9.1 hours played
Written 19 days ago
[i]Quake for the poor… Daikatana before Daikatana…[/i]
What if Quake had the story of Daikatana and was designed by people who made Corridor 7: Alien Invasion? You would get Chasm: The Rift… For some reason, I heard a lot of good things about this game, including HROT being partly inspired by it and that David Szymanski (the developer of Dusk) himself once made his own source port for this game. From the Steam page, the game looked like Quake but with more diverse style and an actual story, so I was quite intrigued. Nonetheless, in the end it turned out to be… DOS trash…
[b]Story, atmosphere, music and everything that’s not gameplay[/b]. The plot is as simple as it can be: in some near future time rifts started opening around the globe; you are an elite soldier that must save the planet. Yes, the game does have briefing cutscenes – which indeed do look impressive for 1997 – yet they are quite boring and their story value is essentially zero. The music is probably the best part of the game. Just like in Quake, it’s mostly ambient tracks that are meant to immerse you into the world and create the atmosphere. Maybe it could have even worked if all of the “vibe” was not crushed by the quality of gameplay. As for the sounds… they just exist and that’s all…
[b]Gameplay[/b]. Oh, where do I start… Firstly, the game actually uses, what most people call, a 2.5D engine (which is technically a wrong name as the engine is fully 3D but that is a different topic), which means you cannot have a room above a room. This is not a problem, you may say, as both Doom Engine and Build Engine proved you can make amazing levels with this technology. Yes, you can, I will respond, but you need to have an adequate level designer for that – this game did not. All of the levels are narrow corridors and small halls located on a flat surface with minimal elevations. The layouts are atrocious and 80% of exploration is: some switch has opened something somewhere, now go around the entire level and find a new corridor – make sure not to confuse it with the dozen of the same copy-pasted corridors you’ve already visited. There are some sections where the game utilizes height differences but they are even more hilarious – every time you jump you hit your head not only against the ceiling but even against the damn skybox aka level’s height limit! The angled surfaces you see on the screenshots – it’s all smoke and mirrors! All of the collision boxes are vertical parallelepipeds, which makes shooting from behind the corners very irritating, as you never know where the collision box actually ends…
Speaking about shooting… The gunplay is bad – there is almost no impact, the guns sound like toys, and enemies, even despite having pain frames, seem indifferent to your shots. While the weapons do differ visually, they seem to barely differ in damage they deal – many times the good old double barrel felt much more effective than the “more advanced” crossbow and saw blades. Even Mega Destroyer – the local BFG – has super small blast radius and medium damage, so you usually have to make 3-5 shots to get rid of even a medium pack of monsters. While there is a decent number of enemy types, because of the terrible level design, the best tactic against all of them is to peek and shoot from behind the corners – there are no big arenas which will require you to utilize movement and evading skills. The bosses are even worse than in Quake. In the latter they were mostly absent and it is much better than having to kill Chton at the end of every episode. Basically, each battle is a puzzle that you must solve to kill the invicible, so you just run around the area like an idiot dying over and over trying to figure out what you need to do. The game also loves to utilize the cheapest method to increase the difficulty – inavoidable damage. There are sections where you need to run on the damaging floors to get to a switch or a key; there are sections where a switch spawns enemies behind you in a straight narrow corridor. You don’t have enough health to survive that – restart the level; you came to the level with barely any health left – restart the entire game!
Now, you may ask, does Chasm: The Rift have not a single good thing about it? Well, actually… there are some good points. Enemies have gib animations and you can sometimes accidently shoot off their hand or leg (yet if you intentionally try to aim for that it won’t work) which can affect their attack patterns; shooting off the head is an instant death. The levels are visually diverse and, even despite terrible design, you will likely remember most of the maps just because of their looks. The game also tries to build realistic environments in the first few levels, and if it continued to do so I may would even turn a blind eye on the map layouts, yet the levels turn into abstract copy-pasted corridors too quickly.
[b]Conclusion[/b]. Is Chasm: The Rift an absolutely terrible game? Well, it’s not, yet it falls back miles from what was already released by 1997. I’m not only talking about Quake I and Duke Nukem 3D; there was Final Doom which utilized a similar engine yet pushed the maximum out of it. In comparison to them, Chasm: The Rift aged very poorly and feels like a sequel to Corridor 7. Even the few aforementioned good points barely save the game simply because its core – shooting and level design – is broken. At best, I can call Chasm: The Rift a “quirky” DOS trash, yet it still remains trash. There is absolutely no sense in buying and playing this game now except for two reasons: first, you played it on the release and have nostalgic feelings; second, you want to dive deep into the 90s gaming and get an idea what kind of trash you could unknowingly pick up at your local store. If none of these apply to you – skip this remnant of history and find something else. Even if you, for some reason, do not want to play modern boomer shooters, yet already tired of Doom, Duke, Quake, Unreal, etc, there are still many good hidden gems from this era available on Steam – PowerSlave, Marathon, Descent, Turok. Chasm: The Rift is really just a relic of the past that, for some miraculous reason, managed get a remaster…
P.S. Insane Time Traveller was the most boring "hardcore" achievement I ever got in my life! The person who came up with it thinking it would be challenging and fun should be fired from the gaming industry...
