In the 90’s, ID Software was the king of the FPS genre. So much so that for about the first half of the decade, First Person Shooters were called Doom Clones. Quake had a similar effect, but to a lesser extent, and the focus was more on the tech than the gameplay, but there were still a lot of games trying to ape off of it’s success. By 1996 with the release of Quake, FPS games had finally settled own as the genre that we all know and love today.
And one of the Quake clones is an unfortunately forgotten game called Chasm: The Rift.
Chasm: The Rift (AKA “Chasm: The Shadow Zone”, which was the name for the demo, and “The Chasm – Entering the Shadow Zone”, which was it’s announced name before being changed to Chasm: The Rift) is a FPS released in September 30th, 1997, and was released for Windows and MS-DOS. It was developed by Action Forms, who are most famous for “Cryostasis: Sleep of Reason”, which came out in 2008, and their cult classic Carnosaurs franchise.
It was published by GT Interactive as competition to Quake, which came out the year before, as a way of getting back at Activision since GT lost the publishing rights of Quake to them. The release for Chasm: The Rift was poorly timed however since it came out a month after Goldeneye 007 for the Nintendo 64, and was release about 3 months before Quake II, which was released for the Christmas rush, meaning that Chasm never had a chance. The only reason that I even knew about it is that I found a cheap copy of it released by one of those bargain bin labels.
The plot takes place in the not too distant future where scientists have discovered that the normal flow of time has been disrupted, from the past to the future, and time rifts have been forming in the Earth’s atmosphere, leading to different periods of history. Mutants known as Timestrikers (unrelated to Timesplitters franchise despite the name similarity) have been making their way through history to try and eradicate all human life. You play as am unnamed commando who has been volunteered and specifically trained to investigate and stop the attacks of these Timestrikers before all life is wiped out. You start out at a power station to investigate why people aren’t getting any power, and the game goes on from there.
The is basic but is enough to explain what is going on and gives you enough reason as to why you’re doing what you’re doing. At the end of each episode, the game is broken up by a cutscene further explaining the plot as you’re playing. The plot is a nice addition to make it stand out from Quake and helps break up the action, but the cutscenes are essentially fancy profile shots of characters and are there just to justify the next level. No award winning writing here, and no need.
There are only two other characters besides you, and one of which pretty much disappears from the plot immediately after the first cutscene and becomes almost completely forgotten after that. Enough other FPS games had at least some plot at this point, so this is nothing special, but it’s still pretty neat.
Graphically, Chasm wasn’t pushing the limits of the hardware of the time like Quake 1 did or Quake 2 would, since unlike those games, which used the graphical capabilities of OpenGL and 3DFX cars for higher video resolutions and colored lighting, Chasm instead goes for a 2.5D engine like the original Doom did, the main difference being that it looked completely 3D and had mouselook but operated on similar physics to Doom. It was designed this way to be able to run on as many machines as possible, taking advantage of the fact that games like the aforementioned Quake 1 and 2 requiring high end PCs to get a good framerate, letting a lot people be able to play their game over other games without having to upgrade their PCs. So while you couldn’t brag to your friends about how powerful your rig was, you still were having fun.
But what it lacks in graphical prowess, it makes up for having a good art design. Because of the time travel plot, the game jumps from the futuristic sci-fi setting that the game starts with and ends up having places set in ancient Egypt and the middle ages. As a way of making up for the lack of the graphical capabilities of the engine, the levels come with neat little details scattered throughout the levels, such weather effects that include rain and open windows that rocked back and forth in the wind, which you could shoot out and destroy.
The only downside to the levels are that more than a few of them come with sections that have close quarters combat, and if you happen to have one of your larger more powerful weapons out at the time, you can accidentally kill yourself from the splash damage of shooting a nearby wall. Once you get used to the tight nit parts of levels, you can train yourself to use some of the lesser weapons, but it’s annoying the first few times it happens to you.
Chasm’s weapons are mostly standard for a 90’s FPS game. You’ve got the Rifle, which is the default weapon and has infinite ammo, the Double-Barrelled Shotgun, Land Mines, which I never used because the other guns always had plenty of ammo and the levels were just small enough that I could get myself blown up on them if I wasn’t careful with their placement, the Blade Gun, which shoots out deadly spinning blades, the Grenadier, which looks like a grenade launcher but acts like a rocket launcher, the Laser Crossbow, the Chaingun, and the Mega Destroyer, which is this games BFG. And despite the fact that the game has tight corridors, I did manage to use this a few times in the slightly more open areas.
