About Chaos Mod:
For those of you who want to play the original game again but with updated resolutions: If you think that’s worth $24.99 then by all means buy and enjoy it! For the rest of you: Read on. This will primarily be a review of the port and not the entire game. Metal Wolf Chaos was originally released only in Japan for the original Xbox as part of push to sell more Xbox systems in the east. There were much better mech games on the market at the time such as the Battletech series and Armored Core. The biggest thing going for Metal Wolf Chaos at the time was its ridiculous english dub (despite never getting a US release until now) and crazy premise: Freedom is dead in the US. The vice president has taken control of the country through a coup and now you, The 47th President of the United States of America, must bring back hope and freedom to your country in the form of a giant mech battle suit. So at first glance this game seems awesome. You’re playing as the president shooting people in a mech suit with terrible/enjoyable english dubbing. How could you go wrong? Well for starters, the core gameplay just isn’t good and this port wasted an opportunity to polish it up further. The game runs at 30fps but that’s the least of your concerns. The sound design is awful. Sometimes dialogue feels like it was recorded in a box and by that I mean the microphone was outside of said box when the voice actors were doing their lines. The gun sound effects are dull at best (the shotgun sounds horrible), voice lines will sometimes cut out during cutscenes and weapons will either sound muffled or uncomfortably loud depending on range just to name a few problems. The gunplay isn’t great either. While there is a selection of weapons and upgrades the sound effects already hurt the gunplay enough but to make matters worse the aiming just feels sluggish like you have some horrible mouse acceleration and guns don’t have recoil or impact. You don’t feel like you’re controlling powerful mech weapons or even fun ones. The only time the game comes close to having “that mech feel” is when you strike the F key (you won’t know this because there are no prompts in game, you have to look for them in the menus) and do an all out attack which fires bullets everywhere. Options menu is also barebones. You don’t have options for AA or anything just a low/medium/high preset, but you do have separate volume sliders. Game looks alright. The mechs look cool but everything else is pretty grey and drab. The aesthetic doesn’t really hold up. Overall, the port functions. It doesn’t crash, but it feels barebones. For 25 bucks it feels like they did all this hard work but glossed over fixing and tweaking what could’ve made the game a lot more fun to play for a smaller amount of work. Things like tweaking the controls and sound can go a long way in a shooter. When you’re shooting enemies by the dozen and you just don’t feel the impact your guns/bullets should have, you’re left thinking “why am I even playing this”. As an alternative, I’d recommend looking into the EDF series (particularly EDF 4.1 and 5) on Steam if you want a goofy english localization with mechs on the side and lots of guns to shoot with that actually do have the gunplay you’re looking for (you know, something actually fun to play around with). Thanks for reading! I have a video further discussing the game here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2SWORfC8m0
