I'm not quite sure if Chaos Control deserves a place under my special Steam tag "shit". On one hand, it's rather short and repetitive on the rails-shooter, where you, as Jessica Darkhill, fly around, controlling the aim rectangle and shoot everything on the screen. On the other hand, considering it is a game from 1995, originally made for short-lived CD-i console, it is somewhat of an impressive looking game.
There is a story. After the USA had launched Pioneer 10 with its plaque describing the home of humanity, an alien race found it. In the distant year of 2071, an alien race called the Kesh Rhan has found its way to our home system and are up to no good. You step into the boots, or the spaceship, of Jessica Darkhill, the best pilot of the Orbital Defence Forces, to shoot down some alien scum.
The first level takes place in New York. Your ship flys past the Statue of Liberty and among the skyscrapers of Manhattan. The second level pits you against a computer virus the aliens are using to incapacitate humanity. After this is a hurdle on the Earth's orbit and finally you get a mandatory trench run on the Kesh Rhan mothership. During the recesses, you are rewarded with surprisingly ambitious cutscenes mixing pre-rendered 3D and 2D animation.
I really wasn't expecting the voice acting in the cutscenes to be top-notch, but surprisingly enough, the actors do a passable job. The dialogue leaves a lot of room for improvement, but somehow the actors managed to pull their lines through without too much snickering. Oddly enough, and I can't say if it is a fault with the PC version, there's very little music in the game. And the little music there is is rather forgettable. Sound effects aren't that impressive either.
Interestingly enough, the CD-i version has pre-rendered in-game graphics as well, but the PC DOS is real-time 3D. Now, you can always argue, that the CD-i looks far better because it has more details whereas the real-time PC graphics don't even have textures, but I must say, that the PC version is very smooth, even played on DosBox, which isn't necessarily always the best-optimized solution in playing old 3D games.
Of course, by 1995, DOS had had games with texture-mapped real-time 3D models, but I do find the frame rate of Chaos Control quite impressive. And at times, the screen is pretty hectic with traffic, so while the resolution and the lack of textures do leave room for improvement, this was a noteworthy experiment.
But, the graphics don't a good game make. The gameplay is a rather run in the mill affair and you'd have to be a hardcore rail shooter fan to like this. The PC version also lacks the possibility of using a lightgun, which in mind Chaos Control was obviously designed. Whit a mouse you be blasting. On the other hand, if DOSBox had proper touch controls, this could be a tad more interesting affair.
There's a little variation in your shooting as a whole, as the game has no pickups. So no alternative weapons, bonuses, boosters or healing items. The whole idea is to stay alive to the end of the level and considering they aren't the longest ones, I do kinda understand why there aren't any pickups. Though, I think the length of the levels is more down to the console versions having pre-rendered graphics, which were time-consuming to do with the computers of the 90s, even if they used Silicon Graphics workstations. Not to mention the storage capacity they required.
Contemporary critics weren't impressed with the title. While many applauded the graphical fidelity of Chaos Control, they were quick to point out the short length, monotonous gameplay, the lack of collectables and the lack of alternative scoring, such as accuracy. In a word, there was, and still is, very little replay value about the game. In 1996, Computer Games World went even so far as to place Chaos Control on the place 38 in their list of 50 worst games of all time.
While I wouldn't go as far as to claim Chaos Control among the worst games ever made, it is somewhat forgettable. If you like rail shooters, that can be played through quickly, in around 30 minutes, you might have some fun with it. Other than that, it might hold some novelty value for a quick peek, but that's pretty much it. And hence, I'm not quite sure if it deserves to be branded with my special Steam tag "shit".
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