A FromSoftware mech game that's been dead since 2010 is suddenly back thanks to unofficial servers: "Just seeing the multiplayer hanger again after 15 years was a really emotional thing for me"

Chromehounds is back, baby! What's Chromehounds, I hear you ask? Well, it's a multiplayer mecha game developed by FromSoftware that isn't Armored Core, and it ran for four years on the Xbox 360.

Chromehounds was quite ahead of its time – essentially a live-service game but from 2006, years before they became as popular as they are today. There's also an offline story mode that, in typical FromSoftware fashion, requires you to complete it six times before you get the full picture.

Three countries on the brink of war are battling it out in Hounds, large, destructive mechs that can be customized by their pilots – that's you. It's very Armored Core. In the online multiplayer, there's an ongoing war raging after the events of the campaign, and you have to choose a country to swear allegiance to before duking it out with the others.

Territory is won or lost based on how many matches you can win in a specific area, and after two months or when one country has conquered the entire map, the war ends and begins anew. Sega took down its servers in 2010, but a fan-revival has been in the works for the past couple of years, and now you can play private matches by following some very convoluted steps to get them working on your PC. Join the Discord to learn more.

"After 15 years since Sega killed the servers, Chromehounds lives," reads a triumphant tweet from one of the moderators.

"Xenia (the leading Xbox 360 simulator) currently has an experimental branch for simulating Xbox Live matchmaking," reads a statement in the group's Discord."If the process for forcing free battles can be determined, we can potentially play free battles for the first time in 12 years."

Moderators say you shouldn't "come with the expectation of it being plug and play atm," but this is more progress than there's been in 15 years, so fans of old mecha games should rejoice.

One tester who has over 600 hours in the original game tells me that "just seeing the multiplayer hanger again after 15 years was a really emotional thing for me."

Another community member who's working on the revived framework said: "Sega and FromSoftware abandoned this title and it was one of the best video games ever released for the 360. There are no other games that capture the same magic and simplicity that Chromehounds has. It was a simple game and although there were DLC parts, buying the DLCS didn't mean buying the meta ... MechWarrior does not compare, nor do any of the Armored Core games, Chromehounds is in a league of its own and it's a shame that FromSoftware never made a sequel or a port."

Currently, people in the Discord are sharing their screens and playing around, testing private matches together and noticing parts that look like they're also in Armored Core 4. FromSoftware remain the kings of clever asset reuse.

In the meantime, here are the best sci-fi games to play today.