Chaser characters revealed

We haven't heard much about Chaser since it was first announced in 2001. Apart from a single batch of screenshots which didn't reveal too much about the character of the game, we've been left largely to our own devices. And as such, Chaser has slipped out of focus. Fortunately publisher JoWooD now aims to rectify that as the game - in development at Bratislava-based Cauldron - closes in on its Q2 2003 release date.

Set within the next one hundred years, Chaser gives you control of the eponymous John Chaser, a 32 year old fugitive whose lifelong disregard for law and order has left him somewhat skilled in hand to hand and weapons based combat - a useful trait for the star of a first person shooter! It has, however, also left him at the top of the authorities' most wanted lists - all over the galaxy.

The game begins as John wakes up, dazed and confused, his memory shrouded in amnesia, with no idea how he ended up on an enormous space ship (the HMS Majestic). But before he has a chance to get his head round the situation, a team of heavily-armed shocktroops sent by Marscorp and Earth authorities emerge and start combing the Majestic in search of him. As John frantically endeavours to evade them, he'll gradually start to learn and remember just what the heck he's doing there.

But why is Marscorp, a company set up in 2044 to handle the colonisation of Mars, bothered by a little fellow called Chaser? We'll have to wait and see, but the chances are that Samuel Longwood, Marscorp's founder and president, has something to do with it. He's the sort of chap whose popularity is more down to a cult of personality than a shrewd handling of business affairs, and one feels his involvement in Chaser's plight is rather more nefarious than he'd have people believe.

You can check out a selection of character art, with John, Samuel and one of his shocktroops, in latest screenshot gallery.