An eccentric baron commissions a vast steam-powered computer. It goes berserk, imprisons its maker and starts turning the countryside into monsters, and six hard men who meet one night in a pub decide to go and blow it up. The One summed up the Bitmap Brothers’ 1993 game as “Upstairs Downstairs Rambo”. Its co-designer, Simon Knight, cited H. G. Wells, Charles Babbage and William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s steampunk novel The Difference Engine. Underneath the Victorian dressing was a top-down, eight-way shoot-’em-up in the line of Gauntlet and Commando. It always sent two characters into the mansion, and when there was only one player, the computer played the other one, and played it well.
Fast facts
- Developer: The Bitmap Brothers. Design by Eric Matthews and Simon Knight; programming by Steve Cargill and Mike Montgomery; graphics by Dan Malone; sound by Richard Joseph and Joi.
- Publisher: Renegade.
- Released: Amiga, early 1993, at £25.99; it needed 1Mb. Begun early in 1991 and due in November 1992, it arrived late.
- Players: one or two, always as a pair.
- Later versions: Atari ST, PC, Amiga CD32, Acorn Archimedes, Super Nintendo and Mega Drive; the console versions were called Soldiers of Fortune in the United States.
- Sequel: The Chaos Engine 2 (1996), a competitive split-screen game.
Six mercenaries
You pick two from six: the Navvie, the Thug, the Brigand, the Mercenary, the Gentleman and the Preacher. Each has his own balance of strength and speed and his own special ability. Amiga Format noted that the Gentleman is quick but cannot take much damage, while the Navvie is slow but can survive a lot; the tougher characters get bombs and dynamite, the Gentleman a map and the Preacher a first-aid kit. The Mercenary, The One suggested, was a good all-rounder for a first visit. Between levels, the money you collect buys extra lives, better weapons and higher skills.
The computer partner
The feature reviewers kept coming back to was the second character in a one-player game. The One’s David Upchurch found that it would “seek and shoot monsters, activate nodes, pick up treasure, collect food if it’s weak but leave it for you if you’re weaker”, though it would not find secret rooms for you. Amiga Format was impressed that it would not walk into your line of fire. Simon Knight told PC Gamer this was the point: after Speedball 2, “we were determined to produce a game that was not only exciting to play with another person, but captured as much of that excitement as possible when played solo.”
Two players split the treasure, which made them rivals as well as partners. Amiga Format found that the race for loot could become “a real-life fight as well”. The One thought the game worked better with one player than two, because the shared screen kept pushing the player in front towards its edge, where monsters appeared without warning.
Nodes and worlds
The game has 16 levels in four worlds: a forest around the mansion, the workshops, Fortesque Mansion itself, and the cellars, where the Chaos Engine waits in the basement. On each level the exit stays shut until you have found and shot a set of totem-like “nodes”; some levels have more than one exit, depending on which nodes you activate. Silver keys unblock passages, gold keys reveal stashes of money, and odd details in the scenery, such as a gargoyle facing the wrong way, hide switches. The in-game music, The One noted, changed subtly with where you were and how the game was going.
Reception
Amiga Format’s Andy Nuttall admitted it was “derivative of lots of games such as Commando and Gauntlet; but it’s done so well, and includes so much detail, that all that is forgivable”. Alone, “it’s a great game. Add a second joystick, with a mate attached to the end, and it becomes a classic.” The One was more reserved, calling it “a classy slice of guns-blazing, gritted-teeth action” that was “unlikely to convert anyone who doesn’t already like this sort of thing”.
Other versions
The ST version followed in 1993. For the PC, PC Gamer reported in April 1994 that the Bitmaps were finishing an enhanced version, which it described as “the last PC portover from those halcyon Amiga days”. Spectrum HoloByte published the Super Nintendo and Mega Drive versions in the United States as Soldiers of Fortune; Super Play gave the Super Nintendo cartridge 89%. There was also a CD32 version. In 2013 Abstraction Games released a remastered, widescreen version of the Amiga game for Windows, Mac and Linux.
The Chaos Engine 2
The sequel arrived for the Amiga at the end of 1996. Instead of co-operation it offered split-screen competition against a second player or the computer, collecting items to open each level’s exit while sabotaging the other side with traps and power-ups. CU Amiga reviewed it in January 1997 as “an excellent game” that proved the Amiga still had life in it.
Sources
- The One issue 49, October 1992: work-in-progress feature (“Upstairs Downstairs Rambo”, the baron and the pub, credits, initiated early 1991, release November 1992).
- The One issue 53, February 1993, p. 42: Amiga review by David Upchurch (the computer partner, the Mercenary, node-hunting, the music, two-player drawbacks, “a classy slice of guns-blazing, gritted-teeth action”).
- Amiga Format issue 45, April 1993: Amiga review by Andy Nuttall, £25.99, 1Mb (the six characters and special abilities, 16 levels in four worlds and their names, nodes and keys, the shop, the computer player, “it becomes a classic”).
- CU Amiga, February 1993: Amiga review (the woodland, the mansion grounds, the mansion and the basement where the computer is housed).
- PC Gamer (UK) issue 5, April 1994, p. 16: preview of the PC version by Gary Whitta (Eric Matthews and Simon Knight; Knight’s influences and quote).
- Sega Visions, December 1993 and April 1994: Soldiers of Fortune from Spectrum HoloByte.
- Super Play issue 18, April 1994: Soldiers of Fortune (The Chaos Engine) review; issue 42, April 1996: review index, 89%.
- ST Format issue 48, July 1993: ST review.
- CU Amiga, January 1997: The Chaos Engine 2 review.
- Wikipedia, “The Chaos Engine” (web, secondary): the CD32 and RISC OS versions, the 1996 sequel and the 2013 remaster by Abstraction Games. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chaos_Engine