Chorus Review

So here we are with Chorus, a third-person space combat shooter, coming out the doors of Deep Silver Fishlabs. Throwing us into the role of “Nara” — or Naran, as the cult refers to her — once the most feared warrior of the Circle while sitting in her sentient ship, “Forsa” (Forsaken). However, the Great Prophet went all Palpatine and essentially requested “Order 66” to be executed, Nara seemingly grew a conscience and fled from the cult. Fast forward a few years and Nara’s past has finally caught up with her.

Kicking off the proceedings, we’re piloting a random spacecraft within the confines of a shipwreck. Here we get to grips with the basics of movement, abilities, and combat through its own little tutorial before we’re set free in the somewhat open world. While each system can be freely explored, there are boundaries that you can’t exceed in each area and you can’t just jump from system to system until you’ve progressed in the story to the point of Unlocking a new one up. That being said, the areas are pretty expansive so you can do a fair amount of exploring.

During the years away from the cult, Nara has become quite the adept scavenger; thanks in part to her special abilities or “Rites” as they’re known. One of these is allowing Nara to scan the immediate and not so immediate area, highlighting items or potential missions to undertake. Some of these missions will be for the resistance, based within Enclave station, and introduces you to one of the main figureheads of the story, Sav, leader of the militia. There’s an uneasy mutual feeling between Sav and Nara, as hints of having a dark past seeps out during their conversations, but not enough to totally let the cat out of the bag.

Part of escaping the cult, Nara severed her bond with Forsa and hid him deep within a cave system for several years. Upon reuniting with her old friend, it turns out that abandoning a sentient starship can leave it feeling incredibly salty from the break up. You quickly discover that Forsa is sarcastic and bloodthirsty, wanting nothing more than to lay waste to the cultist forces of the Circle. Compared to the ship you start the game in, Forsa is just leagues above your initial shitbox as you’re quickly taught how to drift, which opens a whole host of combat possibilities in your dogfights.

Another aspect of Nara that she chose to abandon was her “Rites”. While she kept the “Rite of the Senses”, which just so happened to be the reason why she’s such a good scavenger, her other abilities will have to be rediscovered. The first being “Rite of the Hunt”, this ability allows you to teleport Forsa into an advantageous position in the blink of an eye, or even pass through barriers blocking your way.

As you are able to pretty much free roam the system you’re in, you’ll naturally uncover hidden stashes of currency, random events, and side missions. Some of these side missions may evolve into a chain of events before they are fully completed, which likely rewards you with some goodies for your ship, but some will just reward you with a pocket full of credits. This just emphasises the need to explore even more of the system before you progress the main storyline and move forward with the game; as like any RPG title, the more prepared you are, the easier it should be in later stages of the game.

You’d expect for a space combat game, full of action and dancing around enemy ships, that the controls would be fluid and responsive. Well, I’m happy to report that they are indeed fluid and responsive. Whether you use a controller or keyboard and mouse, you’ll have no issue darting around space and taking out your enemies. Between the two control methods, I personally preferred keyboard and mouse over the controller, as I felt it was a little easier to aim my weapons but they’re both easily usable for some space shenanigans.

Moving to the visuals of Chorus and things are very pleasing to the eye. This is indeed a very beautiful universe that the team have crafted and nothing really feels out of place here. From electrical storms, to peaceful civilian ships going about their day to day; there’s always something that will catch your eye and make you think “I should take a screenshot here”. Well it seems like the outstanding folks at Fishlabs anticipated this by providing a very handy dandy photo mode to utilise. I don’t know about you lot reading this set of ramblings, but I do spend a silly amount of time in these photo modes; you just have to look at my car porn folder that’s currently holding all the shots that I've taken in Forza Horizon 5. To further enhance those wonderful graphics, Chorus does take advantage of NVIDIA’s DLSS technology in the game.

In terms of the audio for the game opens up with an amazing treat for your ears as that main theme genuinely made my jaw drop. I was sitting there just staring at the screen mesmerised by what I was listening to. During actual gameplay, all the characters are voiced and have decent conversations. The to-and-fro between Nara and Forsa feels genuine and they have some pretty meaningful chats. Some of which involve Forsa being a sarcastic bitch, while others are filling in some of Nara’s dubious past. There’s nothing that really looks or sounds out of place which is a testament to how good this game is.

Now we all know games aren’t perfect and there has to be some negatives to the experience, but in all honesty I’m really scraping the bottom of the barrel to find any. They’re very minor inconveniences at best, such as you’ll find pretty similar side quests in each area. There’s bound to be similar quests in many games and as I said, it’s a minor inconvenience rather than an issue with the game.

Overall Chorus is an incredibly solid and rewarding experience. Your eyes and ears will be gently caressed as it takes you on a wonderful journey. Go give it a try, especially if you like space combat games.