The Chaos Engine Review

Anannya Sen’s Review

A really solid 2D shoot em up from the original gaming masters, the Bitmap Brothers.

The Bitmap Brothers were part of the original pioneering group of games developers way back when the only home systems had about a tenth of the memory of your mobile phone. And their games were always good. Chaos Engine is no exception, well rounded shoot em up.

The graphics are definitely in the Bitmap Brothers mould. They are 2D and the detail on the main menu screens and the selection screens is very old English comic book based. The faces are full of character and you do get a good sense of the game. In the game the graphics are a top down 2D approach. This doesn??t allow much scope for a lot of depth but does enable the animation to be pretty fluid and fast. The colour is well suited to the game with the game having an overall kind of grey feel to it in a post apocalyptic way but the forests are quite green and the bridges old and worn. The pick ups are tiny so you don??t really get any sense of detail. Overall not bad, the 2D top down approach means the graphics aren??t stunning but the game flows well.

The sound is quite good for a change to most mobile games. When I say quite good, what I mean is that there is a pretty decent polyphonic tune, which again has that unique Bitmap brothers feel to it (for a minute I though I was playing Speedball 2) and for once it loops through the entire game. There is an alternate tune as well for the selection screens and between levels. No effects at all to speak of but the tune makes the game more enjoyable as it gives the game a good feel. It is loud though!

The controls are good but this is really a game for phones with joysticks. Move around using the D or key pad and use the main button or 5 to fire. You shoot in the direction you are facing in and it??s easy to move and shoot at the same time but diagonal movement is tricky if you don??t have a joystick on your phone, in the sense that you can do it easily enough, but doing it at speed with enemies coming at you is a difficult sometimes. That??s the problem with a lot of these games which require faster movement, for the phones where the diagonal is hard to hit, keys just don??t cut it in my opinion. Use the shoulder keys for the menus and selection.

The playability is really good as the shoot em up element is fast and frantic. The game is set in the future and you have a choice of playing with one of 6 characters. They all have different attributes and different skills. The game is a 2 character game though, so after you have picked your controllable character you get to pick a character for the AI to play as your partner. This is a newish element which I haven??t seen on many other phone games. And the AI isn??t stupid either, basically he (all the characters are male before you start accusing me of being sexist) will follow you around and if there are enemies near you he will engage. And he??s pretty good too, at least a lot better than I was which is why I just used to move near the enemies and watch the AI polish them off while I moved away slightly. There??s loads of stuff to collect during the level like money, health and power ups (weapons). In between each level you can spend the money you obtained to upgrade your characters which is a very rewarding element. The speed of the game makes it very playable and the gameplay is pretty solid.

The lastability is probably not quite as good as the playability. There are many levels and also 3 save slots you can use. This is great in itself but the game is quite hard. Admittedly I??m not the best at shoot em ups but I was having real trouble with the diagonal movement and shooting and kept ending up moving around in a rectangular motion to get a shot on some of the enemies. The enemies are not that varied in the first several levels and the levels also get larger so without the aid of a map, sometimes you are wandering a little. The upgrade side to things means you should get your moneys worth out of the game and if you aren??t put off by challenging gameplay (or you have a joystick) you??ll probably disagree with me slightly on the lastability score. The game can be paused and resumed as well.