Total Chaos

Total Chaos’ remake can be orthodox to a fault, but it’s a polished evolution of a fascinating blend of survival horror and shooter that never lets off the gas.

Total Chaos’ headlines over the years as a public-facing project center on it being a total conversion mod for Doom II. After more than a dozen hours with it, that’s the least interesting aspect of this game. Total Chaos is about one man’s escape from an isolated and desolate coastal mining town run amok by a rotting disease that’s infected both his mind and the very town itself. Its story is vague and mysterious, but reveals itself plainly in metaphor as a fight against cancer, leavi...

Total Chaos is rough, strange, and stubborn in all the right ways.It’s the kind of horror game that lingers because it feels genuinely lived-in, and If you’re willing to meet it on its own terms, it gets under your skin and stays there.

Trigger Happy Interactive made a lot of fans with the hard-hitting sci-fi first-person shooter Turbo Overkill in 2023, but fast-paced sci-fi FPS isn't the only thing the developer has been up to. Total Chaos is a game that was first conceived as a Doom 2 total conversion mod. It has come a long way, becoming a full-blown standalone first-person horror/thriller for Trigger Happy and Apogee Entertainment. The scares are uneven sometimes, and the regular enemy fodder are a little boring, but Total Chaos’s environment and sound design bleeds excellence and it makes for some incredibly chilling mom...

Total Chaos brings enough to the table to be worth trying, despite minor issues that may affect your enjoyment depending on how much they matter to you. For the most part, though, it’s a challenging survival horror experience that’s well-designed and consistently focused on building fear and tension.

When you put all of Total Chaos' myriad of gameplay elements together, a lot of the fear factor quickly disappears, giving way to something more akin to Doom than to survival horror. There's definitely an audience for this game, but it's more of a survival horror-adjacent experience. It has elements of the survival horror genre, but it leans too hard into the Doom formula. This combination creates a fun concept that needs editing to be a cohesive product. $25 is a fair price tag for what Total Chaos offers, but it may make some hesitate if they don't know what they're getting into.

Total Chaos is an exciting survival-horror game that follows a man descending into madness within his own mind. The story and combat are the standouts here, as both are engaging enough to keep the player on the edge of their seats, pushing them further into the depths of the game's world to learn more about the protagonist and take down deadlier foes. Discovering the lore of Fort Oasis, the game's main location, and how its hidden meanings connect to the main character's mental state and sickness shares a strong resemblance to Silent Hill 2, and it's fascinating to uncover. The biggest negativ...

Total Chaos’ audio is the undisputed star of the show. I can’t remember the last horror game I played with such exquisite sound design, from the trickling ambiance of a sewer corridor to the stomping of a massive beast behind its walls, and the screams of enemies seen and unseen are something you never fully get accustomed to. Even the tinny record player, which serves as your save station, plays a disturbing motif intended to be soothing…but is that record warping and bending over time, the farther you get?