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I want to love it, but there is still a lot of jank. Some textures would load, others remained blurry no matter how long I waited. Poor performance for the visuals on offer, including some momentary freezing. I'm trying to push through because there's a lot to like here, creative premise, cool aesthetic (if a little derivative of HL2) and good looking assets. Could be fun with more polish and fixed bugs.

I'm recommending this mainly to be supportive, because underwater city builders are rare, or have been, with no entries in the genre between 2001 (Atlantis/Deep Sea Tycoon) and 2022. That's quite a blind spot for the city building genre, and a promising concept. Now we have two, not including the dreadful looking chinese Unity asset flip, Aqua City. Aquatico and Surviving the Abyss are both rich, chocolatey, well made city builders that mostly deliver on the premise, but fall down on world building and realism.

For one thing, you burn coal for power. Underwater. Burning coal, for power, underwater. Using oxygen. Which you must use electrical power to split out of sea water. Do you see the problem? There's a reason only nuclear subs are able to generate oxygen this way. It's immersion breaking not just for people knowledgeable about air independent propulsion and power systems used in undersea applications but anybody who understands that combustion is an oxygen hungry process.

Aquatico commits this same sin by having you burn oil. Burning oil, for power, underwater. To make oxygen, which you need in order to burn oil. It's a little worse in Surviving the Abyss because there's an implication at one point that the air used for breathing needs purification as a consequence of burning coal. Air produced from electrolysis should be elementally pure. If what you meant was CO2 scrubbing, that's what it ought to say instead.

This is potentially an easy fix with some texture adjustment and name changes. Coal becomes uranium, the coal power plant becomes a compact naval reactor like the type used in submarines. This fits into the game's timeline as the Nautilus, the world's first nuclear submarine, hit the waves in 1953, with development beginning in the 1940s. Details like these are why it's a good idea to hire someone who knows about the setting, better yet if he's a published author who has written fiction with this setting before (cough cough)

I appreciate being able to see human silhouettes walking around inside the structures, it makes them feel inhabited. It would have greater effect were the outer windows transparent to at least some degree. You would not necessarily need to model full interiors for the habitats as the viewing angle prevents seeing too deep into their interiors. This way we might catch glimpses of our colonists when they pass windows or walk through connecting tunnels. If you're going to render the people anyway it seems like you may as well go this extra step. Aquatico only renders colonists in those little residential domes, and does not connect the buildings with enclosed corridors. A head scratcher as it would make obvious sense to do so, in an underwater settlement.

The next problem is that there's no visible ballasting. Air is powerfully buoyant, 64 lbs of upward force per cubic foot. None of the buildings are weighed down by anything. The tunnels are supported up off the sea bed, as though gravity is pulling them down and they need to be propped up when the reverse is true: They need to be restrained from floating. Aquatico has the same problem. the buildings sit flat on the sea bed with no indication of the thick ballast compartment below each module into which sand would be deposited via dredge pumps, or pig iron historically, as was used in real life undersea habitats like Tektite or Conshelf 2.

You might remedy this by elevating units a little ways off the sea bed and having ballast modules matching their same footprint attached beneath them, to the already existing "supports". Concrete is already in the game iirc, have it be a ballast material. You might also have new modules sunk into place, lowered on cables or float bags, rather than constructed by drones/subs sans any animation. Sinking them spares you from having to animate their construction, or breaking immersion by having them materialize, Subnautica style.

There are at least not many big, flat windows, but there are many shapes that do not make sense at a canonical depth of nearly five miles. Water pressure does not play games. This can be solved either by redesigning assets (probably off the table as it's time and labor intensive) or changing the depth at which the facility is emplaced. It gets dark with depth pretty quickly in the ocean, after just a few hundred feet. By a thousand feet it's pitch black. You don't need to go five miles underwater to keep a cloning facility secret.

Deep sea mining takes place around three thousand feet at the shallowest. The hard limit human physiology places on saturation diving is around two thousand feet. As an aside, there's also no coral reefs five miles down, nor even five hundred feet. Also no kelp, because it needs sunlight. Certainly not kelp as gigantic as seen in the game, relative to the apparent scale of individual humans (the fish are also apparently gigantic, when you might've instead used scale appropriate animals like whales, dolphins and sharks). If you need more scenery than just empty abyssal desert, then use hydrothermal vents and their rich surrounding ecosystems of tube worms, white vent crabs, etc.

