Posted on: August 14, 2025
ScrungoChungo
Verified ownerGames: Reviews: 8
Too Flawed to be a Classic
I want to preface by saying I am purely criticizing the game itself and not the remaster. The remaster's quality is quite good and I have no complaints with it. Sadly the game itself is really lacking and was a big let down for me. It's clearly heavily inspired by Doom but didn't take a lot of the most important lessons away from that game. Notably this game has a very awkward combat loop with enemies that are real damage sponges and weapons with very slow fire rates. Similar to Doom, damage received from enemies is semi-random, but so is damage the player does leading to inconsistent encounters that frustrate in many cases. It's not assisted by the fact that most enemies are hiding around corners or ready to spawn in front of your face to get cheap kills constantly. This combined with how many weapons are projectile based and get caught on the terrible map geometry leads to an incredibly frustrating experience. The best gun in the game is the starting shotgun purely because it is hitscan and deals full damage at any range as long as one pellet connects. The devs clearly understood this because they try to starve the player of shotgun ammo in all but the early levels of any given episode. Maps are a chokefest and you'll die constantly to getting caught in hallways or trapped in rooms with one way entrances all done in service to pad out a very short game. For $20 this is a lot to ask for such a polarizing experience that rarely brought me any joy to play. To its credit, Chasm has a dismemberment system which was very ahead of its time and is still fun. It would be much better if it were more consistently easy to dismember specific limbs to give the player an edge in combat, but it's fun regardless. TLDR; bad chokey maps, spongey enemies, lame weapons, middling experience. Only for the hardcore retro FPS enthusiast.
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