Yes, it is CHORUS and not CHORVS. I know we all love to get lost in the memes but.. lets just move on.

Chorus is a game that I felt like got a pretty decent spotlight in one of those Xbox showcases and then subsequently was never heard from again. It curiously did not have a day 1 release on Game Pass considering it was part of the Xbox showcase and only made it to the service quite recently. WHAT is Chorus you might ask? Well no one asked this because I don't think many people have actually played it but in a nutshell (and not one of those shells they put on the nut in a factory) Chorus is an arcade space shooter sort of like Freelancer from way back when. You take on the role of Nara, a pilot bestowed with special abilities called "rites" that used to belong to a cult of religious zealots following The Prophet and trying to bring the universe "into Chorus" so it can become "one." This was unification was done through various means of violence that culminated in mass genocide as Nara is ordered to destroy an entire planet for the greater good. This event takes a heavy toll on Nara and leads her to question the doctrine she so dogmatically followed all her life, and ultimately leads her to abandons the cult, abandon her sentient ship and lead a solitary life as a scrapper in the outer systems.

For what its worth Chorus has A LOT of story and lore that it is constantly dumping on the player, and not a lot of it is very engaging. There is a lot of sci-fi terminology and space religion with various aspects and ideas constantly being thrown at you through rather boring memory visions. Curiously there doesn't appear to be any sort of codex where you can look up any of this stuff at your own leisure so unless you're really paying attention a lot of it can go over your head. Not that this is especially heady stuff. Nara is undergoing a very classic redemption arc from cold hearted killer to a super natural messiah trying to right her wrongs by helping every single straggler along the way and coming to terms with her own guilt and place in the universe. Chances are.. you have already played a Nara in some other game.

The meat and potatoes of the game lie in the somewhat unique space combat at the heart of Chorus. This is not a hardcore space sim so don't expect to be managing several different axis of rotation while juggling different power levels of your internal systems. Chorus is very much a point and shoot type of space shooter that honestly feels somewhat awkward to control at first. There is no strafing and side to side movement is governed by a roll that seems to have just enough of a cooldown on it to feel inconsistent at most times. Not that you will be using this roll for anything other than dodging telegraphed sniper laser strikes. No, the basic movement in Chorus feels rather limited for a space sim but it's main selling point lies in it's unique two-fold answer to the age old conundrum of flying sims: how to make dogfighting interesting when all you do is fly in circles behind each other? Well the answer is special abilities and drifting. Yes, Tokyo Drift style drifting. One of the first basic "rites" or abilities you unlock shifts your ship into a drift trance which is a fancy way of saying it disengages all propulsion and makes you drift in a straight line in the direction of your initial momentum. So while boosting away from an enemy you can engage the drift mode, flip your ship around 180 to aim back at your pursuers while still travelling forwards. This means you're never stuck flying endless circles behind your attackers because you can always just flip around at will to counter attack. This ability also plays heavily into certain environmental puzzles as well as capital sized ships that require you to fly inside tight corridors while taking out weak points to the sides. The second ability that defies this classic merry go round tactic allows Nara to simply teleport behind any enemy ship. This might seem like almost cheating but Chorus manages to lay on the pressure thick enough to where it's never that simple and along with the need to manager your power juice combat is always fairly interesting. As time goes on your unlock more supernatural abilities that help in the eradication of increasingly tough enemy types and honestly thats where the game shines the most.

The biggest problem with Chorus is that it makes a rather lousy first impression. The game opens up with Nara piloting a scrappy junker of a ship and it takes a few missions before you get back up to speed and start gaining the abilities that make the game unique in the first place. Both the opening tutorial and several first story quests are not very good and I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people put the game down before you even start getting your special abilities. The idea of starting the player underpowered before they get back to their "normal" super powered state is nothing new but it's a delicate balancing act that I feel Chorus gets completely wrong. The proper way of doing this is having a heavily scripted and incredibly short introduction section where a few enemies bat you around before you return having regained your "lost abilities" and wipe the floor with them. Chorus doesn't even hint at the fact that you will get anything special down the road, and in fact lets you go on and do side missions all in this underpowered state that you shouldn't waste a single second of your game time on. I flew around the semi open world doing odd jobs not knowing I didn't even fully get out of the tutorial zone yet.

Once you do start unlocking more abilities the combat really opens up and the game becomes a much more fluid and enjoyable experience. Unfortunately that does take a while and I wouldn't fault anyone for giving up along the way. Through the power of guilt free gaming on Game Pass I was able to get there although I was ready to drop the game several times in the early goings and in fact did take a break from it before giving it a second and third try that finally made me stick with it. The narrative never really gets any more interesting and nearly all of it unfortunately plays out as audio logs that force you to float around in space and stare at static holograms. As an arcady space shooter it does come into it's own and with a surprisingly robust equipment system that has set-bonuses you can even customize your "build" to a limited degree. This is one of those games where it's kind of hard to recommend because.. it's not great, but it's not bad. Just kind of a middlie of the road game with some neat ideas that is decent fun if you want to fill up some time between bigger releases, but one I wouldn't recommend you pay full price. It's very pretty on consoles and I imagine even more so on PC if you have the system to run it. Funny enough on Series X the game crashed several times for me because it "ran out of video memory" which is something I never thought I'd see on a console. If you have Game Pass then check it out but also be aware that YES it is awkward to control at first, and yes you will get used to it and you DO need to wait a while before it starts getting better. If you can get through all that.. there is.. a fairly decent game waiting for you on the other side.

