And there is also a pair of binoculars that are supposedly to help with sneaking around and scoping out the enemy...yeah right. You can lean left and right around corners but you can't fire when you do this. The eyesight of the enemy is fantastic and they all appeared to have studied at the William Tell School of accuracy. It is also another game that is insanely hard on the 'medium' difficulty. They'll almost certainly see you before you see them. Inside buildings it's almost impossible to distinguish the enemies, who wear black, from the background, that is sometimes pitch black. The little motion tracker that you get on the easier settings isn't much help. And outside, amidst the boskiness, on 'medium' you are a dead man. Why put snipers all over your levels? Why? Why? Why? You're walking along and BANG, dead. Who enjoys that in a game? Botanists I presume.

Like everything else in the game the combat is competent but not very exciting. Once a foe is alerted to your presence they tend to react by side stepping extravagantly. If they do decide to hunker down they won't even blink when hit by your bullets. When they die though they'll fly backwards as the over zealous rag doll physics take command. The med kits you use will slowly regenerate your health over time so it's possible to take a couple before getting into any major skirmishes. Not a very cunning I grant you but it's effective. There is also a set of implants that you can activate. They are variations on a theme. For example you can use them to boost your armour, improve your accuracy and zoom in a little further. Though they are meant to give you the edge in a battle they overload quickly and are of such marginal assistance that they are ineffective and not worth using.

Not content with half-hearted implementations of all the above they've also thrown in some vehicles for you to use. Again these things work but they don't seem fully fleshed out. Even with the hover bikes you don't really seem to slide or skid much around corners. With the jeep, collisions tend to stop you dead in your tracks with no inertia taking effect. The use of the vehicles is also strictly rationed by the mission design. It is a curious thing to be confronted with wide-open expanses utilising the impressive graphics engine only to be confronted with backward thinking level design. Why go to the trouble of creating a large open playing field if all your missions revolve around the same plodding structure. You are directed to a point and do some random task, then move on to another point and so on and so forth. Even if you do explore a little you soon find out that doors and paths are arbitrarily blocked. The large environments soon start to feel like marathons as you run around from one side to the other jumping through the designer's hoops.

I have little doubt that the graphics technology of Chrome could have made for a pretty good game. Unfortunately the merciless drive to add 'features' has resulted in a discombobulated product. In many ways I found Chrome reminiscent of I.G.I. 2 Covert Strike. But whereas I.G.I. 2 had fleeting moments of panache that embodied its ideals, Chrome never seems to find its feet. Instead of looking forward to each mission I waited with some dread for the next machination. The mix and match approach of the mission design doesn't work. Nowhere was this more evident than in a painfully derived sneaking mission where you can't be spotted. Chrome is certainly an excellent piece of engineering but, despite the boskiness: it isn't much fun.

Randall: We made trees and shrubs. We helped make all this.
Kevin: Whew! That's not bad.
Randall: Yeah. But did we get a thimble full of credit for it? No! All we got was the sack. Just for creating the Pink Bunkadoo.
Kevin: Pink Bunkadoo?
Randall: Yeah. Beautiful tree that was. Og designed it. 600 feet high, bright red, and smelled terrible.

- Time Bandits.

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By Richard Clifford