Chromehounds

The Xbox 360 gets hounded by giant destructive robots. Don't miss our initial impressions and single-player hands-on of Sega's Chromehounds

Everyone loves enormous robots. Tack on to them incredibly destructive weaponry and you've got the makings of a potential blockbuster experience. Sega is hoping to capitalize on that idea with their upcoming Xbox 360 game Chromehounds, a title that has players piloting enormous hounds (robots) as they take part in some pretty engaging team-based gameplay.

The world of Chromehounds is set in a bleak and futuristic world scarred by years of war. After years of global instability, the world was thrust in to a downward spiral of political bickering and petty war. These conflicts are played out on the battlefield almost exclusively by enormous robots called Hounds. These Hounds are piloted by Mercenaries, men with no allegiance to any of the countries vying for world power (Tarakia, Morskoj, and Sal Kar).

While Chromehounds is primarily a game tailored to online multiplayer, the single-player campaigns aren't anything to wipe your nose at. Taking on the role of a Hound pilot, you're quickly put in charge of a squad of Hounds and dropped in to battle. There are multitudes of missions to play through, with each one taking place in varying areas of the world, giving each conflict a fairly nice degree of variety.

While destroying enemy Hounds is usually your main objective in a mission, you'll also be vying to control special radio towers that dot the many maps found in the game. Hounds can only communicate with each other if their within a certain proximity of each other. But, if you capture enemy radio towers, you'll open up a swatch of radio bandwidth surrounding that tower. If any of your allies are in that radio area, you'll be able to communicate with them. One tower, however, isn't enough to stay in contact with your allies, so the more towers you control, the more area you'll be able to travel to and still be in radio contact with your squad-mates.

The locales, however, really play second fiddle to the Hounds themselves. The hulking machines are veritable instruments of death. As expected, Hounds can be outfitted with a dizzying array of weapons, with some models able to tote around a multitude of guns, rocket launchers, and shotguns. Hounds, however, are more than just the weapons they carry in to battle.

As you play through the single-player missions, you'll unlock additional parts and accessories for your Hounds, such as different chassis arrangements and even things like different legs or even wheel bases. All of these parts are valuable in that they allow you to fully customize your Hound the way you want it to be. If you're a bi-pedal fan, you can outfit your Hound with two-legs, giving it optimum range of movement. But, if speed is more your preference, all you need to do is slap on a set of treads or wheels and your Hound will be able to tear through a battlefield as an alarming pace.

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