Have you ever wanted to play a 2D game like Contra or Mega Man, but with the ninja rope from Worms Armageddon? Developer Mommy’s Best Games have just what you need.
Make no mistake, there’s a lot of action platformer games that place a big emphasis on grapple-based traversal all the way back to Bionic Commando, but ChainStaff has all of those beat. A lot of those games that grant you that sort of mobility, even modern ones, end up feeling pretty limited or stiff. Well, here comes this game to give you freedom, fluidity, and fun (the three Fs) to grapple on nearly anything you want, even enemies, have vast and unique maps to utilize the movement, and come coupled with rock solid shooting for a higher skill ceiling.
ChainStaff has a quaint indie charm to it. It’s old-school for sure, from the core gameplay to many elements of the presentation as we’ll go over, and yet if you were to slot this game into the 16-bit or burgeoning 3D era with a console like the original PlayStation, it would come off far ahead of its time. I lost track of all the classics this game brought to mind throughout my seven-hour initial playthrough, but ChainStaff is still wholly itself regardless of influence.
We’ve all been here before, and yet we haven’t
The story and writing ain’t much to write home about, merely a vehicle by which to drive the gameplay, but it revolves around a future for humans that’s threatened by the Encroachment (no, not that one), an alien invasion of high enough scale and aggression to hang humanity’s collective life in the balance. Sergeant Jesse Varlette and his team are slaughtered by the extraterrestrial force, but something freaky happens to Varlette… one of the bug-like aliens (no, not those kind) attached itself to his head, stimulating his heart and nervous system to keep him alive and lucid.
With this newfound relationship also comes the eponymous ChainStaff, an alien weapon and tool that Varlette effortlessly gains the ability to control. Made of some biological material and sheathed in a bone-like carapace, it can be thrown like a javelin, attached to practically any surface like the universe’s best grappling hook, act as a mobile platform to boost your jumps, and even block projectiles temporarily like wall when it’s embedded into a surface. With that, some supportive human tech, and a similarly alien gun to shoot, you gain super soldier status and are cautiously thrown back out into the field to deal with the Encroachment first-hand.
If you like it weird, we’re just getting started. What really drives ChainStaff’s charm is how it’s presented. The main game menu is interactive, just like DVD menus used to be or classic PC games. It’s a lost art, but small things like this help show the passion and vibe the dev is going for. You move up and down the selections, the camera focuses on it, characters move, the beeps are extra beepy, and the various animations and livery do so much more for the game than a static list would have.
Smithsonian-level menuing happening here
The truly awe-inspiring moment comes when you’re dropped into a level. Each of the game’s 10 maps are handcrafted, something worth noting nowadays because AI has forced us to be skeptical of everything. You can tell though. Think the original Shadow of the Beast, just way better. The backgrounds are drop dead gorgeous, conveying alien landscapes that are close enough to stuff we have on Earth, and yet there’s an incontrovertible beauty to them that violates our known laws of physics and nature. All you want to do is explore to see what views your progress yields, what these distinctive biomes are like on their edges, and what the next one will bring. Cutscenes even have this painted canvas texturing to them that I like a lot.
The stellar art direction and design continue on with enemies and bosses. I didn’t notice a single alien enemy repeated from map to map. Each area has its own set of beasts to contend with in a number of ways, all of them colorful and identifiable, some of them demanding in strategy, few are downright annoying (this ilk of game requires at least one). There are birds that look like worms, worms that look like birds, and all manner of fauna that look like they could be mutated or twisted from animals or insects we know. You will never know what’s coming next; all you know is you’ll have to shoot it.
Can’t say enough about how good this game looks
The action of the game is simple yet layered. The nuance and player expression the ChainStaff enables you to experiment with is next level. You have a gun, it shoots, but you can also unlock a set of upgrades for it and ways to add to your arsenal. Along your mission, you’ll find injured soldiers from your unit, some more out of the way than others. You can rescue them by strapping a rocket to their back, sending them back to… somewhere, or you can eat their heart or suck their brain. Rescuing gives tech points which you can use to buy and upgrade sub-weapons like a concussion grenade, a high-powered straight shooting missile, smaller homing missiles, or little satellites that orbit you and do little damage. You can also get yourself some more shields to take more hits. Eating soldier hearts gives you more max health which in turn also lets you get hit more, and brains are sucked by your alien gun to give it more max power.
