The Chaos Engine
HOW THE BITMAPS MADE ME EAT HUMBLE PIE
Darran is never wrong about anything. Just don’t mention this 16-bit blaster to him…
» AMIGA » 1993 » THE BITMAP BROTHERS
When i was a snes and mega Drive owner i was always in awe of The Bitmap Brothers. The studio’s games always looked incredibly stylish and they often sounded incredible – Xenon 2, I’m mainly talking about you – in short, it was one of the few developers that made me jealous that I didn’t own an Amiga or Atari ST.
A few weeks after reading the glowing reviews of The Chaos Engine, I was playing it around a friend’s house and the first thing that struck me was how slow it felt compared to the shooters I would typically play on my Mega Drive or SNES. Snobbishly, I decided that I was actually better off without it, so I became less interested when I eventually discovered it was heading to consoles as well.
In fact, it wasn’t until late 1994 that I finally picked up a cheap copy for the Amiga 1200 I had purchased (I had foolishly swapped it for a SNES with 50-odd games) that I was finally forced to eat my words. The Chaos Engine certainly isn’t a 9/10 shooter by any stretch of the imagination, but it is a very good one. It’s more about controlling crowds than having fast reflexes and it’s all about being aware of your surroundings and working out where best to situate yourself. It’s a thinking man’s shooter, which explains why I was so unimpressed with it on those first few plays.
It really comes alive with a second player, and the six available characters are different enough that choosing the right two really determines how you tackle the game. It turns out that I was always picking the Navvie when I had first played it on my mate’s Amiga, and his slow pace simply wasn’t suited to my style of play. The Preacher (or Scientist, as he was known in the US) quickly became my character of choice as he had high mobility and shots that passed through enemies. The game changed immeasurably for me at that moment and while I still feel it’s not quite as incredible as many of the Amiga mags made out at the time, it proved to me that you should never judge a game harshly on just a few short plays.