Honestly this game isn't great but I found myself enjoying the badness, enjoying beating the shit AI, enjoying how bizarre the occasional platforming segments are. They're rare, and when they do happen they feel like you're trying to climb up some level geometry you wouldn't be meant to climb in a normal game lmao. Also, the explosives in this game have no impact whatsoever, it's hard to tell when you or an enemy actually got hit. That would be my biggest problem with the game. Otherwise the gunplay's fine even if basic.
The plot is apparently a copy of Total Recall. I haven't seen that movie, all I know is that there's a girl with 3 boobs, and there's nothing like that in this game. So all I'll say is the plot wasn't really that interesting. Really funny that Chaser's Protagonist is named John Chaser though. Soundtrack is surprisingly good.
Did you know the devs of this went on to make some of the Cabela's big hunt games?

Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2017/03/14/chaser-2003-pc-review/

Chaser might be one of the most forgettable First Person Shooters in the sea of First Person Shooters, and it’s pretty easy to see why. The story, world, and art style are pretty much all things we’ve seen done before a lot better in both in video games and other forms of media. And that’s before we even get to the generic gameplay.

Developed by Cauldron and published by JoWood Productions, Chaser was released on August 30th, 2003 only for PC, and considering how broken this game ended up being in areas, I can’t imagine how more broken the game would have been if it had been ported to anything else, so be thankful that it came out in the working state that it did.

The game opens in the year 2044, on the H.M.S. Majestic, a space station orbiting Earth. The generically titled main character John Chaser wakes up in the medical bay, groggy and without the faintest clue who he is, conveniently suffering from amnesia. Just as he is waking up, the space station gets boarded by a group of heavily armed and armored men who are looking to kill Chaser.

Luckily, Chaser manages to escape the space station just before it explodes and crash lands on Earth. If the story couldn’t get any more unoriginal, Chaser just takes the plot points wholesale from 1990’s Total Recall, just without any of the quality. Also, what kind of a name is Chaser anyway?

Every single voice actor sounds bored out of their minds or they just took Ambien because they were brought in 30 seconds before they were about to record, got a glimpse of the script, and that was the only way they could tolerate their way through it. Most of the voice acting sounds like the actors were reading the lines out to themselves for the first time and didn’t realize the weren’t going to get a second take. Some of the dialogue doesn’t even match up to the subtitles. Its like the people who were doing the acting and the people doing the subtitles got two completely different scripts.

Graphically, the game is underwhelming. Its average at best and inconsistent at worst. The game uses an engine developed by the company’s in studio engine, the CloakNT engine. The company was hoping that it competes with the likes of the Unreal engine and ID’s IDTech, but its pretty easy to see that it couldn’t compete and had no chance.

The engine tries to have realistic water for the time, you shoot the water and the water ripples. At one point during the game, the water was placed so poorly that if you shoot it the right way (or wrong way depending on how you look at it), the rippling effect slipped out of the surrounding ground geometry.

A section of the game involves you using a sniper rifle to shoot across an open area as a way of showing what the engine is capable of. Which is immediately destroyed by the fact that if you move your character, giant parts of the level will disappear into a what appears to be a black void.

Character models are blocky and are animated weirdly (seriously, look at the characters eyebrows during cutscenes). Half the time you shoot at windows, shards will stay floating in place. The only compliment I can give Chaser is that some of the early levels on Mars look OK, which is not saying much considering the rest of the game.

Levels are incredibly unintuitive. Trying to find out where your objectives are is incredibly tedious, and are often hidden in locations that you would only find after looking in every other location trying to find where to go or by accident.

The controls have a floatyness to them. Hitboxes for enemies are a bit wonky, and are especially bad when using the sniper rifle. Its a mix of the people that you’re shooting at being just small enough in your scope and the rifle being inaccurate enough that you’re bound to miss who your aiming at half of the time. Which is the second blow to the section focused around using the sniper rifle.

The second unforgivably bad section of Chaser is the underwater section. Just like the rest of water levels in video games, the level starts hurting immediately. If the games floaty controls weren’t bad enough on land, they’re even worse here. The underwater section takes places in a ship graveyard in which you have go through the interiors of several ships. The floaty controls and small areas do not mix.

I think the developers also knew this level was terrible, because they put in lights to help guide you through the level. Even then, you’ve still bound to get lost anyway, due to the levels being overly unintuitive. This entire level could have been another cutscene, I’d rather have 5 minutes of mildly annoying voice acting rather than 45 minutes of frustrating level design and awful controls.

It also doesn’t help that the level geometry has problems throughout the game. You’ll end up getting stuck on geometry with no way to get unstuck, so you’ll have to abuse the quickload button. So you’d better save often. Using ladders is a pain in the ass to use. You try and jump off of them to the area you climbed to only to not make it end up hitting the ground.

Which brings us to the worst part of the game. The game doesn’t show you if you take any injuries when falling, so it took multiple deaths to realize it was the fall damage getting me killed. Doors take a second to open. And it doesn’t help that a lot of doors make the same sound when both locked and unlocked if the make a sound, if the make a sound at all, which also contributed to a few deaths before I caught on to what was going on.

The AI is also pretty bad. Which is compounded by the fact that there is no real pathfinding. Enemies will run into objects and friendly AI will try to follow you by going in a straight line instead of about the level, which results in them constantly running into the wall.

For no reason, your weapons disappear between levels, only for you to get an almost, if not completely, different arsenal. And this isn’t your character going into a completely different location or situation either. This happens when you move to a new area of the same place you were just before, like it assumed what weapons the player would have. Why not have a location early on for the player to get those weapons early on in the level.

Also, There was even a glitch that had a puddle of blood land ON the water. Not in it, ON it, like it was a solid object. I don’t know if that’s just how the engine works or someone did that on purpose.

The biggest problem with the game is that it COULD have been good. There are several moments throughout the game that show the developers were at least trying. After you escape the space station at the beginning of the game, it gets blown up and you see the aftermath, with parts of it crashing onto Earth. You see parts of the destroyed space station hitting buildings in the city you landed in. It would have been a good moment if it weren’t for the fact that gang members attack you for being in their territory instead of trying not to be killed by falling debris. And the space station being destroying a major city never gets brought up again.

In the end, Chaser really isn’t worth playing. There have been so many better games in the FPS genre before and since. If you want to play anything that has Mars in it, play any of the Red Faction games, they’re ALL better (And I’m hesitant to say this, but yes, even Armageddon. Even the “Gangstas In Space” segment from Saints Row The Third is significantly better). If you want to experience the plot of Chaser, but much better, just watch the 1990 Total Recall film instead.