My whole playthrough, I focused on more shields because, wow, you get hit a lot before you start mastering the mechanics of the ChainStaff, and the homing missiles to help me score hits even when my aim was erratic or to tip me off to enemies just off-screen. I honestly didn’t even see what brains or hearts did until I tried New Game+ for a bit, which certainly made the game a bit harder for me, but I still came out on top. The options are there; it’s up to you to choose which adds a whole new layer of potential challenge or softens the game’s sharp teeth if you’re getting your ass kicked.
No one knows where the rocket goes, but everyone’s happy when you do, so cool?
The best part is interacting with what you start with. The ChainStaff is so damn fun, and finding all the different ways to use and utilize it is not only entertaining but invaluable as you move further through the game. My favorite was making the staff harden (ayo) while hanging from it to hold me in place, then I could effectively move freely in the air and shoot from different angles, then returning it to soft mode so I can swing through levels with all the fluidity of a whip or rope. I’m telling y’all, if you played a Worms game in the past and loved the ninja rope, you’ll absolutely love playing around with this.
Every single map has multiple paths, at least two. The extra paths aren’t usually reachable until you have a new weapon add-on or ability bestowed by a parasite, giving the game a light metroidvania feel. Backtracking is rarely fun in game like this, but the dev’s inclusion of beacon checkpoints you can spawn on when you start and the core game being as fun as it is means you don’t even feel like you’re wasting time, especially since there’s not much raw value to killing enemies aside from seeing them gib or garnering a burning sense of superiority as a species. This stuff could have weighed down the game; instead, it became an asset that compounded the already rewarding exploration. Plus, these maps are so pretty that you don’t really care about returning anyway. It’s like vacationing at the same place you have before because you had so much fun, only here you have to watch for spitting, stabbing, and exploding aliens.
This jump would have been impossible without throwing the ChainStaff to make a bridge
Speaking of all those things I just mentioned, I have to shout out the bosses. Holy shit, they are cool. They are far from simple “find and shoot the weak point” over and over. You’re asked to engage with them or their environment mechanically, or use a specific ability to edge them closer to death. They’re all large, menacing, and require you to think, be quick, or be dead yourself. One in particular gave me God of War trilogy vibes with how you had to grapple onto its head to bang it into a mountain. Another needs you to use the ChainStaff to pull its innards out and shoot them one by one as a damaging bile pool collects below, requiring you to do some tough platform/grapple management. I can’t remember the last time I fought bosses this consistently cool in an action game, but it’s been a while.
To complement all of this, I must talk about the music. It’s so refreshing to still see some rock and metal soundtracks in games when so much of it is orchestral, symphonic, or electronic nowadays. I grew up with many games and series producing sorcery with antiquated sound chips to make entire progressive rock suites that field goal kicked your skull to Mars, shout out to the GOAT Tim Follin.
I love how the photo that accompanies each map’s briefing looks like an album cover
In that vein, ChainStaff has Deon Van Heerden, the same composer from Broforce and many other games, channeling the hell out of classic heavy metal and other guitar-first melodic rock with live instrumentation. There’s a bevy of tracks on here, running the gamut from slower, bluesy, almost stoner rock to thrashy, traditional heavy metal that would have sat nicely in your father’s tape collection from the ’80s which, for me, is amazing. The main theme has an Iron Maiden-esque gallop to the rhythm, there’s soaring riffs for days, but softer stuff too when the game benefits from it, like complementing a serene star-spotted sky with a more acoustic-driven track to dial in the mood. The final boss track alone is worth playing to the end, as Van Heerden seems possessed by the spirit of Ronnie James Dio, delivering the only vocals on the soundtrack while nailing a fierce power metal modality with his instrumentation. It’s so damn good that I wish there was a sound test or way to hear the soundtrack in-game.
This is a game made by so few people that all their names fit on about two pages of scrolling in the credits; it’s about as indie as it gets. With that in mind, though, I do have some constructive criticism. The camera can be a little finicky, particularly when you rescue (or decimate) an injured soldier. It zooms in on the action, which is fine, but it doesn’t zoom back out to give you a full view until you move away from the area where you found the soldier. This can cause some unexpected (and unseen) run-ins with enemies close by or a stumble off a platform you would have rather not taken. If they can tweak it so the zoom ends with the soldier interaction regardless of your character’s positioning? Awesome.
