Chorus Review: A Space-Combat Shooter That Nearly Earns Its Swagger

Chorus wants you to feel like the deadliest thing in the void. For its first few hours, it nearly pulls that off.

Fishlabs built a space-combat shooter around Nara, once the Circle’s deadliest warrior and now its most wanted fugitive. She flies Forsaken, a sentient starfighter with opinions and a weapons rack. The Circle is a cult, its leader is the Great Prophet, and the fight runs from sprawling space stations to planes of existence that have no business hosting a dogfight. Chorus launched on 3 December 2021 for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Stadia, Windows, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S, published by Deep Silver.

Trailer, via Deep Silver.

Nara, the Circle’s most wanted fugitive

The premise is a revenge story with a haunted pilot at the center. Nara is portrayed by Jess Chanliau and voiced by Cassie Bradley, and the game keeps her past close: every temple she raids and every power she unlocks ties back to the cult that made her. Her goal never wavers. Unite the resistance, reach the Great Prophet, settle the debt.

Forsaken and its three mod slots

Forsaken carries the rest. Missile launchers, gatling guns and laser cannons cover the basics, and three mod slots let you tune the ship’s combat performance. It is a clean loadout system, and it stays readable even when the screen fills with enemies.

Drift through crystalline corridors

Chorus lives or dies on its drift mechanic, and it lives. Drifting through tight crystalline corridors while chaining extra-sensory perception, teleportation and telekinesis into one combo is the best thing here. The “Rite of the Hunt” power warps Forsaken directly behind an enemy, which turns a defensive scramble into an execution.

Aether powers hidden in ancient temples

The aether powers come from ancient temples. Explore one, solve its puzzles, walk out with a new combat ability. That loop gives the open world a reason to exist beyond scenery, and the optional quests are worth the detour more often than not.

Titanic battleships, tiny problems

Scale is the selling point. Chorus throws hordes of enemies and titanic battleships at you, and the cosmic vistas sell the spectacle. The trouble is that spectacle and tension are not the same thing. Once your powers chain cleanly, most encounters collapse into the same rhythm: drift, fire, warp, repeat.

The third-person camera holds up in open space. In the tight corridors it sometimes fights you for the angle you actually need. It is not a fatal flaw. It is the kind of flaw you notice every single time.

A six-platform launch on 3 December 2021

A simultaneous six-platform launch is a lot of surface area for a studio to cover, and Chorus arrived in a crowded window. Embracer Group, Deep Silver’s parent, said the game failed to meet its sales expectations. That is a business fact, not a verdict on quality — but it does explain why a game this ambitious never got a second push.

Where the 7.5 comes from

Chorus is a genuine evolution of the space-combat shooter in the places that matter and a stubbornly familiar one everywhere else. The drift mechanic, the power chaining and the temple loop are real design work. The open world, the optional quests and the story beats are scaffolding around them.

Nara’s arc is thin. The Great Prophet is a distant threat rather than a present one, and the resistance she assembles never gets enough screen time to feel like a cause. Forsaken, the sentient ship, is the more interesting character, and the game knows it.

What Chorus gets right, it gets very right. A zero-g dogfight that ends with you warping behind a battleship and tearing it apart is worth the price of admission on its own. What it gets wrong is consistency. The game rarely surprises you after the first act, and the powers you earn keep solving problems you have already solved.

This is a good game that could have been a great one with another year and a smaller platform list. It is worth playing for the combat alone, and worth admiring for how close Fishlabs came.

Chorus · Deep Silver · Fishlabs · game review · PS5 · space combat