Perhaps you're rolling your eyes, but gamers notice this stuff. It's like sci fi movies with sound in space, or visible lasers, or "gravity plating" as an explanation of why the ships have an "up" and "down" rather than spin gravity. If this seems inconsequential, look at the critical praise The Expanse received for paying at least a little more attention than usual to having realistic physics and real world technologies in their setting. It didn't only improve immersion but made the setting richer and informed some of the plot details.

My life for Rimworld

EDIT: Since the time of this review, the player movement and several other small issues were fixed.

I'm giving this a thumbs up because I wanted Chasm on Steam and now I have it, but there are some really unfortunate and easily fixed problems with this version. The most egregious and noticeable is the movement. It absolutely does not feel remotely like the movement in the original game, I think because all inertia is gone. If you stop pressing forward, even in mid air, you stop dead in your tracks and fall straight down. This feels really weird and wrong to someone who has played a lot of the original.

Another problem is that artistic changes were made with no option to switch them off. For example the grey cloudy skybox has been replaced. Does the new one look better? Yes, it does. But the ♥♥♥♥ looking original skybox was part of the charm. The devs do not seem to understand that the jank and some ugly assets are part of why people still love it. This extends to the lack of distortion when looking up/down. This is perfectly possible to simulate in a modern engine, even if fully 3D. I know because Panzerchasm did it just fine.

I will be keeping this version if only so I can play multiplayer and have it on Steam Deck, but I am not happy with the current state it's in. Please devs, prove the naysayers wrong, show you understand what makes Chasm a charming relic. Don't add new assets without an option in menu to use the old ones instead, fix the movement physics so it feels like the original, add in an option for vertical distortion when looking up/down (as well as a limit to how far up or down we can look) and one last thing, the lighting looks all wrong. Some areas are nearly unrecognizable. This was a complaint many had about the Halo 1 remaster also.

Please revisit the lighting engine or manually correct lighting in the levels, as well as adding options in the menu to use original skyboxes and visual distortion. Please please fix the movement physics, even if nothing else gets addressed. That is all, thank you for reading.

First, we get Alien Isolation, which redeemed the property after Colonial Marines bombed. Then we got Terminator Resistance, the first actual good Terminator game since Future Shock. Now we're getting that new survival horror Terminator, a good Robocop game, Slime Rancher 2. Broken Reality 2, a Killer Klownz from Outer Space asymmetric multiplayer...and a GOOD Starship Troopers game?? Are we spoiled or what? What's next, a Blade Runner game based on Detroit: Become Human mechanics and the original BR film? Then again the 1995 point and click was already superb. Maybe a Judge Dredd fps roguelike based on the Karl Urban film? A Steam port of AvP: Extinction? These days it feels like anything is possible.

Anyway onto the game. I was also disappointed it's not a full fat RTS. It's more like Dawn of War but with the limited baby mode base building of Halo Wars. There is understandably no skirmish mode for the simple reason that it wouldn't work without resource gathering or base building, what's here is only exactly sufficient to support a narrative driven single player campaign. That said, it's very fun and captures the look and spirit of the film perfectly.

If the devs want to put this over the top and satisfy the grumpy holdouts, some additional RTS elements would be appreciated, if only for a multiplayer and SP skirmish mode to be added later. Resource gathering could be as simple as sending platoons to captured mines, which would be a logical source of ores. Maybe wind turbines or solar panels as power sources for turrets and other defenses? If you won't let us construct buildings where we like, at least let us construct new walls, and towers to put turrets on. That's really all this game is missing.

Even as-is, this scratches a very particular itch for long time fans of the film, and the attention to detail identifies this as a labor of love. It has that in common with Terminator: Resistance and Alien: Isolation, putting it in very good company.

Overall a good experience marred by a few missed opportunities. My praise is as follows:

1. Beautiful graphics, especially wildlife models and animations.
2. Intuitive gameplay, I never forgot how to control the game
3. Clever, believable writing. Many games fall down in this area.
4. Good, thematically appropriate conservation message
5. Many welcome video extras, cataloguing feature, bonus songs, etc.

