Tweet
"GL, HF." As our own Rich Stanton once observed, only in StarCraft 2 would you need to remind players to have fun at the start of a video game multiplayer match. With Chaos Reborn, it's sort of the other way round: fun is pretty much guaranteed, but so is luck - good and bad luck, promoted to a position of supreme, and supremely mischievous, importance. It works, too. Chaos Reborn is strategy at its leanest - wizard versus wizard, racing around an arena, conjuring beasts and flinging spells in a swift battle to the death - but the role of luck, or, more specifically, RNG, ensures that every encounter is surprising, and often humbling.I have a theory about this, actually, and it's worth getting it out of the way upfront. The theory concerns Chaos Reborn's community, which is atypically lovely. I'm not saying that most online games gather toxicity around them as a matter of course, but few, I suspect, are quite as friendly and inviting as this one is. This could be because the community's fairly small (I generally get a game within a minute or two of entering matchmaking, but there's rarely more than 10 matches going on at any time). Or It could be because everyone playing is a refugee from the old days of the glorious Spectrum version of Chaos, so it's all fellow travellers and aging friends. In truth, though, I have a feeling it's something to do with the game itself - with what happens on the field. In Chaos (and this is as true for the original as it is for the latest version) you can get almost everything right, and your opponent can get almost everything wrong, and yet there's still that matter of luck to contend with.
For a tactical game, this should be awful - and yet! And yet.
Read more…
More...