I’ve been pretty curious about this game since it was first shown at, I believe, the PS5 “reveal” event, it being an action-y space shooter. It looked like it could be fun. It didn’t end up getting all that much attention, and it did end up being released on everything anyways, which is good.

So let’s check it out!

Developer: Deep Silver Fishlabs
Publisher: Deep Silver
Release date: December 3rd 2021
Platforms: PC, PS4, Xbone, PS5, Xbox X/S (PC version played)
Genre: Space Shooter

Review

I’ll start with the story, for a few reasons. Namely, it sucks. You play as Nara, a person who, for some reason, has superpowers and a spaceship. The game starts with some backstory, where Nara is following the word of the Great Prophet, and ends up using her superpowers to destroy a planet (I guess by opening a rift into the Void?)… Then, for no reason, Nara realizes maybe destroying planets and killing billions is actually bad, so she leaves the Circle (which is the group led by the Great Prophet), and leaves her ship behind. Note that her ship isn’t just a ship, it’s a human that was turned into an AI thing or whatever. So she works with the resistance doing busywork, mostly errands finding random pointless shit and blowing up pirate ships. For not really any reason, she finally decides that maybe she should fight the Circle and kill the Great Prophet, so she gets her ship, Forsaken, back from where she left it. Then she regains her powers, makes some friends along the way but not really, finds a ton of useless mcguffins, and finally defeats the Great Prophet. There’s hardly any characters, Forsaken is boring as shit and his few actions make no sense, Nara is even more boring than the character who is just a lame spaceship and none of her decisions make any sense, especially early in the game, and the one character that could have some depth fucking dies before doing anything. There’s so much weird nonsense that happens here that is never explained, Nara is TOLD to have changed from the start of the game when she hasn’t, there’s so many random buzzwords that mean nothing that get thrown in with no prior mentions of those things (the fuck are tablets? And why are they not tablets?)… None of this… works. The plot really just does things for the sake of the plot moving rather than it moving in a way that feels natural. Heck, there’s no reason at the end for basically anyone in the galaxy to care about Nara and want to help her beyond “well maybe she’ll kill the Great Prophet I dunno”, and yet everyone is on her side. You know, after she killed billions and has done basically nothing yet to actually atone (especially if you just look at the actual story and none of the side-quests, which are optional). There’s one time where literally she IMAGINES coming clean on the whole “murder of billions” thing, but she never actually does it.

I will take a minute to talk about the awful voice acting, because it’s really notable. Ignoring the fact that none of the voice acting is any good and none of the VAs were directed to emote in a way that sounds believable, Nara in particular is insufferable… for a specific reason. See, at the end of every conversation or cutscene or whatever, you have to hear Nara’s inner thoughts… in the form of creepy weird whispering ASMR by someone who has no idea how to do that. Whispering ASMR is already a bit… odd… here it’s just fucking weird. It’s so jarring, it makes no sense for this to be a thing. And you can’t skip dialogue in this game, just to make things worse. In fact you have to wait for it to end before you can get back to playing.

The graphics are okay, it’s all in space and there’s not much going on overall. Most of the areas are basically big floating rocks with some space station-y stuff sometimes attached to it or floating around randomly. There’s one “city” area where… obviously no one actually lives there, it’s not designed to look as if it’s a real place. The world never feels real, because even your ship can’t damage other ships that aren’t enemies trying to kill you, or damage anything in the environment. Also the textures, even at the highest quality, are a bit weaksauce, especially on the countless giant rocks. There’s just not much here, unfortunately. There’s only a few cool-looking areas, but there’s not really much to say about them. Everything takes place in basically open space with nothing around. As far as performance, it’s pretty good, I was playing it at 1440p at anywhere between 150 to 190fps, usually averaging around 180. There’s some drops here and there, possibly for loading maybe (?) where it drops as low as 120fps, but that’s not very often or for very long. The framerate was a weird one as each area (which is its own open world, basically) had its own framerate. Some parts just didn’t perform as well, but it’s never horrible.

So the core gameplay is that of a space shooter, which I’m sure some people have incorrectly compared to Star Fox. What’s interesting about the gameplay, especially once you regain Forsaken, is the combat and movement. It does a lot of things I really enjoy, and I will bring up some Star Fox comparison for some of this. I won’t even mention the crappiness until I mention all the good stuff, because, at its core, this game has a lot of good.

