Metal Wolf Chaos XD - Review

Over the years there have been a lot of games that were never released here in Australia and some of them, never left their country of creation and before the internet became the thing it is now, those games become the stuff of legend. Metal Wolf Chaos was one of those games, crafted by FromSoftware and released only in Japan and only on Xbox, it soon gained cult status by those who wanted it and god-like status for those that did own it, well now the game has gotten the remaster treatment and we can all enjoy it. With the wait being 15 years, was it worth it, or is this a product of its time?

The story of the game is 80’s Hollywood level, lots of pointless back story, that only helps serve the action on the screen and it works, here you take on the role of President of the United States Michael Wilson, who has been run out of Washington, when the Vice President Richard Hawk leads a coup d’état, a seriously dick move. But Wilson is not alone, he has support from Jody Crawford, his secretary and his massive mech suit, known as Metal Wolf, and thus begins the quest to retake the country back. The story is told a little randomly, as players start on the West coast and make their way back East, taking on missions in any order they choose, the general story though ends when you reclaim the White House and follow Hawk into space, to finish him off, once and for all. The story never takes itself seriously, even if the tone it attempts to present does, the voice acting helps sell that fact, as the words are heavy, but the presentation of it is campy as heck.

When you are not listening to Crawford give you information on items, prisoners or missions in general, you will be in your Metal Wolf, basically destroying everything in sight, as you aim to complete whatever the objective is. Most of the missions require you to slug through waves of enemy soldiers as you make your way towards the end of the map, but occasionally there will be missions where you need to save hostages or such. In fact, most missions will have them littered around the maps, with some delicate weapon skills needed, to bust them out, anything more powerful than a shotgun, will blow them up instead. There was on mission early on, that required a lot of thought on how to beat, that was storming Alcatraz Island and disabling a massive cannon that sat atop it and the reason why it required a change in tactics, was that there was a time associated with the level.

For the most part, you can just run and shoot your way through the levels and you achieve that by using two of the many weapons available to you, one assigned to a trigger each, swapping them out is pretty straight forward and done in game, no pausing there. Most of the time, your classic weapons like an Assault Rifle or Shotgun are going to be used, but there are times when a Sniper Rifle or a Rocket Launcher will be needed and thankfully Metal Wolf can carry a lot of options for you. Ammo is the scare part though, you can only carry so much into a mission, and while some trucks might leave some ammo behind, you will need to destroy enemy facilities to attempt to locate more, some of them are going to be harder to destroy, so you will find yourself swapping out the weapons. There were a few missions, where I would run out of ammo on my assault rifle and end up using a pistol or shotgun in its place, but this was before I discovered you could destroy the bases for refills, the other things you will locate inside of them are pods to recharge your shields and health and even up the damage you can dish out.

When you are not tearing through cities and locations of America, you will be looking at menus, where you can upgrade your weapons and that is done in two stages. The first is that you can research weapons, giving you more powerful versions of them, this costs money to achieve, which you earn in missions, so the more missions you do, the more you can invest in research. Once you have researched an item, you can make it and then equip it out on your mech suit, with four slots on each arm, meaning you can have a large number of weapons available to you, some items like the Sniper Rifle, will take up a slot on bother sides, should you want to use it, so you will get seven weapons instead of eight. Taking the time to learn about a mission and then what kind of weapons you need for it, is something you don’t really have to do, but it can make things a little easier for you. The overall difficulty is not to challenging, so modern fans of the FromSoftware titles, might seem a little confused by it, don’t get me wrong, there is still a challenge, especially towards the end, but it is not brutally so.

When it comes to presentation, the game is a mixed bag, across the board and it is a good thing and a bad thing, as some of the choices made, appear to be on purpose. Taking the voice acting as the example, there is a clear level of cheese applied to it, now I don’t know if the original game was this way, but it works for the story, as it is also cheese filled. The level of dedication the voices present, to keep that happening, is quite admirable, but there is a massive downside to the audio, the mix, it is just broken. Whenever anyone is speaking, the game either decides to ignore the addition of the vocals and keeps the music at the same level, or it cuts out the music for a bit, giving you nothing buy vocals and sound effects and it is not infrequent, it happens each time there is spoken dialogue. The problem was, if I started to mess with levels, i.e. lowering the volume of the music, then it was hard to hear, but still did not improve the overall audio portion of the presentation.

On the visual side, things are stranger, there is a clear look the game first had back in 2004 and if I played the game at the time, the visuals would have been impressive. The maps are quite large and do contain a lot of levels, making them bigger still, the problem is the cutscenes, which are done in-engine, show just how basic the worlds are. One of the earliest missions has you storming the streets of San Francisco and the game does a lot of shots to show how the city has been taken over, a nice touch, the problem is there are not buildings rendered, past the ones that you walk by, so overhead shots give you large amounts of nothing between the buildings and the skybox. Given that it is a remaster of the original, I would expect some awkwardness to the visuals, but the lack of effort given is surprising.

Metal Wolf Chaos XD is a fun game, it never takes itself seriously, but has enough to do, to keep most players entertained. Those who are coming for the original developers name, might find themselves disappointed with what is on offer, but those who stick to the end, will find something that is just fun and campy and that is all it needs to be.