Posted on: May 9, 2011
Curunauth
Verified ownerGames: 1226 Reviews: 23
Bland, spiked with poor design
Chaser is an acceptable but below-average shooter whose overall blandness does nothing to offset the boredom and frustration caused by generally poor and sometimes frustrating level design, stupid AI, and uninspiring gameplay. VISUALS and AUDIO: Chaser's visuals are somewhat inconsistent - the faces are decent, but the body models are pretty low-polygon, and the environments are rather simple. The guns are lovingly rendered with high polygon counts and detailed textures, making them stand out oddly against the environment and enemies holding them. Some of the levels clearly received a lot more attention than others - the best have a reasonable amount of decorative objects and varied (but simple) structures, while the worst are mostly composed of long strings of identical, near-empty hallways. Even the quality of the textures seems to vary. The audio is acceptable - limited environmental reverb adds a bit of atmosphere, and guns can be identified by sound, which is nice. On the other hand, none of them sound particularly satisfying. The music is a fairly run-of-the-mill techno soundtrack, mostly forgettable with a few enjoyable standout tracks. Unfortunately, many tracks have distracting loud sections and/or sound effects that interfere with combat awareness. CONTROLS and GAMEPLAY: The controls are at least straightforward and responsive. You have a standard set of FPS movement and action controls, along with an "adrenaline mode" that slows down time. Oddly, there is no introduction to the time-slowing superpower beyond a one-paragraph mention in the middle of the manual, and an entry in the keyboard-control mapping options. It feels like an afterthought, and although it the implementation is fine, it wasn't particularly original at the time, and the glut of games employing it has only gotten denser since then. You can crouch and jump, unlike many games, this has no impact on the accuracy or sometimes ridiculous muzzle climb of your guns, and in fact most have *worse* recoil in aimed/zoomed/burst-fire mode. Still, one can adapt and find the most effective way to fire each weapon. Your aim is thrown off when you are hit sufficiently hard, which is a nice touch. Oddly, despite the obvious future setting, all of the guns are modern projectile weapons. The creators clearly enjoyed guns and went to some effort to accurately model and differentiate the weapons, but none of them end up feeling particularly satisfying (and swapping weapons is painfully slow). The game also has an irritating habit of taking them away from you, including several completely weaponless levels where you have no option but to run for the exit. Worse than those are the vehicle levels, though - in one, you pilot a drift-prone submarine that can outrun its own torpedoes, and in another a highly disappointing mini-mech (the easiest and most boring level of the game). Essentially, all of the toys you get to use turn out to be disappointingly bland. STORY/ACTING: The story is composed largely of standard sci-fi fare, but manages to be quite disjointed. You stumble from one plot twist or inevitable betrayal to the next, culminating in a somewhat ridiculous grand reveal and a highly dramatic final scene with no emotional impact whatsoever. The blandness of the game extends to the story, which manages to rob several potentially-awesome moments of any excitement. You are theoretically pursuing one particular enemy for most of the game, but you end up fighting a long string of different factions along the way - that and the total lack of pacing structure make it rather difficult to figure out where you are in the story. The voice acting is a mixture of decent and Mickey-Rooney-school-of-acting-Japanese, but the dumb stereotype acting matches the way those characters are written, so it just ends up unremarkable, like so much else. This also makes the characters tremendously predictable - the only surprise in the plot for me was how long it took one particular character to betray me. DIFFICULTY: At the highest difficulty level, you take damage very quickly, which could have made this an interestingly difficult game if only there were more sections in which enemies effectively pressured you. You are rarely charged by more than two enemies at a time, enemies are mostly as fragile as you are, and headshots are easy in slow-mo. If you remember to use your adrenaline power, most engagements are pretty simple, and if you don't, most assaults on large enemy groups result in taking almost no damage or death followed by quickload. On lower difficulties, the health and armor packs scattered generously around every map and dropped frequently by enemies should make life very simple. The one major asymmetry between you and your enemies is in sniper weapons - although enemy snipers can detect you at quite a distance, see through opaque foliage, and have very