As a space shooter, Chorus is a game where you spend the entire time in the spaceship, shooting at stuff. I played with mouse and keyboard and that worked fine. The keyboard controls forward movement speed, light left and right spins to dodge, as well as all your Rift powers and boosting. The mouse controls aim, which also controls where you’re facing for 3D forward movement, as well as shooting and the funnest thing to do in this game, DRIFTING. The aim is actually interesting and that’s where I’m bringing the Star Fox comparison. The good Star Fox games have you aiming not only by moving the crosshair, but also moving the entire ship along with it, so there’s more nuance to aiming since it’s intrinsically tied to movement. Like, I don’t mind having movement and aim being independent, but something  about that style of movement and aiming makes it feel like you can kinda just move in a circle and avoid everything while you aim and kill everything separately and very easily. Your movement range as far as aiming is a bit limited, as you won’t spin around very fast with just moving your aim, since at first you have a shitty ship… but soon enough you get Forsaken, a ship that is pretty similar to the first one except it can drift. This means exactly what is sounds like. Space Initial D. It removes some of your rotational restrictions, enabling you to basically corner faster and change directions really easily. It also maintains some of your momentum, so it can allow you to maintain speed in a direction while aiming in another, useful for certain targets. Drifting as a whole is super useful and fun, as it gives you speedy movement in many directions and makes combat super fast and fun, it allows for fast turn-arounds and stuff. If there’s any issues with the movement in combat, it would be the ability to avoid attacks. Generally just boosting and moving is fine, but there’s some attacks that lock on to you . Those you can avoid either by somehow managing to hide behind something (which is a very rare instance), using the rite that allows you do ram into enemies (sometimes doesn’t work), or doing the aileron roll on the left or right, which has pretty tight timing. The problem comes when some of these lock-on attacks come in off-tempo, because the aileron roll has a weirdly long amount of cooldown. So if you manage to avoid one attack, the next will hit you. Not much you can do in this situation other than taking the hit, unless the dash attack works, if you have it (it’s a late-game upgrade so… probably not).

Other aspects of the combat is the shooting, obviously. You have a selection weapons, which basically means you’ll only be using the gatling guns and the others are only there for specific cases. The gatling gun hurts red health bars, the laser breaks shields (blue health bars) and missiles deal lots of damage to armored enemies (yellow/orange health bars). Aiming unfortunately has a LOT of aim assist, the aim really sticks to enemies if they’re within range of your shots, so despite the combat being super fun because of the movement, it’s also tremendously easy. There’s not much depth to the actual shooting, as you’ll switch to whichever weapon you currently need and… that’s about it. Sure you CAN use the laser on a normal enemy without a shield, but the gatling gun will just be better. You CAN use the gatling gun against an armored enemy, but the missiles are just better. You CAN use the gatling gun against a shielding enemy, but the laser is slightly better for the blue part of its health bar (then you switch to gatling for the red part of the health bar).

The other aspect of attacking enemies is rites. You have a couple of these, which are basically superpowers. The one you start with is a detection power that tells you where there’s pickups, it scans certain non-enemy-ship targets and, if you hold it, areas with side-quests. You get the rite of the hunt, which allows you to literally teleport behind an enemy to shoot them. Pretty straightforward, it’s very useful. The rite of the storm is basically a lightning strike, it deals damage but also makes enemy ships lose control, blowing them up if they hit an obstacle. There’s a rite that lets you tackle enemies, one enemy type is particularly weak to it, and it can avoid things a little, and blast through specific walls. The final rite is control, which lets you psychokinetically take enemy ships and try to throw them at other ships? I guess? It’s useless other than the one spot you need to use it. As you do sidequests, you may find rite upgrades… it just makes them a bit better, like the lightning one becoming chain lightning. Rites are pretty fun, though obviously the teleport and the lightning are extremely powerful and the rest is just situational.

You do get more powerful as you play. There’s multiple instance of a store where you can buy new shit, which adds to its selection as you progress. You can buy hull upgrades for more HP, shield upgrades for more shield, though you can only buy up to whatever the game lets you, based on how far you are, for those upgrades. There’s a single healing upgrade (it’s just a long cooldown whenever you use it, also you heal automatically if you don’t get hit for long enough, and of course shield heals pretty quickly). Then there’s missiles, gatling guns and lasers (which can also be sidequest rewards). And there’s 3 slots for mods, such as extra damage per weapon type or faster cooldown for certain things, and such. Basically money becomes useless very early. The other way you get stronger is by… doing things. There’s a mastery menu when you pause, and it gives a list of things you can power up, like damage dealt, damage dealt from certain sources, longer special effects and such. You get those upgrades by doing what they ask. Shooting down ships, making ships ram into walls using the lightning, breaking shields, killing with specific weapons or rites, that kinda stuff. You may not really notice when these happen, but it’s nice that there’s a system for getting stronger.

