“The future is chaos and chaos is you!” - The Exploited “Chaos is My Life”.
The World United Solidarity (WUS) has made life boring in the year 2050. No sex, no booze, not even candy cigarettes were allowed. The people were tired of being WUS-sies, they had enough of censorship on TV and on the inte...
“The future is chaos and chaos is you!” - The Exploited “Chaos is My Life”.
The World United Solidarity (WUS) has made life boring in the year 2050. No sex, no booze, not even candy cigarettes were allowed. The people were tired of being WUS-sies, they had enough of censorship on TV and on the internet. Enter the Chaos Overlords. Former crimelords and CEOs, these leaders decided to capitalize on the people by creating chaos - selling the populace all the drugs, high-caliber weaponry, and pornography they desired. The cities have become battlegrounds as the Chaos Overlords vie for power as they attempt to destroy each other.
You are a Chaos Overlord. The city lies vulnerable before you, waiting for all the chaos that you can bring. Wage a strategic war of influence on an 8x8 grid that represents city blocks. Hire gangs at the beginning of each turn and seize control of the city, block by bloody block. Research new items for your gangs to equip so they can dominate your enemies’ gangs in combat. It’s time to make some chaos, so go out there and kick some neck!
More than 70 unique gangs, such as the Disgruntled Postal Workers, Renegade Nuns, or the Bankers.
Sow chaos and disorder with more than 50 weapons, performance-enhancing items, and armor types.
A complex strategic layer of gameplay where you can snitch on your opponents, bribe the police, and engage in gang-to-gang battles.
The game isn't compatible with Win7 or Win10 due to a known graphics bug: blank rectangles show instead of images. This makes the game unplayable. I asked GOG for a refund but they only offered exchange.
Notice that the "Compatible with" field doesn't mention Windows 8. This is because there is white rectangle errors when running this game on Windows 8.
Ah, this brings back memories. My good old reliable 486 was used to fire up this game the first time in 1998 and I immediately fell in love with it. The basic gameplay consists of occupying squares in a grid-like map. Each square in the grid has certain structures that are mainly used to obtain money and control over that square. You pay gangs money to work for you and occupy these grids, as well as defend them from the enemy.
The gangs! Whoever came up with these must be bordering on mad genious. You've god the dreaded blood order, you've got smiley-face gangs, scientists, suicidal party goers, professional atheletes with questionable business ethics and so on. Better gangs cost more money to hire, plus they have an upkeep that must be paid each turn. Hire too many gangs too early, and you'll quickly sink into a financial crisis that will be your undoing! You'll research weapons and equipment that will help you complete this goal. Too much chaos and the cops come after you and not enough and you will get run over by rivaling syndicates. You have to carefully balance resources, offense, defense and other variables to be victorious.
The only complaint I have is that sometimes you will get a lot of crappy gangs for many turns which will prevent you from advancing, so there is also a factor of luck involved. Usually this only matters at the beginning of a campaign, though.
Chaos Overlords is a superficially nondescript game, but take the time to master it and you'll be rewarded with a deep, challenging and rewarding turn-based strategy. The game revolves around establishing an economy to hire and outfit an army of gangs, while defending your territories and expanding your boundaries.
Chaos Overlords has an outstanding soundtrack but it's not a visually impressive game by the standards of TBS games of its era (Chaos Overlords was released in 1996, the year of MoOII, CivII and HoMMII). The city setting is abstracted to a grid and combat animations are represented by static dummies. In spite of its dry presentation, Chaos Overlords is surprisingly immersive. The thumbnail gang portraits and descriptions are wonderfully evocative and the game is very good at creating intense border conflicts and shifting boundaries.
GOG's re-release is not the HD overhaul Chaos Overlords fans might have hoped for. The game plays like an emulated 1996 release - a 640x480 screen floating in the middle of your widescreen monitor, with none of the click-intensive GUI quirks ironed out and no windowed support. None of the rough edges matter to me though, I'm just glad to see this underappreciated gem find a permanent home. If you're a fan of TBS and cyberpunk I highly recommend checking it out.
I played for years downloading the game frow abandonware, then i buy it on gog. Surprise! On win 10 is unplayable cause known graphich error...
This is a WONDERFUL game but don't buy before gog fix the graphich problem
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