Frustrating Fun

Chaser is a game that I borrowed from a friend. We played it at a lan on the multiplayer and I wanted to try out the single player campaign.

Chaser is a first person shooter. You play from inside his body. The storyline of the game is kind of weird in the beginning. They give you nothing to go on. It has a little introductory movie, that you can’t skip through, that doesn’t give you any information about yourself except that some people are trying to kill you. The rest of the storyline is given to you as you beat levels. Basically, all you know is that your memory was wiped. Your memory comes back slowly and you have visions about what happened in the past.

The time period of the game is way in the future. It is somewhere around 2044. We have space travel and many new types of weapons.

The first thing that I did was the tutorial. This tutorial goes over the basic feats that you will need to be able to know how to play the game. The tutorial lost my interest when I was doing it so I only got a little of the ways through.

One of frustrating parts of the game is that you cannot skip the introductory subtitles and movies to the levels. You have to watch. This is especially annoying with the first movie since it is about ten minutes long. Other than the introductory movie, these subtitles do not get in the way too often.

There are two extremely frustrating things in this game. The first is pointless missions. You will do a mission and spend about forty-five minutes on it, only to find out it didn’t do you any good. The missions go like that over and over again. On one occasion, you do about five missions to get this one guy to take you to Mars, and then something bad happens and he dies, so now you are back where you started. This happens way too often and it discourages the player.

The second most frustrating part of the game is how they don’t give you any direction on where to go on a mission. They say, break into that gulag, but they don’t tell you how or where. Usually, the maps are pretty big and you have to run everywhere in it to find how to get in. This adds a lot of extra time to the level. It would be better if they told you how to get in but made it a little bit harder so that there wasn’t any wasted time running around. On almost every level, I have wasted a lot of time just trying to figure out where to go. It makes the game less enjoyable. For example, if they told me to get into the gulag, there would be a little tiny hole in the wall that I would have to crawl through that is extremely hard to find. Every level has this problem multiple times.

The graphics for this game are good at some points and bad at others. The water in this game is extraordinary. When I was doing the tutorial and saw the water, I thought that the graphics were going to be outstanding. However, I was disappointed. When I saw the graphics throughout the game, they were not very good. For example, when the main character gets out of the truck and jumps to the ground, but when he lands, his feet sink into the gravel a couple of inches. Or when a character looks down, his face goes through the jacket. In the actual game-play there are not many glitches. The only thing is when a couple of guys just appear out of nowhere. There are a couple of mistakes in movies too. At one point in the campaign you have to go to Mars. When you are flying in your spaceship up to Mars, there is a line through the middle of Mars that isn’t supposed to be there. It kind of ruins the effect of the movie.

The sound in the game is pretty good. It allows you to get into the gaming experience. Usually the sound is quiet and kind of laid back but every once in a while there will be some fast paced music.

Multiplayer is fun. I was able to play this game at a LAN and it was great. There were a few glitches though. Once I went on top of a building and everything went white. I couldn’t see them but they couldn’t see me.
The weapons in the game are fun. At first you start off small and you gain weapons for your arsenal. You eventually get all of the weapons that are associated with shooters (Pistol, Machine gun, sniper rifle). One time you get arrested and you lose all of your weapons. It is ok though because you get to get a laser sighted machine gun afterward.

Overall I had a fun experience with the game although every level took me longer than it should have. The game is pretty long but that is only because it is so easy to get lost. If you have some extra time and you like first person shooters, consider Chaser. Oh yeah, Chaser is the name of the main character.