Thanks for the writeup. I’m exactly in that position of “played for several hours and sort of placed it aside for something more engaging”, as you described. I really like the Tokyo drifting mechanic, and I didn’t have all that much time to play with the teleportation yet. Knowing it gets notably better a little past where I’m at makes me want to revisit it.

I will say that I actively dislike the story and banter so far. It has the problem of making Nara’s times *too* great, particularly the part she casually drops about having tortured people (in addition to the planet destruction). She’s all too happy to engage in more violence, sadsack internal monologue aside. And once I unlocked her real ship, most of the dialogue consists of characters talking past one another or making vague pronouncements. Stuff like “things are bad”, “but we will defeat them”, “yes we will defeat them”. It’s very stilted and repetitive. I might just tune out from that and listen to a podcast or something, based on what you said about the story throughout the game.

@allthedinos: I will say the game makes one of the worst uses of whispering as internal monologue that I've witnessed in the last decade or so. It is both corny and difficult to actually make out. I am right at the end of the game and I hear there is an "interesting" reveal but honestly I don't think anything can really make up for as you said vague pronouncements, and cliched redemption moments. Being at the very end I can't say the game has really made a strong case as to why Nara suddenly stopped being a genocidal space nazi apart from a shallow "she felt bad about it" explanation that really seems inadequate for who she was and what she has done.

I bought Chorus at launch and still haven't started it. Seems like a game I'd really like but I just... haven't done it for some reason? What a mystery.

I agree with those words about Chorus. I'm a few hours in, and it's enjoyable so far. I will say that the button combination for the drift mechanic feels--which is often used while also targeting timed puzzles-- feels exteemely awkward when I'm doing it. That could just be a me problem.

The whispering is awful and the "memories" are boring and confusing to look at. I say this as someone who likes audio logs in games: this game's version of the audio log is implemented terribly.

The setting is fucking weird. More than anything else, it reminds me of the super weird lore of the Riddick universe. The scale of the star system that the game takes place in feels off.

But hey, I can equip my cool-looking ship with different space guns and I can teleport behind enemies and the game is pretty. I'm digging the hell out of that part, at least.

@bladeofcreation: I’ve looked over the button mapping many times trying to find a better alternative for the drift and I can’t really think of one. I’ve gotten used to putting both fingers over LB and LT at this point. I suppose if you have an elite controller it would help to put the drift onto a back paddle - now that I think about it I do have an elite controller that I haven’t been using.. oh well I kinda got used to the awkward layout by now but yah in retrospect an Elite controller seems perfect for this game.

I have finished Chorus (it's one of the games in this month's Game Pass club over on ResetEra) and I will say that I think the flight combat is weird, but ends up being really satisfying. I enjoyed my time with it throughout the whole.. 20-25 hour runtime of the game. They add powers and stuff, but I also just grinded mastery on fodder enemies for an hour at a time sometimes. And mastering some of those techniques actually really does feel great.

One thing I think could have been better is the variety in the weapons and mods. There's a pretty cool system where you can upgrade the systems on your ship in ways that do change how it fights pretty significantly (at least until you get into the later game, when your powers are more than strong enough that you don't even need to shoot, if you don't want - and mods can help with that too). But, at the later stages, you want to work towards set bonuses to maximize whatever play style you choose. But because those bonuses seem tied to specific gear, it often felt like there were only a few viable combinations of choices, rather than having the full gamut of being able to mix and match whatever. Plus, some of the end game weapons are the same as earlier game weapons, just more powerful (that's not surprising per se, just it would have been cool if they had kept up with the variety in weapons - what IS there is pretty cool in fundamentally changing how you use your missiles or your shotgun).

The story is bad. Like middling and disappointing, not trainwreck. It's not just that the way the story is told is bad (personally, I threw on subtitles and I didn't mind the whispering overmuch. The voice acting isn't.. terrible). But man, WHY IS EVERYTHING SO MELODRAMATIC. You know where the story is going by the first couple hours (that's not totally true, but still) and boy does it just go there. There are certain plot points that really just don't make sense IMO. And the game doesn't do a great job of explaining out its factions in an interesting or not confusing way. And there aren't even that many of them!

But yea, it's the way every decision and choice is IMBUED WITH SO MUCH WEIGHT AND DRAMA, but they're really just saying the most basic ass sci fi tropes imaginable. The twists at the end are.. twists, but they're also not that meaningful either? They're just.. there. And the actual story ending could have been more satisfying. Meh.

All that said, I actually think Chorus is a good game overall. 7.5/10? I enjoyed playing it, and I thought even the side missions, repetitive though they may be in some senses to some people, were fun. I wanted to like the characters and the story but couldn't quite do that fully. I liked it enough to basically get all the achievements (I may have missed one or two) and to basically do every quest that I could find in the game. Many others in the thread agreed that it wasn't their favorite game, but there were aspects that they enjoyed. Take that for what you will.

@bladeofcreation: I didn't use the drifting until the 2nd half of the game at all. It's not really necessary in fights. But.. when I did randomly pop the achievement for killing 3 enemies in one drift, that did feel good haha. I came to quite appreciate it in concert with all the other powers, where before I had just been boosting everywhere constantly. When the combat system comes together, it's pretty satisfying.

That said, I never got the hang of drifting indoors or for puzzles. Constantly bumping into walls. CONSTANTLY.