The Lost Art of the Box Art (no.3)

And here we go again with this serial, celebrating games with awesome box art.
For today, let's head into the vault and dust off a classic: The Chaos Engine!
I've talked about this game before. Some of you may remember it from the glory days of the 16-bit era with it appearing on the Amiga, SNES and Megadrive and some of you may have encountered it through the recent re-release on Steam.
Whilst this games merits may be questionable (the tough difficulty being one), it takes one look at the box art to see that this game has, to the newcomer, some potential:

Original image located here. Accessed 21st November 2014

One would think, from this artwork that The Chaos Engine is a character-based game. And they are correct: The whole point of the Chaos Engine is to build a party of two mercenaries from a team of six and shoot stuff.
And as the characters are the driving force of the game, it is therefore no surprise that they take center stage: There is no indication what kind of game this is; there's only the vaguest idea of it's steampunk origins; the connection to the title is only left up to imagination and presence of the legendary Bitmap Brothers is used as a selling point.
And somehow it works! Based on their portraits alone, these characters have plenty of personality. True none of them may speak and each of them only have a slither of a background but it is telling that twenty years on and I still remember the names of each of them - Navvie, Thug, Mercenary, Brigand, Gentleman and Preacher. And that says a lot in these times when games are populated with named characters with their own dialogue and story arcs.

Perhaps there is something to be said for characters with adjectives for names?

One common criticism of the Chaos Engine is that there is a compelling setup behind the game that sadly isn't utilized at all. And despite my championing of this game, I feel compelled to agree. I do indeed feel it a complete waste that these characters offer a lot of personality and none of which is capitalized upon. If anything this game may make for a compelling remake in an age where scripts and fully-voiced dialogue are increasingly commonplace.

Still, the game promised six Hard-Nailed Mercenaries and, in a way, it delivered. So I can't argue with that