Chaser starts poorly, featuring a few crappy stealth sections and oftentimes clunky gunplay. Chaser reminds me of the on-foot segments of Shogo in a way due to its tactic of forcing you to take on loads of almost identical weak hitscan enemies that nevertheless are capable of dealing significant damage. The main difference being that Shogo had charm, which Chaser lacks. Production values are also all over the place, with most of the focus seemingly being placed on long elaborate cutscenes while the rest of the game suffers from a lack of attention to detail. I was even able to jump off the map in one level. Interestingly the game featured a bullet time mechanic only a few years before F.E.A.R. did the exact same thing. What undermines it here though is that your own weapon also slows down substantially. Nothing sucks more than having to watch your character reload in slow motion. By the end of the game though it does average out to be decent, in spite of all of its pitfalls. If they had a made a game that was half as long but twice as polished they could have even had something close to exceptional on their hands, as when the gunplay works, like it did for the most part in the Soviet levels, it comes close to Return to Castle Wolfenstein in terms of sniping and tactical bliss. Sadly though most of the time it falls apart due to its overstretched ambition and cumbersome mechanics, not least the impotence of the game's explosives which really started to grate on me by the end, or the intricate platforming and navigation puzzles that just served to show off the game's unwieldiness. Still, compared to how weak the game began I am reasonably impressed with how it turned out by the end. It was certainly worth the measly few dollars I paid for it. By far the biggest strike against it is that it still lacks the charm needed to be a flawed gem.
