Posted on: November 23, 2010
zebber
Games: 337 Reviews: 4
A game I could have passed on...
First off, I'm going to make it clear this is about the game's single player; apparently some people love its multiplayer, and if you want to hear about that you won't here. Moving along. I recently picked Chaser off of Steam a few weeks ago. It's clearly a budget shooter, and I thought it'd be a nice cheap fix for someone looking for a new game to play. And I'd heard it was a long game, all the better, right? Not....exactly. The game is extremely bland. There are bad guys with guns: some wear fancy red armor, others black trenchcoats or suits, some gang members, some Russians, but they're all the same enemy. Every single one will behave the same. And what is this "behavior"? The game commits a cardinal sin of blatantly spawning enemies immediately around corners, or in that room you just cleared, or basically anywhere you are. Don't be surprised when you see enemies frequently pop into existence hugging a corner; it's the game's style to "surprise" you in such a fashion. What about the mechanics? Well, there's nothing too special here; again, the common theme is blaaaand. You run and shoot, nothing special but nothing to complain about...except that the game is very bad about giving you feedback. You'll barely be aware that you're being shot at, other than the ridiculous speed with which health and armor erode. There is very little indication you're under attack, and the sounds associated with firefights are somewhere between muted/lackluster and nonexistent. Gameplay frequently consists of hunting for enemies that are persistently peppering you with fire from rooftops, hills, balconies, and rooms you just walked through. If you aren't a fan of regenerating health mechanisms, rejoice! For you won't find any of that here. However, this game leans towards being a good example of why developers have moved towards such mechanics, because as I said before, your health/armor wear away quickly in the smallest encounters, enemies are almost always present due to the game's dedication to using you as a bad-guy respawn point, and the game itself lets you get shot at without raising much of a fuss. I certainly didn't want regenerating health, but this game swerves too far into save/reload territory for my tastes. If you've read this far, allow me to do you one favor: there's a gameplay mechanic that is not touched on in the in-game tutorial, and it is incredibly useful. You can slow down time! Of course, you slow down a ton, too, so its usefulness is mixed, but it will help you deal with those hairier moments more easily. Search your control configuration to find it. Finally, there is the setting and story. They are, regrettably, bland. There's some vaguely interesting stuff about some much-flashed-back-to attack on your person, but it's all drowned out in how unforgivingly the game drags you through the smallest minutia of your journey. Most levels are less about moving anything forward, and more about just continuing whatever leg of the journey you have to make, only now with slightly different surroundings. One of the lower points of the game is exactly this, when you've just helped some guys navigate some enemy check points, and then you make a rather boring "thrilling" escape via jetpack into water, at which point you are forced into some kind of half-assed submarine simulation fighting large numbers of drones while navigating a maze-of-a-shipwreck where everything is tinted the same color. Apparently this was your plan, and rather than just letting us join back up with our allies, or go through some more interesting escape, you trudge through this. Or you go through the fifth chunk of Russian mountains. Or another industrial wreck of a city. Ad infinitum. In short, yes, the game is long, and yes, it is a shooter. But it makes neither of those concepts a joy to behold. Or even that enjoyable. There are far, far better games on GOG that aren't this awful game.
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