Soldiers of Fortune

aka: The Chaos Engine
Moby ID: 933
Genesis Specs
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Description official descriptions

A time traveler from the future was stranded in Victorian England, and his knowledge of yet unknown technological inventions was passed to the Royal Society, headed by Baron Fortesque. With the help of this knowledge, Fortesque managed to construct an immensely complex artificial intelligence known as the Chaos Engine. However, creation rebelled against its creator, assimilated its mind, and turned Britain into a war zone populated by mad machines. Mercenaries are willing to enter this dangerous place and put an end to the chaos, hoping for an appropriate reward.

Chaos Engine (Soldiers of Fortune in the US) is a run-and-gun overhead shooter. Sixteen levels (in four groups of four) await the players in the game. The basic gameplay is similar to Gauntlet, but in an open-air setting, with bridges across rivers and other features in the maps. The visuals are in the 'metallic and blue' style Bitmap Brothers appeared to favor.

There are six characters available in the game, each with different strengths and weaknesses, and different starting prices. In two-player mode, each player chooses a character and plays co-operatively, but in one-player games, the player also chooses a character for the computer to control, with its artificial intelligence allowing it to open doors, pick up power-ups and take on enemies away from the ones occupying the player-controlled character.

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Screenshots

Promos

Credits (Genesis version)

28 People (19 developers, 9 thanks) · View all

Design
Graphic Design
Graphic Conversion
Original Code
Code Conversion
Additional Code
Original Game Music
SFX
Sound Conversion
Title Music
Project Management
Special Thanks
Product Manager
Testing
Instruction Manual
Marketing
Special Thanks
[ full credits ]

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 78% (based on 58 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.7 out of 5 (based on 87 ratings with 7 reviews)

The Bitmaps' latest classic in 16 bits.

The Good
The Bitmap Brothers once had a real nag for making first-class action games at a somewhat slow but regular interval, and The Chaos Engine was the last of these achievements during the 16-bit era. As was common practice, the ST version hit the shelfs shortly after the Amiga release and came with a number of small confinements to make the game fit the ST's more limited hardware capabilities. Those will be mentioned in the second part of this review. What sets The Chaos Engine apart from most action games is its focus on the individualities of each of the six mercenaries you can choose from. You get everything from the brainless bully to the smart but fragile thinker, whose attributes are sorted into the usual set of categories such as weapons power, speed, size of the health bar and intelligence. At the beginning of a new game you will have to pick two characters, one to be controlled by the player, the other by the computer. Except, of course, you play with a friend, in which case both players get their own character. In multiplayer, the game is significantly more fun, especially since what would later be known as co-op mode was still something of a novelty until the early nineties. All the characters carry different weapons, including a gun plus an extra weapon. Basically, however, every standard gun is one out of two basic types; they either shoot one to four straight and parallel bullets or an increasing number of spreading bullets, the impact being depended on the upgrade level. Were they differ, apart from the fact that none looks like another, is the initial value of their penetrating power. This alone will leave you thinking for a while about which of the characters you want to play with and which one you will trust as your AI companion. It also gives the game some considerable replay value, since the difficulty of the game is set rather high and you will have to come up a slightly different strategy for every combination of mercenaries you send into the field. This is also were the intelligence level comes into effect. The more stupid the AI-players get, the more you will have your hands full fighting off your foe. The more intelligent they get, the more help they will give you, but as the smarter ones also are more vulnerable, you will have to take good care of them in return. More tactical finesse is required when having to be quick at deciding on whether you or your comrade-in-arms should pick up one of the precious power-ups. He might have little health left, but so do you. And can you still save him when you forfeit that huge green drink in the lower corner? The same holds true for the distribution of extra weapon pick-ups. Those secondary weapons range from huge medikits to powerful special shots and such that eradicate every non-human sprite on screen. Most interestingly, The Chaos Engine offers a genre-mix with RPG elements of the kind that you find in many of the more recent games. That is, every second level you are given the chance to upgrade your character according to the amount of money, which is left by some of the monsters after you have killed them. You can increase every of the four main abilities of both players as well as spend an extra life saver or two on every one of them. If all the strategy and tactics and thinking that these features bring about make you wonder where the action comes in, make no mistake; the Chaos Engine never strays from its premise to be a first-class action-packed arcade-style game. Once in a level you will be constantly pushed by monsters and defense installations to move on, look for power-ups along the way and decide which path to take. The latter again increases the replay value, since most of the levels offer slightly different paths that you can take. At the very least they often have various valuable extras, which you can reach only by blocking off the way to another. All of the above is being rendered in state-of-the-art quality. The Bitmap Brothers induced their unique, comic-like style into every byte of the game. And although four worlds, each offering four levels with almost exactly the same graphical appearance, might be considered a rather minimal approach as far as creating a game world goes, the strength of The Chaos Engine is not so much the expanse of the playing field as it is the emphasis on detail. Particularly impressive are the characters designs and animations of friend and foe. They almost appear to be 3-dimensional puppets - no exaggeration here.

