Chromehounds

Today, I’ll be reviewing Chromehounds for the Xbox 360.

Chromehounds is a game about giant robots. You are a mercenary, hired to blow the hell out of other giant robots. There are 3 different factions. I don’t really care what they’re called.

You work for one or the other, depending on your “class” of robot. The classes are: Soldier, which is the basic combat unit, Sniper, which is…well…a sniper, Defenders, which are the damage takers, Scouts, which are the speedy guys, Heavy Gunners, which are just moble howitzers, and the Tactical Commander class, which is the “information specialist.” The game tries to make each class different, but they really just differ in ways of blowing stuff up.

The gameplay is pretty solid, and you can tell that it was worked on the most, although it can get repetitive and difficult at times. At the begining, you’ll most likely have to take out a small group of enemies, whose location is told to you by one of the NPCs, via coordinates on your map.

Guitar Hero (series)

My cohort doesn’t exactly have the highest opinion of Guitar Hero. So, in order to give you another viewpoint, I will provide my own opinion of the series.

With the exclusion of the expansion pack, Rock the 80s, I have played every Guitar Hero game. I can play Easy, Medium, Hard, and I can attempt Expert. I’ve put in around 12 hours, which is very decent for someone who doesn’t own any of them. I feel that even with my relatively minor amount of time put into playing it, I can provide a good summary of the game.

In Guitar Hero, you play the part of one of around eight characters who attempt to become a rock star. They do this by playing guitar in a supposed band, although you don’t get to play any other instrument (excluding instruments similar to the guitar, such as bass).

As the story continues, you play song after song, each one getting progressively harder. At the end, supposedly you get the whole shebang-booze, chicks, and drugs.

How do you play a song, anyhow? Each game is packaged with a guitar peripheral for the console you buy it for. It’s plastic and small, but it gets the job done. The peripheral has five coloured buttons at the top of the “neck”. There’s also a “strum” button you push up or down. On-screen, circles of colours fly down the “road”, and you press the coloured button it correlates to and press the strum button at the same time it flies over a part of the screen.

Guitar Hero (series)

Guitar Hero is basically worshipped by most people, and has five or so games in the series. I have played 2 and 3, desperately trying to like these games, seeing as everyone bows down before it and sacrifices baby lambs in its name. I figured it had to be good. I was dead wrong. I can probably tell you the entirety of the game in one sentence. Let me try. In Guitar Hero, you have to press colourful buttons, and strum on a toggle thing at the bottom of the guitar, and time your strumming to the notes on-screen. See? I told you. Anyway, onto why Guitar Hero is so bad.

Apart from the fact that it is sickeningly simple, especially for a console game, it has almost no difference between the games. The only thing I saw added between games were new songs, and different characters. The object of the career mode is exactly the same. The controls are exactly the same. The games shouldn’t even be separated by numbers! They should just be expansion packs, with different songs! There are only two things ever done to make the game any different. In Guitar Hero 3, boss battles were added, where you play guitar, and somehow develop magical abilities to break parts of the other guy’s equipment by playing a certain note. The other new thing is the fact that you can use different instruments, such as drums, with the newest game, Rock Band.