Now, the downsides:
1. You cannot drive the sub. It's just a mission hub/3d menu basically, and it's cramped for that.
2. No habitat. This might make for a cool DLC or sequel feature in partnership with Fabien Cousteau's Proteus project and would alleviate the cramped feeling of using the sub as the between-level hub area
3. Repetitive, simple gameplay loop which is only expanded upon twice in the game (zoom scanning, UV/red lights)
4. Inaccuracies in an otherwise scientifically focused game, like the deep water ADS looking identical to the normal wetsuit and no nitrogen saturation mechanic, which would have been a good opportunity to teach players about dive tables


How to improve for a DLC or sequel:
Let us drive the sub. Let us dock the sub to a habitat where the wet lab and menu items are. Greater mission variety like scanning seafloor to make maps, setting up biorock accretion structures, building artificial reefs from debris, retrieving lost artifacts from shipwrecks, possibly flooded cities in a post sea rise world, etc. If there is deep water diving please use an actual atmospheric diving exoskeleton. Also please include a first person mode.

Currently broken, has been for a while now. Lander is stuck to the pad. I can fire the thrusters and it kinda slides around slowly but can't take off.

Forces you to sign up for Ubisoft's Steam wannabe just to play the game you bought...on Steam...Also wonky controls in VR with no apparent option to rebind, plus some unskippable logo videos at the start.

A bit rough by modern standards but revolutionary for the time, basically invented many conventions of how VR FPS works. Arizona Sunshine walked so that Boneworks could run. I do miss certain niceties like the backpack introduced by Island 359 and as noted, all the physics ♥♥♥♥ from Boneworks and Alyx. Gun reloading is especially weird and simplified compared to Alyx or, say, Pavlov. But that's all just nitpicking the mechanics.

The game itself is entertaining. It has some good moments. The writing is nuclear cringe. None of the jokes land except maybe the one about the cow. Maybe that's intentional characterization? Maybe the protag is just a dad joke kinda guy. He seems self aware about it once when he says he needs to get better jokes, but actually having better jokes would've been preferable.

What saves it all is the emotional tone shifting when he's near the end of the military base and begins to lose hope. He's really relatable all of a sudden, no longer wisecracking five times a second, slowly succumbing to fatalism. I'd have liked him to do more like that. At least speculate about the outbreak, why some zombies have weird growths and so on.

Gameplay is really basic. Wave shooter section, corridors, wave shooter section, scavenging section where you find a key, or bombs, or a lever, or a "winch", then corridors, then wave shooter section. There's some incidental tasks like starting generators in the mine or the sniper rifle bits that break up the monotony but there's not really anything I'd call a puzzle in this game. It's very straightforward linear FPS gameplay with wave shooting segments. If the shooting didn't feel good that would sink it, but it does.

Although the player doesn't have cool physics like Boneworks or Alyx, many objects in the environment do. You can open and close doors, including car doors, while scavenging. It's a bit frustrating you can't pick up obviously useful melee weapons lying about, like crowbars, axes or shovels. This game badly needs melee weapons you can store on your back, ala Killing Floor: Incursion.

Making everything possible to pick up but none of it can be used for anything is an awful tease. I'm also still confused as to why almost none of the homes have toilets or sinks and only two or three of them have a fridge. A couple are just couches. Man cannot live on couches alone! Lots of new stuff added since the first time I played, but it feels like filler. Just a few additional scavenging and wave shooting areas before the finale. Quantity does not equal quality but I do suppose it's better than nothing as the ending was originally unexpectedly abrupt.

All in all, there's not much competition out there for single player VR FPS. Even so this stands on its own merits and is still fun to play in 2021. I will be checking out the DLC, especially now that optimizations have made this title run far smoother on my machine than I remember it.

What a superbly charming, polished game. Short but sweet at 2.6 hours (I collected every invitation) it was time well spent. I have no complaints whatsoever, it was a purely positive, enjoyable experience. I wouldn't have paid $20 for it on account of the short length, but on sale for $10 it's easy to recommend.