It’s hard to be a man interested in videogames and not have some kind of appreciation for robots. Robots are cool. True, they’re better when they do ‘stuff’ such as turn into other things (see: Transformers), dance while claiming to be ‘alive!’ (see: Johnny Five) or hunt things to the end of the earth in an unstoppable orgy of violence (see: The Terminator) but on the whole, robots are awesome. It’s also hard as a male gamer not to have a general appreciation for guns – not necessarily the real thing (we’ve fired real guns in the past at a rifle range and really didn’t enjoy the experience one bit), but certainly the fact that a large majority of games see you using them in one way or another, and that they make loud noises when fired. And then there are explosions… yes, explosions are very good too, especially when they’re large and flamey. As such then, you’d think that the equation would be obvious: Big Robots + Massive Guns x Huge Explosions = A Great Combination. Right? Right?

Well, no – not necessarily. It’s true that as a pure sum of its parts, Chromehounds should rule our lives with an iron fist (and legs, arms and head too). But the sad fact is that where we were expecting a game packed with gun-toting mechs racing around a bustling landscape blowing each other to pieces in the name of war, the reality is somewhat different. Chromehounds is bland. Chromehounds is linear. And boy, is Chromehounds slow… in fact, it’s slow to the point where we’re tempted to write the word with either lots of ‘o’s or with ellipses in between every letter, just for effect. So, the question we’ve got to ask is this: between the game being announced and the game being released, what the hell happened?

Unsurprisingly, the answer is not that much. Rather than there being a breakdown in communication, some kind of developmental cock-up or just plain bad luck, FROM Software has simply gone about creating what it knows best – an overly serious mech-based game. That the game’s lead producer was also the man responsible for overseeing the creation of several Armored Core games (FROM’s million-selling robot franchise on the PlayStation2) is incredibly telling, because many of the underpinning concepts behind the series are present in Chromehounds too. The only real differences lie in how FROM has expanded the game from being a single man in a single mech to having a more squad-based slant to it, with multiple classes of mechs (or Hounds, as they’re known) being available to the player at any one time. That, and the enhanced visuals that appearing on a nextgeneration console like the Xbox 360 afford, anyway.

Or at least, that’s the idea. However, having stomped around many of Chromehounds’ numerous landscapes, we’re a little concerned… exactly where is this evidence of next-gen quality? Yes, some things stand out as being rather lovely – the pinpoint detail of each Hound that you get to control, for instance, complete with pumping pistons, whirring cogs, recoiling barrels and other precision elements proves that FROM really does love its mechs, the attention to detail on each one is so high. And spot effects, from the fiery explosions that issue forth from each Hound you destroy to the resulting voluminous smoke, really are quite nice, despite being fairly commonplace. Sadly however, the same can’t be said for the actual environments that you have to explore in order to win each battle. But then, what word would we use to describe them? ‘Barren’ would be a good one, except that’s exactly what you’d expect a battlefield to be and so it doesn’t quite do our disappointment justice; ‘bland’, on the other hand, is a little too harsh, but then only a little. That these landscapes are bereft of anything genuinely interesting, however, save for various flat-textured mountains, even flatter-textured grass, sand and rock, and only the occasional village, enemy base or cluster of trees for you to flatten, is the real point we’re trying to get at here. It feels like you’re walking across empty ground for much of your time, which, considering how damn slowly each Hound moves, grows tiring very quickly. It wouldn’t be quite so bad if the enemies were numerous enough to draw your attention away from it all… but they’re not (and remember, this is on the Xbox 360 – a console that prides itself in being able to handle large numbers of on-screen characters at any one time). You’ll be lucky if you’re fighting six, maybe seven enemies – be they bigger Hounds or smaller tanks – at a time, which may be practical from a sense of the odds being unfairly stacked against you, but doesn’t do much to hide the shortcomings in terms of the game’s environmental visuals. Perhaps if FROM had put as much effort into making the levels you fight in as interesting to look at as it did creating the story behind Chromehounds, we wouldn’t have cause to complain...

Yes, the story. If there’s one thing that FROM has decided to put a lot of effort into, it’s Chromehounds’ plot – an extensive tale of a nation at war that starts back as far as 1945, twists real-life events to fit (so the disaster at Chernobyl was now the result of a terrorist attack, not just an accident) and sees the formation of three distinct factions: the Democratic Republic of Tarakia, the kingdom of Sal Kar and a group of mercenaries known as Rafzakael who fight for whoever pays them the most. It’s the conflicts between these factions, leading up to the great Neroimus War, that forms the basis for Chromehounds’ single-player mode, with the player jumping between sides to experience a slice of every nation’s grief. Apparently, it’s been done like that so that you can make a conscious decision about which nation you want to fight for when you go online… and that’s a good thing, to be honest, because there’s nothing like a bit of empathy to help keep a game interesting. Well, it would be if it made any difference, but the fact is, there are no differences between the three sides. In fact, there’s very little point behind any of the single-player mode, something that Sega has already all but admitted in its press releases. It’s merely a series of mission-based training exercises that allow you to practise with each available Hound class (or Role Type, as they’re known in the game) before going online, as well as unlocking Hound parts that can be used to create a unique Hound that you can use – yep, you've guessed it – online. Does the game focus too much on its online components, leaving the single-player mode floundering as little more than an afterthought? Well, yes – that’s exactly what it feels like to us and, to be frank, we’re massively disappointed.

Yes, we’re disappointed that Chromehounds is so slow; we’d hoped for something along the lines of Zone Of The Enders or Phantom Crash in terms of speed, but it’s not even close. We’re disappointed that a game with such a heavy emphasis on online play isn’t being marketed as such, leaving no doubt to many people feeling let down when they realise the offline mode is, in fact, boring filler rather than being an experience in its own right. We’re even disappointed at how the game fails to take any real advantage of the nextgen hardware, merely adding a little bit of extra detail to the robots instead of really doing something groundbreaking with a genre that has been stuck in the same rut for ages. But most of all, we’re disappointed that Chromehounds just isn’t what we hoped it would be. Clearly, we’ve fallen victim of our own hype machine and when that happens, you know it’s time to turn around and just walk away.

We’re still secretly hoping therefore, that deep inside of Chromehounds’ online mode – the very thing that all the focus appears to have been placed on – there's something that manages to change our minds or, in the very least, make us rediscover our love for big stompy robots. But as it stands right now, we’re feeling somewhat empty inside. We used to think robots were awesome, really we did. Now we're not so sure. What have you done to us, FROM... seriously, what have you done?