Chaser (computer game)

Chaser is a first person shooter for Windows . It was developed by the Slovak company Cauldron and published in German-speaking countries by the Austrian publisher JoWooD in 2003.

action

The player wakes up in the medicine department of a space station without any memory. As soon as he comes to his senses, he is chased across the station by a task force that suddenly appears, but in the end he manages to escape in an escape pod towards the earth of the future. Little by little, Chaser, the protagonist of the story, gets to know his real identity through conversations with other people and through slowly recurring scraps of memory. The puzzling search for answers with many twists and turns leads the player through a gloomy, futuristic city in which the Mafia and private security forces are fighting, through various locations in a neo-Soviet Siberia and, in the last third of the game, on the colonized one Planet Mars , on which the large corporation Marscorp leads a dictatorial regime.

Characters

John Chaser , the eponymous hero, suffers from artificially induced amnesia . Plagued by regular vision-like memory fragments, he tries to track down his identity and purpose.
Mike Gomez : Chaser's contact in Montack City. First he helps him to escape from the city controlled by the Mafia and private police.
Shimako is a famous computer expert and hacker in the Montack City underworld who Chaser has to visit in Little Tokyo to have an implanted transmitter removed. She dies a short time later in a hail of bullets from soldiers who storm the facility.
Kabir Ahmed is the head of a network of smugglers stretching from North America to Russia. Since Kabir can organize a flight to Mars from a Siberian spaceport , Chaser takes on some dangerous jobs for him that almost cost him his life.
Yevgeniy Fjodorovic Sokolov : a Russian veteran who nurses the badly wounded Chaser to health in his remote hut. In return, he freed his son Pyotr from a gulag .
Samuel Longwood is President of MARSCORP (Martian Security and Economics Committee). He was able to expand his position of power to the point that he rules Mars like a dictator. He later claims that Chaser was working on his behalf.
Valero : He's the head of the mafia in Montack City. However, he dies when he tries to blow up Chaser's Spider, because Chaser had thrown it into Valero's car after it was removed, so that Valero finally blew himself up.

technology

Chaser is completely 3D. Noticeable are the widely used, colored light effects, as well as the frequent use of script events . The engine itself was already a bit out of date when the game was released. Animations , especially death animations , often appear choppy. The musical accompaniment is quite atmospheric.

censorship

In the German version of the game, animated blood effects and some level textures (blood stains) have been removed. Killed enemies disappear immediately after they have fallen over. Not so in the international version.

Reviews

The rating of the game by the trade press was mixed. Nevertheless, Chaser is an insider tip among fans of first-person shooters, which is not least due to the intensely dark atmosphere and the large extent of Chasers compared to many other games of this genre . The multiplayer part of the game also had a loyal fan base for a long time.

Web links

Official website
Chaser at MobyGames (English)

Individual evidence

↑ Meta-evaluation Chaser (Windows). In: Metacritic . CBS Corporation , accessed April 23, 2015 .
↑ Chaser for PC Reviews. In: Metacritic . Retrieved October 11, 2013 .

[1] Meta-evaluation Chaser (Windows). In: Metacritic . CBS Corporation , accessed April 23, 2015 .

[Chas0-2] Chaser for PC Reviews. In: Metacritic . Retrieved October 11, 2013 .