Making its debut announcement last year, I was given an opportunity to go hands-on with Deep Silver Fishlabs’ high-flying action packed space shooter, Chorus. With roughly an hour’s worth of gameplay under my belt, here are my thoughts on Chorus.

First small disclaimer. The footage seen in this preview was provided directly from Deep Silver Fishlabs, as we were not allowed to record our own gameplay. While this isn’t our own gameplay, the footage provided showcases the exact same demo I played, and as far as I could tell, showed no graphical or performance differences. 

So, what is Chorus? Well, in short, Chorus is a single-player driven space combat shooter that has a similar focus and feel to gameplay like other craft titles like Ace Combat, Everspace, and Star Wars Squadron. 

You’ll take on the role of Nara, an organic being created by an organization known as the Dark Cult. Sadly, not a whole lot of story details were revealed during the demo, but what we do know is something goes wrong between Nara and the Dark Cult, forcing her to hunt down members of the mysterious organization in order to bring it down. A big task for one person, though luckily she isn’t the only one out there wanting the Dark Cult gone.

Again, very light story elements in the demo with the majority of it being told in a similar fashion to that of Ace Combat, with open comm chatter throughout missions.Voice acting will clearly play a pivotal role, and as far as we can tell Chorus strikes a great, and appealing balance. Nara for example will at times have her own subconscious talk to her, perfectly delivering lines and portraying them in an ominous way..

Combat will also feel familiar to Ace Combat vets,  and the previously mentioned titles with Chorus leaning heavily into the arcadey style of flight. It’s fast paced, with loads of different, and crazy maneuverability that the players can achieve. However, unless I was doing something wrong, we didn’t notice any kind of fast zero-g u-turning. I mean, I know it’s space and all, but some sort of quick u-turning would have been nice to have in case, y’know, you want to change directions quickly. 

The demo only featured one ship, and we aren’t too sure if there would be more available at release. However, the one ship did give us an opportunity to explore Chorus’ upgrade and equipment system. 

In total, there are three types of weapons that the ship is equipped with, there’s a gatling gun, missiles and short burst lasers. Depending on the kind of enemy you are firing at, some weapons may be more effective than others. Regardless, they can all be upgraded to different variants that have greater perks, though increased power consumption leads to faster exhaustion.

There are modifications that can be done to the ship to improve that, along with a number of other stats. Plenty to mess around with that’ll lead to some interesting ship builds.

Additionally, the ship also has two abilities. One that scans the area to find hidden enemies, while the other acts as a short range teleportation that lets you get behind chasing enemies. We found ourselves using the teleportations quite a lot as you can imagine as you’ll find yourself in plenty of dogfight chases. 

Now, for those Ace pilots out there wondering if Chorus is going to offer any kind of real challenge, while the demo did have a bit, it certainly didn’t scream being hard at all. Granted, we were locked into medium difficulty. So I can’t really say much on that matter outside of that.

So far, so good, Chorus looks to bring back the glory days of Colony Wars, TIE Fighter (albeit in a more arcade-y version), and dogfights all in a pretty neat package. Based on the footage, there’s not going to be a lack of explosions, and other adrenaline-pumping dogfights the genre is known for. Thankfully, Fishlabs has managed to make the game feel alive; I mean, as alive as you can be in space.

We still have questions regarding different ships, how immersive can the story be, and the like, but it looks like we’ll have to wait until Chorus flies out this December 3, 2021 for the PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series S|X, Epic, Stadia, Luna and Steam for PC.