Chorus tells how one cannot escape from the past without first sacrificing a part of oneself. It is not an easy thing, not for someone who has lived in darkness for so long while the entire Galaxy was subjected to an evil capable of destroying entire populations and planets with a simple snap of the fingers.
Obviously we are not talking about the Death Star and the evil Khan from Star Trek, nor about Thanos and his armies from the darkest reaches of the Universe.
Let’s talk about the Fishlabs, a Hamburg-based development team with great ambitions that has created a fascinating and engaging sci-fi universe, offering an intense and well-told, mature and merciless story.
In fact, we have already written about Chorus in our preview by examining some ideas that we found intriguing for a shooter set in an unknown galaxy full of mysteries, disagreements, quarrels and fratricidal wars.
Inspired by science fiction classics like Star Wars, Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica, Chorus is a truly amazing video game. It is not satisfied only with telling a story through a narrative capable of involving and thrilling, but it thrills thanks to a well-structured and nuanced gameplay.
In Chorus we play Nara, an Elder, an inflexible warrior who has undergone rigorous training from childhood by the Circle, a religious sect that dominates the Galaxy with an iron fist. The young woman, trained to be a weapon of mass destruction, escapes shortly after wiping out a planet, forced by the Great Prophet to purify the cosmos of the Resistance, a formation made up of the most fearless guerillas in the Galaxy.
Nara’s journey, now far from the wars of the Circle and the obscurantism with which she grew up, led her to a new beginning, away from the dangerous paths she was used to. Three displaced populations on the edge of the Galaxy have mixed together to avoid the Circle, working in the pay of the highest bidder, protecting merchants or pilgrims from pirates in the entire Stega system with her friend Sav, who welcomed her without asking. where it came from.
Peace, however, cannot last for those who are branded: a sudden offensive by the Circle, with an army capable of overwhelming even the pirate tribes, puts the peoples of the border on alert, forcing Nara to fight against its past. to defend their people.
Averting a ruthless and sudden attack, the young woman realizes that hiding is completely useless, and that the only way she has to live is to annihilate the Great Prophet. And to do so she must face her past, freeing her spaceship Forsaken, a friend she abandoned after running away from her mentor.
Without making spoilers that could ruin the experience for those concerned, Chorus embeds an exciting story of redemption with the desire for revenge and the desire for revenge, in a Universe with attention to every detail.
The team managed to build a lore that prompted us to explore its peculiarities, bringing a breath of fresh air to a genre that rarely offers new features. In fact, thanks to an enjoyable and well-structured gameplay, we were faced with an unexpected experience.
Certainly Chorus is not innovative but neither is it derivative: it is original, fun and profound. Get there with ease thanks to the boundless passion of a passionate development team.
As we mentioned, the title is a third-person shooter where we face the enemies aboard the Forsaken in epic space battles, leaving behind us the debris of our opponents’ ships.
Explained like this it seems easy but it is not at all: the combat system is fluid and gives us the opportunity to face the fighters of the Circle by darting between the asteroids and the ruins of ancient outposts.
Shooting with the machine gun is simple, once we lower our opponent’s shield with plasma beams chasing him at the speed of light while we arm the missiles against a Charged Vulture of the Circle, difficult if faced without implementing a wait-and-see strategy.
To have hit us are the various types of enemies, which force us to use different strategies to face them during the most challenging battles. If our defenses were to fall, the best solution could be to heal, returning to the attack more fierce than before by darting among the stars as if we were in command of the Millennium Falcon.
When we are not fighting we can upgrade the weapons and the hull of the Forsaken in the hangars of the stations for the various systems of the Galaxy, which offer secondary missions that make us earn money, to invest as we prefer.
As we travel through this small but full-bodied universe, our aim is to regain the power we once had by exploring temples throughout the galaxy. If on the one hand the fights are exciting, on the other we find ourselves solving detailed environmental puzzles.
In fact, to unlock barriers, we are forced to use drift, a skill that allows us to hit pillars surrounded by a mysterious but powerful aura, generated by an electromagnetic force.
Using Perception, a skill of Nara, we can deal with the past through memories scattered around the maps. In addition to understanding more of the lore of the game, we experience firsthand a plot that involves the relationship between Nara and Forsaken, indissoluble since their first meeting.
The skills of the Elder are vital during the most fierce battles, such as appearing behind enemies and then finishing them or charging them while they are in retreat, thus allowing us to get the better of anyone who stands between us and our fate.
At more demanding difficulties they must be wisely dosed as the blows we can inflict. The playful structure, the real highlight of the work, is its most successful part.
Furthermore, the relationship between Forsaken and Nara convinced us thanks to masterfully written dialogues and situations that made their silences difficult to bear if you are not ready to face the pain.
As we listened to Nara’s thoughts, we perceived a sensation similar to the one we felt in Hellblade with Senua, where fears were revealed along with insecurities. This time we witnessed something unprecedented, a relationship that exudes humanity and hope in a Galaxy dominated by fear and insecurity.
Further compliments go to the artistic direction: thanks to the stars and the wonderful outposts where we have been, it becomes complex to forget about certain iconic and memorable places. This is partly due to the photographic mode, which allowed us to capture enchanting settings.
We played Chorus on Series X / S, boasting some performance modes we set up before our run started. The title runs smoothly at sixty frames per second, ensuring fast loading times during cutscenes and the most agitated moments.
Ultimately Chorus is a game that amazed us with its storyline and gameplay, which performs at its best at a high level of challenge. Exciting and addicting, the work of Fishlabs offers an enjoyable and long-lasting experience, which cannot be missing in the library of a sci-fi enthusiast. The introductory price, set at € 39.99, helps in this sense.
8
/ 10
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