Choir Review: Making Space Inaccessible to Everyone

When I preview Chorus, I praised the game for its high intensity space dogfights. Air combat is pretty fun, but when you move it into space and superpow a player’s ship, combat is taken to a whole new level. You can teleport behind your enemies and shoot them dead, or really drift in space. Let me repeat that last part; you can drift through space, like you’re in a Fast & Furious movie.

But the space combat and killer magic powers your ship has are the beginning and the end of Chorus‘ strengths. The game (one that has clearly been invested a lot of time and money based on its visuals and wonderful sound design) is a headache when you’re not shooting at something. Even then, there are many reasons to be upset.

Chorus brings some great space combat to the table, but that’s not what defines it. Instead, it’s the myriad of gameplay issues, all of which were present on my screen more than enemy ships. A hideous user interface, bloated design, uninteresting story, and completely irredeemable main character – all of this drains the fuel of Chorus‘tank.

Space war crime simulator

Chorus It puts players in the shoes of Nara, who, when you start to control her, is a pirate hunter for a group called the Envoy. She is incredibly talented, well loved, and leads the pack as she fends off a fascist space cult called The Circle that is slowly expanding throughout the star system.

However, when she’s first introduced, Nara isn’t with Envoy – she’s a warrior for The Circle. She is not just a warrior, either, she is one of their best warriors, someone who is so trusted by the group’s leaders that she is tasked with destroying an entire planet that refuses to enter the fold of the cult. She does it, killing billions by her own estimate. After committing intergalactic genocide, Nara has his “Are we the bad guys?” moment and leaves The Circle, abandoning her identity and joining the Enclave, where she is not known, to try to move on with her life.

Most Chorus has players fighting the cult like Nara, slowly pushing it back as she destroys his outposts and ships, all the while helping the resistance movement that has grown against him. It’s her way of atoning, and the game often asks players to sympathize with Nara, showing her in vulnerable moments when faced with her own memories. That is a question that I simply cannot respect. That Nara, who only realized that the cult he was a part of (which subjugates groups of people with psychic totems) was bad after blowing up a planet, is irredeemable.

It is quite possible that he is simply too severe, too tired, or too nonchalant, but I couldn’t find a single way for Nara to atone for his actions outside of fighting The Circle. In fact, his active participation in the resistance was a reluctant decision. He didn’t want to go back to the fights and violence he knew. If Nara could have gotten away with it, she would never have to face her past, she would never have to make up for what she has done. She is a selfish and immature character, one that was written in one of the most forgiving villain-to-hero stories I’ve ever seen.

But in the context of ChorusThe whole story, Nara is only part of the problem (albeit a very big one). The game frequently introduces new characters, keeping a small number that respawn to advance the plot. But it is almost impossible to really develop any connection with these minor characters. On Chorus, the characters almost never leave their ships, so all the NPCs you encounter are actually just voices on ships, shown through a small image on the right side of the screen.

Without seeing their faces in motion, these characters are not much more than disembodied voices. When one of them died in a battle, it just didn’t hit me. It was just another ship exploding. It also doesn’t help that none of the other characters in the game are very convincing; the way they are presented completely removed them from me.

To be fair, that goes on with Chorus. As the story of the game progressed, I didn’t feel connected to it. There was no instance where I ran to my next story mission in the game’s open world because there was a sense of urgency. It all happens slowly and, on very rare occasions, the stakes seem as high as it seems.

Exciting dogfights

My time spent working hard Chorus‘The cutscenes and dialogue paid off every time I got a chance to shoot other ships. The game’s version of space combat is excellent and left me feeling like an unstoppable force in any battle. While smaller ship engagements are the most common players will encounter, larger ship fights are where the game really picks up.

During these fights, which I liken to rebels flying through the Death Star in Star Wars, players move through laser beam fire, systematically destroying turrets and thrusters. These fights culminate in battles inside a ship, where players finally blow their core to pieces and escape before the entire ship explodes. These fights are as cinematic as they are exciting, putting every weapon the players have to task.

Fight in Chorus is a high stakes rock-paper-scissors game, except they are swapped out for chainguns, lasers, and missiles. Each one damages a certain type of defense competently, with weapons that pierce a ship’s hull easily, lasers quickly knock down shields, and missiles can destroy the armor built into spaceships. Switch between the three. as well as Rites, magical abilities that allow Nara to teleport behind enemies or scan the area, left me making different inputs on my controller every second.

Abandoned accessibility

But the combat and Chorus‘the game in general, are affected by some questionable decisions that not only make the game annoying but ruin its accessibility. The most obvious are the game’s HUD and UI, both seemingly made for ants. Enemies in dogfighting are represented by small circles that appear on the peripherals of the screen if they are not in front of the players. Any other objects or targets pinged by a scan are displayed in the same way, albeit as triangles.

As a result, Chorus sometimes it can be completely unintelligible. Some of the game’s missions task players with finding objects in large 3D spaces, which requires using the ship’s ping. But it does not differentiate between objects that are part of a mission and other objects that are in space. They are all marked with the same small symbol, something that caused me so much confusion that I thought that the game simply had not generated what I was looking for. My sight is 20/20, so I cannot imagine the experience that someone who has some type of visual impairment can have with Chorus.

Similary, Chorus makes closed captioning a necessity rather than an option, regardless of whether or not you’re wearing headphones. While flying through space, which is almost always an experience without music for whatever reason, Nara sometimes talks to herself. But whenever he has an internal monologue, he screams-whispers, turning almost every word into an incomprehensible hiss. Fortunately the size of ChorusCaptions can be adjusted in its sparse accessibility menu, but the rest of the game’s text cannot be changed from its difficult-to-read size.

Our take

Chorus it’s a frustrating game, not because it’s wacky or buggy, but because it could be so much better. A litany of truly bizarre design choices, like an eye-straining user interface and incomprehensible dialogue, ruined the experience for me. If this game was designed with greater accessibility in mind, it wouldn’t feel as infuriating. I could look past Nara, who is hands down one of the worst main characters I’ve seen in a game in a long time. I could praise his match, which feels absolutely fantastic. But nothing in Chorus It outshines its flaws, which make their way into every redeemable moment the game has.

Is there a better alternative?

If you’re looking for something that scratches the same ship-based combat itch, Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown it’s a great way to jump into the pilot’s seat.

How long does it last?

Chorus It takes 10-12 hours to complete, though playing through all of the game’s secondary content could easily add an additional five hours to that.

Should you buy it?

No. Chorus it’s a prime example of how great gameplay can be taken down with disgusting design options.

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