The biggest problem of this game though is the open world. It’s very hard to make an open world game where the open world actually ADDS something to the game. There’s some elements that may help. Having “dungeons” all over the place helps, for example, sub areas that are different from the overworld. Having varied areas and some kind of reason to explore is definitely helpful, as well as having some places that feel like they have some design to them, so your exploration isn’t just seeing the same shit over and over. Most importantly, the open world should be fun to travel through. Chorus… does none of that. There’s actually 5 large open areas here (and one small open area). There’s nothing really “designed” anywhere, pretty much, it’s mostly just space rocks. The space station thingies are cool, but they’re just plunked “randomly” into the world. There are “dungeons”, but you only get into them when the story requires it (and a small handful of sidequests), and otherwise you’re just in the open, and those dungeons are basically empty boring straight corridors. This game does not do puzzle-solving, beyond “try to shoot 3 targets in a limited time that is not communicated to you” or “use the scan to find items”. And then travelling the open world… say your current story objective is 50 kilometers away from you. You have the boost, which you don’t want to use. You have the super boost, which is a bit over 3 times as fast but you have very little maneuverability, it’s solely meant for travel to objectives. At that full speed, you cover a bit less than 1 kilometer per second. So 50 kilometers away means you get there in just a bit over 50 seconds. That’s ridiculous, but that’s not all. When you’re around 5 kilometers away, the super boost disables itself for some reason and you’re stuck with the normal boost, so that’s about 15 more seconds (if not more if you have to wait for dialogue to end). And that’s not counting loading times from one open area to another if the objective is in a different area, of course. There IS fast-travel in this game, but you can only fast travel to jump gates, and there’s only one or two per area, and missions are basically never gonna be close to these. This game, basically, has no respect for your time. SOMETIMES things will happens as you’re waiting for your ship to get to its objective… it’s not very useful, those random encounters will just give credits which you don’t need, so it’s better to ignore them.

Speaking of this game not respecting your time, the travel time isn’t the only time wasting that happens here. Some of the missions are literally nothing, even some story missions. Get to a spot, watch a memory (which shows a hologram and you have to listen to some bad dialogue), then follow a path to more memories… you can’t skip those, they’re hardly relevant, and, while those are going on, you’re not playing the game. Every dialogue in the game, which is crappy and long, is followed by Nara’s internal ASMR whispering thought garbage. Thing is, nothing progresses until all the dialogue, including the weird creepy ASMR, is done. And sometimes they go on and on for no reason. The memories are a waste, the dialogue wastes time, some missions are literally “go to this place and wait for 10 seconds” (though this mostly happens as optional random encounters or optional side-missions), some missions are just “fly behind people for a minute” which are just time-wasting… there’s so much of this game that isn’t gameplay. And I’m not even gonna mention the absolutely shitty cutscenes. There’s way too much of this game that isn’t gameplay, and it’s for the benefit of a story and world that isn’t interesting.

And that’s really it. You get fun combat and movement, though some aspects could benefit from extra depth, and the rest of the game is waiting for it to finally let you play again. The world isn’t interesting to explore, and there’s SO much time being wasted.

Overall

This game was 13 hours long. That surprised me, because it felt like I had been playing it for a hundred unending, boring hours. Nothing is much worse than a game/movie/book/song that feels 10 times longer than it actually is. Pacing is a thing. And I’m not saying this is a bad game. Just that it could’ve kept the exact same amount of actual gameplay and cut the length of the game to around 5 hours. There’s so much fucking filler it’s kinda unbelievable.

The gameplay itself is fine. The ship movement with the drifting and the weapon types and such, it’s pretty good. The leveling is fine. But it’s all weighed down by so much waiting. Waiting for memories, waiting for Nara’s weird ASMR whispering that creeps me out, waiting for people to talk, waiting endlessly to go from where you are to wherever the quest needs you to be, some of the side-quests (or even main quests) are literally just waiting (waiting for a meter to go up, watching boring memories, waiting for dialogue to end, waiting behind ships while not shooting them). I don’t get why this game is designed the way it is. The open world concept just ruins it. I think if they had put even more polish on the actual gameplay/level design rather than make me waste so much time, we’d have something very close to a classic.

Like, the combat’s fun, but it certainly could’ve done with some polish. With all the movement options you have, you have pretty awful dodging options, with the aileron roll that has way too long cooldown. Really that’s my one issue with the combat. Taking the same gameplay and squooshing it into a level-based areas that actually have stuff in them? That would be great.

As far as a recommendation for whether you should buy this… I’ll have to go with “not really”. It’s SO close to actually being amazing, but it has so much questionable design that I don’t feel good recommending it… and this is a game that’s not even full price at launch.

Funny that my next review is also an open world game. Hopefully it does it better.