In addition, since you want to play with your fellow clan mates, you need to communicate to them which mission you’re joining. You select or launch a mission from the clan lobby where everyone can talk to one another. The problem here is that as soon as you launch a mission, join a mission, or rendezvous on a mission, you are disconnected from the lobby and lose communication with the rest of your clan. This would be fine if it was easy to join a mission, but since I would get kicked out a mission four out of five tries, I would have to wait for the game to load back into the clan lobby before I could communicate the failure to my clan mates.

    Capping off my frustration was the fact that once you got in a game and had started to ready up for combat, you had no indication at all of how many human opponents you were facing off against, or even any way to communicate with the other team to update them on your readying up progress. The only information you have on the other team is if they’re in the lobby and whether or not they’re ready to deploy. This wouldn’t be so bad, except that half the time I got into a mission, the other team would leave before my clan was ready for combat. With no communication between teams we had no way of knowing why the other team left, or if they were simply kicked out of the game. When you couple the four out of five failed attempts to join a match with the numerous failed attempts to get started once you’re in a match lobby, it took a solid hour to get a single match going.

Looks a bit like overkill - don’tcha think?

    Now at any point in time you can simply select the free battle option and be tossed into a random match with random players, or fight with your clan against an AI-controlled team. But it’s not all that fun playing a team-based game with complete strangers, and playing against the AI wasn’t fun due to the very mechanical strategies the computer uses (nothing like playing against human opponents). To top it off, in every mode outside of your clan lobby you can’t view your teammate’s Hounds. Therefore you have to ask each and every person which Hound type they’re using and hope you have a good setup for your team. The Tactics Commander Hound unit is the most important Hound due to their radar, but I was the only Tactics Commander I encountered in my entire time playing. I would hate to think how other players got along moving around the battlefield completely blind to where the enemy is at.

    While it may seem like Chromehounds is a horrid Xbox 360 title, the true fact of the matter is the potential this game has is phenomenal. If you can gather a solid clan and actually get into a battle, the matches are intense and a ton of fun. But the huge amount of work and frustration that goes into finding a match and actually launching a match far outweigh the fun you have during a match. Perhaps a few months down the line when people know how to play Chromehounds and how to effectively navigate through the online match making service, the game will shine. However, for the time being the servers are lackluster, you’ll get kicked out of games, lose your connection to the server and become extremely frustrated before you even get a game in. I’m sorry Chromehounds, but you have failed me.