Developed by The Bitmap Brothers and published by Spectrum Holobyte in 1993

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Any visitor to my channel will know that I’m a huge fan of The Chaos Engine, probably the best of the Bitmap Brothers games and one of my favourite for the Commodore Amiga computer. The game was ported to other systems, including the 16-bit consoles offered by Sega and Nintendo at the time.

At it’s core, the game is a shoot ‘em up featuring multiple levels with multiple paths and puzzle-lite elements that influence the route you take through the game. Monsters that you kill drop coins that can be collected and spent between levels to upgrade your mercenaries as they progress through a dystopian, Steampunk vision of Victorian-era Britain. Memorable for it’s remarkably adept (for the time) CPU-controlled companion, amazing artwork from Dan Malone and solid gameplay, it was a firm favourite amongst Amiga fans.

Since the actual gameplay is largely unchanged, this review will examine the translation from Amiga to Genesis, as well as a couple of notable differences between European and U.S. versions of the game; whilst the game is still very much The Chaos Engine at it’s core, a couple of tweaks were made to make it more “consumer-friendly” for the North American market.

Most obvious, of course, is the change to the game’s title. I suppose I can see the logic behind this in that Soldiers of Fortune naming does focus on the fact that the 6 in-game characters are mercenaries for hire and that they’re rewarded with cash for destroying the bad guys. Despite the name-change, the Chaos Engine itself remains the primary antagonist in the game.

The second principle change is the character of the preacher has been renamed to the Scientist. I suppose the portrayal of a man of God taking down monsters with a futuristic laser wand and looting cash from their corpses didn’t sit well with publishers intent on bringing the product into a market that is more sensitive to the portrayal of religious symbolism and iconography than, say, the more cynical and irreverent attitudes of the British market.

By and large, the conversion is a solid one. The core gameplay is identical to all the other versions out there, so there’s really not much to say about the core mechanics that I haven’t discussed before.

Performance is generally good across the board and the NTSC 60 Hz refresh makes the whole game feel more snappier and responsive than the 50 Hz PAL equivalent on the Amiga. However, the frame-rate isn’t consistent and there are moments when things start to lag noticeably when multiple sprites are on screen. Despite this, it remains eminently playable and, dare I say it, possibly the most responsive!

The graphics and art style have been adapted to the Genesis hardware well. The game’s colour palette resides somewhere between the Amiga OCS and AGA releases, although everything is more subtle than the slightly gaudy colouration of the latter.

One area where the Genesis port does suffer, however, is the audio. The Amiga audio hardware designed specifically to play back digital samples, something that the Genesis struggles with and is evident in the digitised speech samples that sound rather robotic and rasping. The conversion of the game’s audio was was handled by Graftgold, but it’s something of a mixed bag; the FM synthesis music sounds poor compared to the Amiga, plus the sound effects aren’t brilliant either; the rasping ‘CHOOM!’ effect used for explosions sounds like it’s come out of an older 8-bit machine!

Overall, I still feel that this is a solid conversion provided you’re willing to turn a blind eye (deaf ear?) to the audio. The gameplay is as good as it always was, plus the Genesis controller setup makes it easy to play (far better than the QuickShot joystick I used to play this on my A500 back in the day). Factor in the great two-player cooperative action and you’ve got yourself a decent shooter that comes highly recommended.
#retrogaming

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