Of course, Chasm comes with the obligatory ’90s FPS power-ups too. Other than the health and armor pickups, there is temporary invisibility, which works pretty well, temporary invulnerability, and the reflector, which bounces some of the enemies attacks off of you and right back at them, and can be fun after some practice.
Unfortunately, the game is on the shorter side, with only about 15 or 16 levels total, and it’s pretty easy to complete this whole game in an afternoon. The only thing preventing it from being shorter is that more often than note, parts of levels turn into mazes that you can get lost in pretty easily, so half of your play though will be trying to find the next button or area. Thankfully, the game comes with a mini-map when you press the TAB button so it lessens the impact, but it’s still an annoyance.
While the enemies might mostly act the same, they all have unique look to them. You have your standard military looking guys in the first section of the game with the weapons that you’d expect them to have, such as lasers and rocks, but the enemy roster soon includes a variety of baddies that depend on the time period that you’re in, such as zombies, giant mutant warthogs, half animal half human mutants, alien warriors, mutant scorpions, and a gremlin-like creature wearing a jester outfit that the creative team like the look of so much that they put it onto the games cover. The game comes with a type of strategy where you can blow limbs off of the enemies, resulting in some of them changing their strategy by running up to and trying to beat you to death because you blew off their arm that was holding their ranged weapon. It adds that extra layer to the gameplay that Quake didn’t have.
At the end of each episode, there is a boss battle, which there is a total of 4. But instead of being bullet sponges like a lot of FPS games from the 90s, you have to use parts of the level to try and kill them. For example, you have to defeat the first boss by trapping it in a room with a giant fan and press a button to suck it into said fan.
Action Forms even released a free 3 level map pack on the website for this game, which has gone down over the years, but exists in both an archived form via the Web Archive, and is packed in with an installer that includes both the base game and these extra levels. These new levels add in even more variety in terms of it’s visuals, featuring snow levels, and has a few new monsters to boot.
The most surprising thing about the game is that it came with a level editor, but sadly I couldn’t find a whole lot of levels or mods for it other than a few ports of E1M1 from Wolfenstein 3D, a few test maps that few people have made, and even a Transformers mod that didn’t make it that far before it was eventually abandoned to be work on as a Quake II mod, which from what I can tell, didn’t make it far into development either. It is possible to make levels with the Doom SLADE editor, but I doubt it’s worth investing time and effort into a game no one remembers, unless you’re impressing the other 4 people who still love playing the game.
On the sound front, it’s pretty solid and everything sounds good. The soundtrack consists of atmospheric music, cribbing off of Quake’s soundtrack. It might not have had the talent of Trent Reznor or even be as memorable, but it’s still a pretty solid soundtrack.
Believe it or not, Chasm even comes with a multiplayer component, but compared to other FPS games coming out at the time, it’s one of the most unmemorable multiplayer experiences out there. It also comes with two cooperative modes where you can play through the game with or without enemies with friends. Considering how close quarters the game got at points during the Single Player, I can’t imagine how it would have been with other people. But it’s still an appreciated feature.
The multiplayer features the standard Deathmatch mode you’d come to expect from a 90s FPS with multiplayer, and even though it does have a few Deathmatch arenas, most of the levels are from the Single Player. And to gain access to most of the level, you have to play it like you would the Single Player. Why it doesn’t have the entire map unlocked from the beginning is baffling. And who would bother with trying to unlock these areas when you’re just going to get killer by the other players anyway, unless there was some mutual agreement to let someone open up the areas. And you’re limited to what weapons the level had to begin with. There is no reason to play Deathmatch unless you’re a sadomasochist who wants to set up a multiplayer game with an old FPS game and have several friends who are also sadomasochist who love obscure FPS games.
Chasm is a solid little game even if it couldn’t compete with it’s contemporaries. Back in the day this would have been difficult to get up and working which was compounded by it’s obscurity meaning that not a lot of people could help you get it up and working, but thankfully developer General Arcade has come along and given the game a remaster which lets you not only play the game on modern systems but at resolutions up to 4K at higher frame rates without having to fiddle with some ini file.
Chasm: The Rift is highly recommended.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2061230/Chasm_The_Rift/
https://www.gog.com/en/game/chasmtherift
https://web.archive.org/web/20041020140543/http://www.action-forms.com/games/chasm/
http://www.mobygames.com/game/chasm-the-rift
http://chasmtherift.wikia.com/wiki/Chasm:_The_Rift_Wiki
Cult Classic Corner - Video Games 