Lemmy Kilmister didn’t die, he just went to be a pilot in the far future named Choppa Papa
I also found a bit of a glitch or pathing issue with story progression. If you want the best ending and to fight the real final boss, you need to collect five psychic alien fetuses (feti?) near the end of the game. Well, I did that, and after getting the final one, I got a post-mission cutscene that told me I still had to collect them all, and that not doing so might not be the best idea. But I did! As a result, I feel like I missed out on something, but it was ultimately not that damaging to my overall feeling on the game because I was able to still unlock the true ending. If this is indeed a problem, it’s nothing a patch couldn’t fix I’m sure.
Lastly, I would have loved it if the Back/View button on my Xbox controller could have summoned the area map screen. Instead, you have to pause and navigate to that option to pull it up, which isn’t a big deal, but after decades of using whatever the Start button’s partner is to pull up maps, it feels like a missed opportunity. Either that or use the right trigger or left bumper, as they are by default unmapped!
This game rules
ChainStaff is the kind of scrappy indie game you root for unapologetically. It may not have the established pedigree or frothing, rabid audience of Hollow Knight, Slay the Spire, or Hades, and yet it offers many things none of those games do and I’d be willing to wager that much of those games’ audience would find a lot to love here. With that in mind, I hope it’s a nice breakthrough for Mommy’s Best Games whose chief developer Nathan Fouts has developed a number of games prior including Serious Sam Double D XXL which you can see a lot of the DNA from in ChainStaff. I genuinely hope the best for them and this project because it deserves success and to be played by people like me who grew up with cool action side-scroller games, metal music, and other weird-ass stuff that informs their eclectic tastes to this day.
ChainStaff rips, no doubt. It has supreme action, nice difficulty, and the only thing more beautiful than its movement is its resplendent landscapes. It ain’t perfect, but it’s perfect for me at this moment, and I hope you try it and find something to love with it as well.
Have you ever wanted to play a 2D game like Contra or Mega Man, but with the ninja rope from Worms Armageddon? Developer Mommy’s Best Games have just want you need.
Have you ever wanted to play a 2D game like Contra or Mega Man, but with the ninja rope from Worms Armageddon? Developer Mommy’s Best Games have just what you need.
Make no mistake, there’s a lot of action platformer games that place a big emphasis on grapple-based traversal all the way back to Bionic Commando, but ChainStaff has all of those beat. A lot of those games that grant you that sort of mobility, even modern ones, end up feeling pretty limited or stiff. Well, here comes this game to give you freedom, fluidity, and fun (the three Fs) to grapple on nearly anything you want, even enemies, have vast and unique maps to utilize the movement, and come coupled with rock solid shooting for a higher skill ceiling.
ChainStaff has a quaint indie charm to it. It’s old-school for sure, from the core gameplay to many elements of the presentation as we’ll go over, and yet if you were to slot this game into the 16-bit or burgeoning 3D era with a console like the original PlayStation, it would come off far ahead of its time. I lost track of all the classics this game brought to mind throughout my seven-hour initial playthrough, but ChainStaff is still wholly itself regardless of influence.
We’ve all been here before, and yet we haven’t
The story and writing ain’t much to write home about, merely a vehicle by which to drive the gameplay, but it revolves around a future for humans that’s threatened by the Encroachment (no, not that one), an alien invasion of high enough scale and aggression to hang humanity’s collective life in the balance. Sergeant Jesse Varlette and his team are slaughtered by the extraterrestrial force, but something freaky happens to Varlette… one of the bug-like aliens (no, not those kind) attached itself to his head, stimulating his heart and nervous system to keep him alive and lucid.
With this newfound relationship also comes the eponymous ChainStaff, an alien weapon and tool that Varlette effortlessly gains the ability to control. Made of some biological material and sheathed in a bone-like carapace, it can be thrown like a javelin, attached to practically any surface like the universe’s best grappling hook, act as a mobile platform to boost your jumps, and even block projectiles temporarily like wall when it’s embedded into a surface. With that, some supportive human tech, and a similarly alien gun to shoot, you gain super soldier status and are cautiously thrown back out into the field to deal with the Encroachment first-hand.
