Chaotic: Shadow Warriors for Xbox 360 Reviews by Gamers

Imagine that you find yourself caught in the middle of a large battle raging across an entire world between warring factions. Each group is trying to gain dominance over the other and is actively seeking any artifact that could potentially tip the balance of power in their favor. This is the basic setting of Chaotic: Shadow Warriors, the latest animated series and card game to be turned into a game. While the recently released title from Activision tries to capture the excitement of the show, the gameplay is anything but, degenerating into a repetitive sequence of fights and tame exploratory sequences.



The plot behind Chaotic revolves around a digital game world known as Perim, where the holographic characters of the game are allied to four separate factions and constantly fight each other for control with the help of human players. One night, a mysterious group steals into an Overworld stronghold and steals powerful equipment known as Battlegear from their armory, further accelerating tensions between the factions. You take on the role of Tom, a teenage boy that enters the world of Perim as a player and is quickly tasked with solving the mystery of where the Battlegear disappeared to before it's too late. While you don't have to be a fan of the show, it will definitely help to be able to piece together why you want to help certain characters or why the basic mechanics have been included because they are shortly dismissed after Tom is introduced into the game and never brought back up again.



For the most part, gameplay within Chaotic revolves around two separate phases: exploration and combat. Exploration across the various lands of Perim is a linear affair, as Tom will solve minor environmental puzzles to access new areas and defeat nuisances like spiders, insects and other creatures with a gun known as the Pyroblaster. The most important facet of Tom's exploration is to use his scanner to collect different characters and equipment that's scattered around the world, which is added to his overall holographic army. The scanner allows him to also edit and equip the gear that your forces will wield in battle with a few simple commands. Now, in theory, you'd need this flexibility to adequately prepare for the different enemies that you could potentially face, but you'll never have to do any of this. In fact, while you'll collect characters from all of the different factions, there's practically no reason to change creatures. It's entirely possible to fight your way through the game from start to finish with the same characters and equipment, which is extremely disappointing.



Speaking of fights, battle within Chaotic is a turn-based affair where creatures launch attacks, abilities or "mugic" spells (a form of magic) at enemies, with the side that remains standing declared the winner. Attacks are governed by attack points, which slowly regenerate over the course of a battle and cause a pre-determined set of damage. The strength of these attacks can be further augmented or blocked by Sixaxis controls, giving players a way to affect the damage caused or received during a fight. The Sixaxis controls are fine, although you don't always have to be accurate with your swings – the game will sometimes disregard swings in the right direction and count inaccurate swings at other moments. However, there are a number of problems with the fighting mechanics, such as an extremely limited variety of monsters that you face, allowing you to quickly learn which enemies you want to attack first and how to defeat them. This turns fights into a boring inconvenience between exploration segments. Another problem is that you never fully know how many attack points you have to pull off a specific strike, which will force you to make less powerful strikes or avoid combat altogether for a turn so you can rebuild what you need point-wise.



A third issue with the game is that the stat-affecting attacks don't seem to be particularly effective at all. For example, I can launch two attacks that are designed to lower an enemy's power or speed. Unfortunately, when it's the opponent's turn, they'll still attack and cause the same amounts of damage, rendering the negative stat effects completely useless. The same can be said about wielding elemental attacks against vulnerable creatures, like water attacks against fire beasts, because they don't add any bonus damage. Combine all of these problems, and you can see that the mechanics for battle are flawed, which is perhaps one of the reasons why no one is choosing to participate in multiplayer matches. In fact, there are less than fifty players on the leaderboards that have even played another person, and since the multiplayer mode isn't particularly conducive to finding or setting up matches with other players, the multiplayer community is clearly dead. You'll have better luck setting up a versus battle with a friend on your couch than you will against people online.



In some ways, that's fine, because you're not really missing out on anything visually striking about Chaotic. While the character models are pretty decent, that's probably the best thing about the graphics. The mugic spells are colorful, but not particularly eye catching, and the attacks that you'll launch against your enemies aren't very detailed either. In fact, some attacks look like clouds of dust or generic particles. The environments for the most part consist of decent to bland texture work, and the framerate will slow down without any reason whatsoever. Sound isn't much better, either; sound effects are decent, but the soundtrack is forgettable and Tom continually repeats the same line about mugic every five or so minutes.

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