The basic premise of The Chaos Engine is the creation of a machine which has the capability to manipulate time and matter. Instead of doing anything useful, like fixing pot-holes on roads or turning dog-poop into roses, the Chaos Engine begins turning people and animals into monsters and mechanical aberrations. Enter six hard nailed mercenaries for hire.

The Chaos Engine is a top down shooter with some basic RPG elements; it is vaguely reminiscent of the even more ancient Gauntlet. Its setting suggests a Victorian England which has been dragged, kicking and screaming, into a sort of steam-punk nightmare. Although The Chaos Engine can be played solo with an AI buddy, it's advisable to recruit the aid of a friend in combating the fiendish creations of the engine; it is also advisable to use a joypad, rather than the keyboard when playing the game.

The character selection screen, stretched to proportionsfor which it was never intended.

The Chaos Engine begins with character selection; a total of six characters are available. The navvie and the thug are the most expensive, but they are also the most resilient, and the most powerful. The gentleman and scientist occupy the other end of the scale, they can be killed more easily, but are faster, cheaper, and have a number of useful abilities. The bandit and mercenary hold the middle ground, in terms of power, speed, resilience, and cost. On selecting a character the player is hurled into the first of sixteen levels, the object of each is to collect keys and destroy a set number of nodes, which permit progress to the next level. Money is scattered throughout the levels and extra money can be earned by killing monsters. Every two levels this money can be spent on character upgrades, such as health, firepower, or extra lives. Sounds simple, eh?

The mercenary and the thug make their way through the first level.

There are a number of facets of the gameplay which give The Chaos Engine a pretty unique feel. The levels are highly mutable, so picking up a key, destroying a node, or sometimes just crossing over a certain point on the map can determine which routes through the level are open, a feature which adds significantly to the game's replay value. The Chaos Engine is packed with traps. At certain points throughout the levels, enemies will spawn around you, forcing you to either kill them expediently, or be killed yourself. Some of these traps are incredibly fiendish, but as you progress your spidey sense will rise to the challenge. As far as games go, its pretty unforgiving; players begin with three lives and a couple of hits iwill kill you. Thankfully, it is also a lot of fun.

Graphically, The Chaos Engine, is roughly what one would expect from a game which is now in its teens; in other words, the graphics are outdated. However, they were good in terms of what could be done at the time, and are certainly functional, perhaps even oddly attractive. The music is mainly electronica and significantly better than what we are entitled to expect from the gaming world's equivalent to a crooning pensioner. The opening music and the music from the character development screen are oddly arresting, in spite of their age. The sound effects are probably the weakest aspect of the presentation, but once more, respectable, given their age. The controls are simple and responsive, which is an absolute must for games of this now largely abandoned genre. Before drawing a conclusion and rating The Chaos Engine, it might be best to mention the manner by which it has been evaluated. One school of thought suggests that older games should be rated in comparison to their contemporaries. To adopt this method comes close to belittling all the technical and creative innovations of the meanwhile. This doesn't seem right. Another methos would be to rate the game against present developments. This doesn't seem particularly fair to games which are now ten or fifteen years old. What I have decided to do for classic games like this, is to try to come to some sort of compromise between both positions, as this does a degree of justice to both.

Our heroes stop to pick up some frisbees on their way to the YMCA.

If you are tired with the current emphasis on graphical excellence, in lieu of gameplay and character (I'm beginning to sound like my father), The Chaos Engine might be well worth a look. Although it will take a bit of fiddling to get the game working on a modern PC, The Chaos Engine is a fresh breeze of tasty retro action, which is especially fun in co-operative mode.