If you like it weird, we’re just getting started. What really drives ChainStaff’s charm is how it’s presented. The main game menu is interactive, just like DVD menus used to be or classic PC games. It’s a lost art, but small things like this help show the passion and vibe the dev is going for. You move up and down the selections, the camera focuses on it, characters move, the beeps are extra beepy, and the various animations and livery do so much more for the game than a static list would have.
Smithsonian-level menuing happening here
The truly awe-inspiring moment comes when you’re dropped into a level. Each of the game’s 10 maps are handcrafted, something worth noting nowadays because AI has forced us to be skeptical of everything. You can tell though. Think the original Shadow of the Beast, just way better. The backgrounds are drop dead gorgeous, conveying alien landscapes that are close enough to stuff we have on Earth, and yet there’s an incontrovertible beauty to them that violates our known laws of physics and nature. All you want to do is explore to see what views your progress yields, what these distinctive biomes are like on their edges, and what the next one will bring. Cutscenes even have this painted canvas texturing to them that I like a lot.
The stellar art direction and design continue on with enemies and bosses. I didn’t notice a single alien enemy repeated from map to map. Each area has its own set of beasts to contend with in a number of ways, all of them colorful and identifiable, some of them demanding in strategy, few are downright annoying (this ilk of game requires at least one). There are birds that look like worms, worms that look like birds, and all manner of fauna that look like they could be mutated or twisted from animals or insects we know. You will never know what’s coming next; all you know is you’ll have to shoot it.
Can’t say enough about how good this game looks
The action of the game is simple yet layered. The nuance and player expression the ChainStaff enables you to experiment with is next level. You have a gun, it shoots, but you can also unlock a set of upgrades for it and ways to add to your arsenal. Along your mission, you’ll find injured soldiers from your unit, some more out of the way than others. You can rescue them by strapping a rocket to their back, sending them back to… somewhere, or you can eat their heart or suck their brain. Rescuing gives tech points which you can use to buy and upgrade sub-weapons like a concussion grenade, a high-powered straight shooting missile, smaller homing missiles, or little satellites that orbit you and do little damage. You can also get yourself some more shields to take more hits. Eating soldier hearts gives you more max health which in turn also lets you get hit more, and brains are sucked by your alien gun to give it more max power.
My whole playthrough, I focused on more shields because, wow, you get hit a lot before you start mastering the mechanics of the ChainStaff, and the homing missiles to help me score hits even when my aim was erratic or to tip me off to enemies just off-screen. I honestly didn’t even see what brains or hearts did until I tried New Game+ for a bit, which certainly made the game a bit harder for me, but I still came out on top. The options are there; it’s up to you to choose which adds a whole new layer of potential challenge or softens the game’s sharp teeth if you’re getting your ass kicked.
No one knows where the rocket goes, but everyone’s happy when you do, so cool?
The best part is interacting with what you start with. The ChainStaff is so damn fun, and finding all the different ways to use and utilize it is not only entertaining but invaluable as you move further through the game. My favorite was making the staff harden (ayo) while hanging from it to hold me in place, then I could effectively move freely in the air and shoot from different angles, then returning it to soft mode so I can swing through levels with all the fluidity of a whip or rope. I’m telling y’all, if you played a Worms game in the past and loved the ninja rope, you’ll absolutely love playing around with this.
Every single map has multiple paths, at least two. The extra paths aren’t usually reachable until you have a new weapon add-on or ability bestowed by a parasite, giving the game a light metroidvania feel. Backtracking is rarely fun in game like this, but the dev’s inclusion of beacon checkpoints you can spawn on when you start and the core game being as fun as it is means you don’t even feel like you’re wasting time, especially since there’s not much raw value to killing enemies aside from seeing them gib or garnering a burning sense of superiority as a species. This stuff could have weighed down the game; instead, it became an asset that compounded the already rewarding exploration. Plus, these maps are so pretty that you don’t really care about returning anyway. It’s like vacationing at the same place you have before because you had so much fun, only here you have to watch for spitting, stabbing, and exploding aliens.