good aim, they don't do much damage (except the 4 one-hit-kill snipers in one level). You will probably find the scoped assault rifle far more useful than the sniper though, since the bolt-action rifle is painfully slow and does not kill some enemies with a headshot, while the silenced rifle alerts enemies anyway and has a scope that actually hides all objects beyond a certain (medium) range. The AI is very stupid, and even their scripted actions aren't particularly impressive. Enemies can open doors but very rarely pass through them, do not react at all to grenades (not a huge weakness, since you throw like a 12-year-old cripple), reset to standby mode on quickload, and don't always react to nearby deaths. They generally do not react to being shot so long as you can't see their face, and will fire at chest height when you are behind cover, even if you crouch and pick them off through a knee-high gap. They are only effective fighters when you must round a corner into a group that are facing you, when the game spawns them in a cleared area behind you, or when you must protect an objective against a considerable army in continuous waves that don't give enough time to recharge your adrenaline. Fortunately for that last case, Chaser keeps the last four quicksaves, so a poorly timed save (defense objectives don't indicate their health) won't require a whole-level replay. LEVELS, STRATEGY, and OTHER ELEMENTS: The level list feels like someone was going through action game cliches and checking off boxes. You have weapon-less run-to-the-exit levels, a stealth level, a submarine level, a point defense level where you pilot a light mech, sniping from a tower, a mine, a space station, some curiously clean slums, etc. Unfortunately, many of the gimmick levels are really poorly implemented. The mech level is essentially a ridiculously easy target-shooting minigame, as you have unlimited ammo, a ton of armor, and no more than 4 enemies dropped at a time, most at a range from which they don't open fire. The "stealth" level merely requires that you follow directions and employ trial-and-error to time several runs past stupidly inattentive guards (and find you way in several areas with insufficient or misleading instructions), as you fail the mission upon detection. The submarine level features numerous invisible walls and a trail of colored lights that only appear as you hit previous ones in order, leading to many minutes spent wandering around to find the next one, and almost 20 minutes in a level cleared of enemies as I tried to find the final exit, which is visible only from a small angle nowhere near the last waypoint. The bland scenery helps add to your disorientation, and accidental backtracking is likely, at which point you must figure out in which direction you should follow the trail of already-passed lights. Another level takes place in a sprawling military compound in a blizzard (which features the best visuals in the game - swirling snow in spotlights looks great), which could have been cool except that it is ridiculously hard to find your objectives - after falling through the map twice, I gave up and used a walkthrough to find the darn buildings I needed to go to. That level also features the only switch in the game were red light does not mean locked/inactive. Several other levels have unmarked switches identical to decorative, non-functional ones (in one case, directly next to one), but the worst hidden lock is a board blocking a door visible through a grate off to the side of a combat zone that you pass en route to a different objective (on a map that requires repeated backtracking to complete). On the subject of buggy levels, several make extensive use of ground clutter, which adds variety and really improves their looks, but rapidly becomes irritating because you can be stopped by or stuck on a 2-inch-high brick, and possibly (but rarely) end up embedded in or falling through a floor. The tower-sniping level (wherein you defend a painfully slow truck) has a mixture of unhelpful scripting (the driver initially calls for help when attacked, but at several points fails to tell you about enemies appearing in front of him, and twice misinforms you about the location of his attackers) and strange bugs, the worst of which is a grenade launcher in plain sight that you must not shoot before he fires his first shot. If you kill him immediately, the truck will continue to be hit by explosions from nowhere, and you will probably lose the level. THE VERDICT: There is absolutely nothing special about Chaser, and virtually every part of the game has some element that is sub-par or stupidly frustrating. I did enjoy some parts, and some of the frustrations were mitigated by peeking at a walkthrough, but it doesn't have any above-average elements to counteract the bad parts. It's not horrible, so it's not a 1-star game, but it is solidly down in 2-star territory.
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