I am, first and foremost, a
fan of action-oriented shooters. Not stealth.
However I can tolerate it. I played through
Thief 3: Deadly Shadows, and it was one of the
most memorable games i've ever played. The Chronicles
of Riddick also had it's fair share of stealth.
Just as long as there's a good story and atmospheric
design to go with the game, then I can tolerate
stealth.
Now Thief 3 definitely had
an enthralling story and it's graphics, with
great level designs and lighting, were excellent.
Which meant I could put up with the sometimes
frustrating gameplay.
Chaos Theory, on the other
hand, was weak the in the storyline and the
design sometimes looked a bit bland. However
the actual stealth gameplay was a fair bit more
enjoyable. Probably 90% of the enemies I ended
up taking out; by means of strangling them unconcious,
hitting them in the head or a gun shot. So it
meant I wasn't going back and forth creeping
around enemies. The actual gunfights in Chaos
Theory were frustrating though. If you only
have one enemy to hit then you have no problems,
but taking on two or three is a problem because
your weapons are very useless. Same enemies
seem to take quite a lot of bullets before they
finally die, and you simply don't have that
many bullets to begin with. I guess it's designed
this way so that you use your guns as little
as possible. However I would have preferred
more accurate weapons, but perhaps less ammunition.
In the graphics area, Chaos
Theory's lighting looks great. There's high
contrast throughout and some great lighting
effects. But you would expect this from a stealth
game where shadows are an important element.
The level design, however, could have been better.
For most of the game it looked decent, but considering
you move at snails pace and there's only ten
levels, which are all fairly small, they could
have focused on a lot more detail or set pieces.
I mean they do all look good, but I could have
designed these levels all single-handedly in
six months. Ubisoft is one of the biggest game
studios in the world. They had a dozen level
designers working on the game. So, I'd expect
the level design to be amazing, not just decent.
The story is supposedly a big
part of the game as your chasing terrorists
in a plot to launch Korea and USA to war. However
it was convoluted, boring and confusing. The
story fell flat. The only positive here was
the often amusing humour of the main character.
So what is the best thing about
Chaos Theory? The soundtrack, composed by Amon
Tobin.
Overall Chaos Theory has no
replay value for me. By the end of the game,
which was a good ten hours, I was getting bored
with it. Not helped by having to repeat the
entire last level after because a killed one
of the enemies, not realising I needed him for
a retinal scan. The game has a few of these
gameplay bugs that should have been ironed out
in testing. Another time a scripted sequence
never triggered, meaning I was completely stuck.
If you like stealth games though,
it's fairly enjoyable.