This jump would have been impossible without throwing the ChainStaff to make a bridge
Speaking of all those things I just mentioned, I have to shout out the bosses. Holy shit, they are cool. They are far from simple “find and shoot the weak point” over and over. You’re asked to engage with them or their environment mechanically, or use a specific ability to edge them closer to death. They’re all large, menacing, and require you to think, be quick, or be dead yourself. One in particular gave me God of War trilogy vibes with how you had to grapple onto its head to bang it into a mountain. Another needs you to use the ChainStaff to pull its innards out and shoot them one by one as a damaging bile pool collects below, requiring you to do some tough platform/grapple management. I can’t remember the last time I fought bosses this consistently cool in an action game, but it’s been a while.
To complement all of this, I must talk about the music. It’s so refreshing to still see some rock and metal soundtracks in games when so much of it is orchestral, symphonic, or electronic nowadays. I grew up with many games and series producing sorcery with antiquated sound chips to make entire progressive rock suites that field goal kicked your skull to Mars, shout out to the GOAT Tim Follin.
I love how the photo that accompanies each map’s briefing looks like an album cover
In that vein, ChainStaff has Deon Van Heerden, the same composer from Broforce and many other games, channeling the hell out of classic heavy metal and other guitar-first melodic rock with live instrumentation. There’s a bevy of tracks on here, running the gamut from slower, bluesy, almost stoner rock to thrashy, traditional heavy metal that would have sat nicely in your father’s tape collection from the ’80s which, for me, is amazing. The main theme has an Iron Maiden-esque gallop to the rhythm, there’s soaring riffs for days, but softer stuff too when the game benefits from it, like complementing a serene star-spotted sky with a more acoustic-driven track to dial in the mood. The final boss track alone is worth playing to the end, as Van Heerden seems possessed by the spirit of Ronnie James Dio, delivering the only vocals on the soundtrack while nailing a fierce power metal modality with his instrumentation. It’s so damn good that I wish there was a sound test or way to hear the soundtrack in-game.
This is a game made by so few people that all their names fit on about two pages of scrolling in the credits; it’s about as indie as it gets. With that in mind, though, I do have some constructive criticism. The camera can be a little finicky, particularly when you rescue (or decimate) an injured soldier. It zooms in on the action, which is fine, but it doesn’t zoom back out to give you a full view until you move away from the area where you found the soldier. This can cause some unexpected (and unseen) run-ins with enemies close by or a stumble off a platform you would have rather not taken. If they can tweak it so the zoom ends with the soldier interaction regardless of your character’s positioning? Awesome.
Lemmy Kilmister didn’t die, he just went to be a pilot in the far future named Choppa Papa
I also found a bit of a glitch or pathing issue with story progression. If you want the best ending and to fight the real final boss, you need to collect five psychic alien fetuses (feti?) near the end of the game. Well, I did that, and after getting the final one, I got a post-mission cutscene that told me I still had to collect them all, and that not doing so might not be the best idea. But I did! As a result, I feel like I missed out on something, but it was ultimately not that damaging to my overall feeling on the game because I was able to still unlock the true ending. If this is indeed a problem, it’s nothing a patch couldn’t fix I’m sure.
Lastly, I would have loved it if the Back/View button on my Xbox controller could have summoned the area map screen. Instead, you have to pause and navigate to that option to pull it up, which isn’t a big deal, but after decades of using whatever the Start button’s partner is to pull up maps, it feels like a missed opportunity. Either that or use the right trigger or left bumper, as they are by default unmapped!
This game rules
ChainStaff is the kind of scrappy indie game you root for unapologetically. It may not have the established pedigree or frothing, rabid audience of Hollow Knight, Slay the Spire, or Hades, and yet it offers many things none of those games do and I’d be willing to wager that much of those games’ audience would find a lot to love here. With that in mind, I hope it’s a nice breakthrough for Mommy’s Best Games whose chief developer Nathan Fouts has developed a number of games prior including Serious Sam Double D XXL which you can see a lot of the DNA from in ChainStaff. I genuinely hope the best for them and this project because it deserves success and to be played by people like me who grew up with cool action side-scroller games, metal music, and other weird-ass stuff that informs their eclectic tastes to this day.
ChainStaff rips, no doubt. It has supreme action, nice difficulty, and the only thing more beautiful than its movement is its resplendent landscapes. It ain’t perfect, but it’s perfect for me at this moment, and I hope you try it and find something to love with it as well.
by David Rodriguez