The Bad
In comparison to the Amiga version, the ST release offers a little less colorful experience. In terms of what an ST can do, though, The Chaos Engine could not be better looking. The same holds true for the sound department. Although impressive for ST standards, one crucial aspect, namely the voice acting, is missing in this version. All the other sounds are well done and add to the impelling atmosphere, but since characters play such an important role in the game, having their voices been cut is something of a disappointment. Other than that one more thing needs mentioning. Fortunately, though, it does not overly distract from the fun the game delivers, but serves merely as a small annoyance for first-time players. What I am talking about is the fact that you get the code, which includes all the progress you made in the game as well as the upgrade status of your players, only every four levels. Since the code system was changed from a two-level to the four-level interval during the last days of the game development, my guess would be that The Bitmap Brothers realized only late along the road that their game would in fact be rather short. However huge the levels may be, there are only 16 of them. So instead of making you learn two stages at a time and then have a new starting point for the following ones, we are now being left with having to master four levels, including all their secrets and shortcuts, to advance further.

The Bottom Line
Overall, The Chaos Engine is one of the most enjoyable action games ever made. It comes with six nice character profile cards, an intro tune that stays in the ear for years and one of the most intoxicating, if a bit short-lived, gameplay experiences ever.

Atari ST · by G'Kyl (50) · 2004

Pumping with action and keeps you amused for ages.

The Good
This game was one of the best Bitmap games, a well thought out storyline for an Action game. Play with the computer or with a friend and you are set on blasting baddies and collecting as many extra powers as you can. Once you have completed the game, the task becomes one on using different characters and finding the maximum amount of treasure for each level.

The Bad
First played this game on the Amiga where the music is far better than that of the DOS version that seems to have been rewritten, the RISC OS version has been converted better. It appears the music is the only bad tiding as the rest of the game is brilliant. It's age is showing in that the graphics are only 16 colours but they are done in a Amiga-esque way to hide that.

The Bottom Line
If you like an action game with a bit more brain-power to put behind and like collecting various tokens and listening to cool effects then this is the game for you. Now starting to show what real games were like moons ago.

DOS · by Nathan Walker (4) · 2000

Fortune for soldiers

The Good
The Chaos engine is a Roaming shooter that is both challenging and fun to play. Viewed from a top down perspective you must blast your way through several levels to put a stop to the Chaos Engine which has populated the lands with vicious monsters.

Playing as one of 6 characters you shoot, collect keys, items and money to get to the portal of each level. In between levels you would get the chance to spend the money you have collected in a shop to purchase power-ups. These were essential as the game got tougher & tougher.

In parts this game could be very testing, but that isn't to say that is wasn't beatable. In multiplayer though you really must work together otherwise you've no chance.

TCE was a very likeable game that was easy enough to pick up and play at any time and is recommended to those who like a meaty shooter with a bit of challenge.

The Bad
There were elements of the game that irritated. Like not being able to see where exactly the path was or getting trapped behind several enemies when trying to get that precious Life power-up.

The Bottom Line
Got some time to kill? Then the Chaos Engine is what you need.

Genesis · by Liam Dowds (39) · 2003

[ View all 7 player reviews ]

Discussion

Subject By Date
Level Editor released + first custom level lilalurl (733) Jun 26, 2010

Trivia

Advertisement

Shortly after the game's release, Renegade took out a full page advert in trade magazine CTW, which simply said "The Chaos Engine. So good, even that bastard Stuart Campbell liked it", referring to a British journalist who had a habit of not liking much-hyped games, including previous Bitmap Brothers titles Xenon 2 and Gods, but gave this one a great review. Ironically Campbell later worked for CTW (as of 2004).

Development

The original beta version (as seen on TV in many countries) was a three player game (not two).

German index

On March 31, 1995, The Chaos Engine was put on the infamous German index by the BPjS. For more information about what this means and to see a list of games sharing the same fate, take a look here: BPjS/BPjM indexed games.

Passwords

A quote from the manual addendum lying in the game box:

Please note - In order to continue the time-honoured Bitmap Brothers tradition of mucking around with the password system at the last minute, The Chaos Engine now only awards passwords at the end of every world rather than after every Equipment Screen.

Sorry.

Version differences

  • In both the SNES and Genesis versions of the game which are named Soldiers of Fortune, the game's ending credits still call it The Chaos Engine.
  • In the console versions the Preacher was changed into a Scientist due to Sega and Nintendo having a policy of censoring any religious material in games for their consoles.

Awards

  • Amiga Joker
    • Issue 02/1994 – #2 Best Genre Mix in 1993 (Readers' Vote)
  • Power Play
    • Issue 02/1994 – Best Multiplayer Game in 1993

Information also contributed by Johnny "ThunderPeel2001" Walker, Martin Smith, Timo Takalo, WildKard and Xoleras

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  • MobyGames ID: 933
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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Derrick 'Knight' Steele.

Genesis, Atari ST added by kametyken. Antstream added by firefang9212. Windows, Linux, Acorn 32-bit, J2ME, Amiga CD32, Macintosh added by Kabushi. BlackBerry added by MAT. SNES added by Katakis | カタキス. Amiga added by Rantanplan.

Additional contributors: Macintrash, -Chris, kametyken, Martin Smith, Patrick Bregger.

Game added February 29, 2000. Last modified March 23, 2024.