Chaser

A rare moment, where you aren't shooting guards

You’ve been here before. The sirens wail deafeningly and in between you make out a woman’s voice, warning that the space station is about to blow into oblivion. Outside you see the earth rolling past the windows with a speed that’s way too fast – no doubt it’s time to find the exit. But just like the other times you’ve escaped a doomed space station there are guards that have to be eliminated.

You briefly wonder if they’re not supposed to be saving themselves but dismiss the thought as a guard, clad in red, shoves his gun up your nose. You quickly dodge and blow his brains out. You continue this way on your path through the space station, and luckily all doors leading away from the escape pods are locked, making it impossible for you to take a wrong turn.

As you reach the launch pad a couple of escape pods fly away in front of you, leaving you wondering if there’ll be one for you as well. Luckily a single one remains and you can leave the crashing space station and get safely back to earth. Phew…

Shooter Deja-vu

That one's going to be hard to wash off

Welcome to Chaser, another traditional shooter trying to convince you that it actually has a serious story, and it almost succeed in this. You play the part of Chaser, who wakes up in a space station realizing he has lost his memory. He’s not given much time to find out where he is, however, he has to eliminate enemies from the exact moment he opens his eyes.

Even though your main concern in the early stages of the game is to blast away in all directions, you receive short flash backs all the time that slowly unveil the background of the events taking place. These flash backs occur suddenly while you play and the first couple of times they are bound to startle you nicely. It all builds up an exciting story.

Unfortunately this quickly gets confusing, since several characters are introduced entering and leaving the story before you even realize who they are. This tends to make you ignore the storyline and just settle with the endless slaughter of opponents.

Doesn’t Doom III get any better?

One pissed off japanese guy

Chaser uses Cauldron’s own graphics engine: CloakNT. If you look at its capabilities, you’ll see that it can handle most of the effects that will be present in the upcoming Doom III. Owners of high end graphics cards, supporting DirectX 9, will have the pleasure of experiencing some of the effects we will see in the future. Surfaces in particular are drawn using the latest shading technology, creating some of the best looking characters we have seen in a game.

The outdoor levels in the game are the most impressive, and the majority have a very high degree of detail. Furthermore they are gigantic in size. To contrast however, the indoor levels are mind-numbingly boring, most of all looking like something straight out of Quake II. Never before have we seen such a massive difference between the levels in a single game. It seems as though the developers have had a level designer with great talent design the outdoor levels, and then had an intern do the rest.

This is how Chaser is supposed to be played

This time it isn't rain that interrupts Wimbledon

Despite the large levels, Chaser is a very straight forward game. Therefore the most important elements in the game become the weapons you use, since you basically only have to focus on shooting. This is where the game shines; the weapons are awesome, and you get plenty of ammo to waste so you can go nuts without worrying about running out of bullets.

The weapon sound effects will please your ears, in fact one of Chaser’s bright spots is the way sound effects and music become an integral part of each other. The music follows the game play like in many other games, but in Chaser the music changes character depending on the environment you’re currently situated in.

Chaser should be played with the trigger constantly squeezed and the volume turned up so loud that the neighbours start complaining. This is how you get the most out of the game since you don’t have to worry about the limited AI. You constantly experience things that have been repeated ad infinitum in other shooters. Unfortunately nothing new is added to the game play which could have separated Chaser from the masses.

You will literally be captured by the game

You should skip Chaser, if you can't handle blood

You’ve been here before. The planet with its red desert sand was previously one of the places where you had to liberate innocent people. How come there is always some multinational company thinking they can get away with suppressing the inhabitants of Mars? Fortunately you’re once again there to clean up with your M4 so justice can be served in your own gory way…

Chaser has many little bugs, which I can forgive since I know the developers aren’t among the big shots. Unfortunately the game commits some serious sins as well. Some times you’ll end up in places from where you cannot get out, even in places where it should be impossible to be trapped. If only the developers had realized that gamers will check every corner to find power-ups. If this happens there’s only one way out: reloading a saved game.

Forgive Chaser for it has sinned…

Notice the reflection in the mask

Some times you’ll not get a certain scripted event activated because you’ve found a short cut in the level. If this happens, it’s like stepping into a wax museum, where everybody stands motionless. The only way to get the game reactivated is to find the path you were supposed to have taken and then move on with the mission.

The gravest bug in Chaser is the fact that enemies spawn too late. You’ll often be looking at a roof that’s empty, take a step forward and suddenly somebody shoots at you, somehow appearing from nothing at all. Perhaps the developers wanted to economize with the resources, which could be the explanation for when bodies sometimes disappear before they hit the ground after you’ve shot them.

All this affects the overall experience of Chaser. The credits list a lot of game testers, but whether they have just partied constantly or if they have just not been taken seriously, is something we can only guess about. The bottom line is that these errors shouldn’t have been in the final version of the game.

Oh yeah… There’s also multi player

Don't worry, the sniper rifle is cool

Chaser has moments where everything just flows and delivers classic hit-and-run action. It has cool weapons and you get to shoot more enemies than Sylvester Stallone did in Rambo III. Unfortunately the uninspiring levels and the bugs all serve to give a substandard impression.

The game also has multi player sporting some deathmatch scenarios. But this is not interesting for more than a few hours and there are plenty of games with far superior multi player action out there. Some will say that the game has to have multi player, but I think the developers might as well have cut that part. On a good day the number of servers running Chaser will be around five, and then it doesn’t really matter at all, does it?

Is this the best you can do?

Did you hear something?

We are left with a feeling that Chaser could have been a great game. The fact is that the game has a graphics engine with potential that is rarely fully used and a level design that sometimes impresses you, but usually doesn’t.

You will go from levels that are exciting and fast paced to levels that are some of the most boring we have ever seen. We would have liked if the game had had half a year more to be completed, correcting all the details.

This isn’t the case, so maybe we should just hope for a sequel without all these bugs. In that case I would certainly volunteer again to escape another exploding space station and eliminate green martians…

(Translated by Julian Henlov)