Chromehounds

COMBAS towers, which you're meant to claim by lurking next to them, are dotted around each map and create a communications bubble around them. It's only in the bubble that team comms are possible. So the only way to push the limit of your communication bubble (alright, "Network Area") is to go off and capture other COMBAS towers. Unsecured gaps can break up communications between commanders and their troops on the frontline.

Diligent use of the tactics commander mech type can help you out here though, and probably requires further explanation. TCs are rolling Network Areas, and can be used not only to identify enemy units and alert colleagues to their location through a rudimentary system of d-pad commands (or via voice), but can also bridge gaps between friendly COMBASs. TCs spend most of their time looking at the map, and it's pretty basic work - there's no zooming around in 3D like an RTS, certainly - but along with COMBASs it amounts to an interesting take on traditional mech combat, and lends multiplayer, in particular, a palpable aura of strategy.

However, there is a problem with all of this, and unfortunately it's rather a big one: Chromehounds is really, really, really boring to play.

You can forgive the story (yes it's rubbish, but it's not the point). You can forgive the small numbers of players online (I certainly can, since the game is sure to see a bit of growth right after it comes out today). But the pace is awful. Even on something relatively mobile like caterpillar tracks, if you tool yourself up with more than a bargepole to swat at people you'll take a massive speed hit, and with so much ordnance flying around you'd be ill-advised to go in under-stocked. Jumping into the scout campaign and being told of my high mobility, it was a bit depressing to discover that this basically meant walking instead of sauntering.

The single-player game sows the seeds for this slothful pace in endless brown and gold and grey fields of battle that you have to plod across for what seems like an eternity to get anywhere. Often while your commander-du-jour is busy telling you to get a move on in gratingly affected tones. Cleverly, the developers also throw in huge mountains you can't climb and rivers of mud that slow you down - you can avoid them, but usually it takes longer anyway. As for the scout missions I mentioned - some of them simply involve pootling around for a quarter of an hour in the dark. Well done.

Once you do get somewhere exciting, you can switch between up to four weapon sets with the right bumper and fire at will, clicking in the right analogue stick to switch between third- and first-person views - the latter zoomed depending on the weapon. But the combat's awful. The third-person camera is angled down slightly with no crosshair, so you can scarcely aim at anything without relying on the window-in-window first-person view - something that never came naturally while I was on the front. Played in first-person, your peripheral vision's suddenly grossly limited, but at least you can hit things; providing you can get the awkward analogue aiming to fix on a target, or your view isn't being horribly obscured (and the game slowed down) by billowing smoke and explosive effects (which still fail to mask the way certain enemies, particularly tanks, simply fade away once they're hit, rather than actually disintegrating). Tactics commanders have it a bit better, but not much - they can avoid battle, and don't have to pootle around so much, but their reward is, er, watching coloured icons move very slowly across a map screen.

It's all a bit of a chore, and even the high-resolution mech models and excellent editing suite can't help it - the latter bodes well for cyberpunk artists, but only providing they want to showcase their wares in the midst of a raging inferno. There are other problems offline, like night missions where you can see virtually nothing (and yes I did find the night vision button, although I'll freely admit that this may still be a brightness failure on my part - wouldn't be the first time). Meanwhile, mission structure often relies on noting where the maddeningly swift smaller enemies spawn so that if you do fail and have to start again, you can at least make sure you're in the right place and not spend two or three boring minutes staggering slowly toward the white noise of anguish flooding from your dying comrades' diesel-soaked lungs. Did I mention that the first thing that seems to go when you take damage is speed?