TheRetroArcade
Veteran
Posts: 1,975
Joined: Feb 2026
Joined: Feb 2026
Chasm: The Rift is an early European contender to American FPS supremacy.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works.
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.
You are now subscribed
Your newsletter sign-up was successful
Want to add more newsletters?
Every Friday
GamesRadar+
Your weekly update on everything you could ever want to know about the games you already love, games we know you're going to love in the near future, and tales from the communities that surround them.
Every Thursday
GTA 6 O'clock
Our special GTA 6 newsletter, with breaking news, insider info, and rumor analysis from the award-winning GTA 6 O'clock experts.
Every Friday
Knowledge
From the creators of Edge: A weekly videogame industry newsletter with analysis from expert writers, guidance from professionals, and insight into what's on the horizon.
Every Thursday
The Setup
Hardware nerds unite, sign up to our free tech newsletter for a weekly digest of the hottest new tech, the latest gadgets on the test bench, and much more.
Every Wednesday
Switch 2 Spotlight
Sign up to our new Switch 2 newsletter, where we bring you the latest talking points on Nintendo's new console each week, bring you up to date on the news, and recommend what games to play.
Every Saturday
The Watchlist
Subscribe for a weekly digest of the movie and TV news that matters, direct to your inbox. From first-look trailers, interviews, reviews and explainers, we've got you covered.
Once a month
SFX
Get sneak previews, exclusive competitions and details of special events each month!
Weird Weekend is our regular Saturday column where we celebrate PC gaming oddities: peculiar games, strange bits of trivia, forgotten history. Pop back every weekend to find out what Jeremy, Josh and Rick have become obsessed with this time, whether it's the canon height of Thief's Garrett or that time someone in the Vatican pirated Football Manager.
Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl is to Ukraine's games industry what Doom is to first-person shooters, a cultural star so dazzlingly bright that it can easily blind us to what came before. Yet just as Doom was preceded by Wolfenstein 3D and Catacomb 3D, Ukraine's game development history stretches much farther back than Shadow of Chernobyl.
GSC Game World had itself released several successful strategy games before it turned its eyes to the nation's infamous nuclear power plant, while Sherlock Holmes specialist Frogwares was making detective games involving Arthur Conan Doyle's sleuth as far back as 2002. And who could forget the legendarily janky open-world FPS Boiling Point: Road to Hell, a game that itself is surely due for a Weird Weekend.
Yet even these games merely represent the twilight zone of Ukraine's videogame ocean. Delving into the midnight zone brings us to the library of Action Forms. Founded in the same year as GSC (1995), Action Forms' debut title was Chasm: The Rift, an early 3D FPS that was, in some ways, way ahead of its time.
If you looked at a screenshot of Chasm, you might find this hard to believe. At a glance, Chasm looks incredibly similar to Quake. The blocky 3D characters, the single-pixel blood spatters. Even its early levels boast a grungy industrial aesthetic clearly borrowed from id Software.
In fact, for the longest time I believed Chasm was built with the Quake engine, so closely does it replicate its look and feel. But this isn't the case. Chasm's engine is entirely homebrew tech, programmed by Action Forms' founders Yaroslav Kravchenko and Oleg Slyusar, who were students at Kyiv Polytechnic Institute around the time Doom exploded onto the PC gaming scene.
While it looks like Quake, the tech is actually quite different, and much weirder, blending 2.5D geometry with 3D polygonal objects. If you're thinking "Isn't that basically 3D anyway?" you would think so, but no! A true 3D shooter feature...Read more: Full article on www.pcgamer.com
What do you think about this?
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works.
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.
You are now subscribed
Your newsletter sign-up was successful
Want to add more newsletters?
Every Friday
GamesRadar+
Your weekly update on everything you could ever want to know about the games you already love, games we know you're going to love in the near future, and tales from the communities that surround them.
Every Thursday
GTA 6 O'clock
Our special GTA 6 newsletter, with breaking news, insider info, and rumor analysis from the award-winning GTA 6 O'clock experts.
Every Friday
Knowledge
From the creators of Edge: A weekly videogame industry newsletter with analysis from expert writers, guidance from professionals, and insight into what's on the horizon.
Every Thursday
The Setup
Hardware nerds unite, sign up to our free tech newsletter for a weekly digest of the hottest new tech, the latest gadgets on the test bench, and much more.
Every Wednesday
Switch 2 Spotlight
Sign up to our new Switch 2 newsletter, where we bring you the latest talking points on Nintendo's new console each week, bring you up to date on the news, and recommend what games to play.
Every Saturday
The Watchlist
Subscribe for a weekly digest of the movie and TV news that matters, direct to your inbox. From first-look trailers, interviews, reviews and explainers, we've got you covered.
Once a month
SFX
Get sneak previews, exclusive competitions and details of special events each month!
Weird Weekend is our regular Saturday column where we celebrate PC gaming oddities: peculiar games, strange bits of trivia, forgotten history. Pop back every weekend to find out what Jeremy, Josh and Rick have become obsessed with this time, whether it's the canon height of Thief's Garrett or that time someone in the Vatican pirated Football Manager.
Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl is to Ukraine's games industry what Doom is to first-person shooters, a cultural star so dazzlingly bright that it can easily blind us to what came before. Yet just as Doom was preceded by Wolfenstein 3D and Catacomb 3D, Ukraine's game development history stretches much farther back than Shadow of Chernobyl.
GSC Game World had itself released several successful strategy games before it turned its eyes to the nation's infamous nuclear power plant, while Sherlock Holmes specialist Frogwares was making detective games involving Arthur Conan Doyle's sleuth as far back as 2002. And who could forget the legendarily janky open-world FPS Boiling Point: Road to Hell, a game that itself is surely due for a Weird Weekend.
Yet even these games merely represent the twilight zone of Ukraine's videogame ocean. Delving into the midnight zone brings us to the library of Action Forms. Founded in the same year as GSC (1995), Action Forms' debut title was Chasm: The Rift, an early 3D FPS that was, in some ways, way ahead of its time.
If you looked at a screenshot of Chasm, you might find this hard to believe. At a glance, Chasm looks incredibly similar to Quake. The blocky 3D characters, the single-pixel blood spatters. Even its early levels boast a grungy industrial aesthetic clearly borrowed from id Software.
In fact, for the longest time I believed Chasm was built with the Quake engine, so closely does it replicate its look and feel. But this isn't the case. Chasm's engine is entirely homebrew tech, programmed by Action Forms' founders Yaroslav Kravchenko and Oleg Slyusar, who were students at Kyiv Polytechnic Institute around the time Doom exploded onto the PC gaming scene.
While it looks like Quake, the tech is actually quite different, and much weirder, blending 2.5D geometry with 3D polygonal objects. If you're thinking "Isn't that basically 3D anyway?" you would think so, but no! A true 3D shooter feature...Read more: Full article on www.pcgamer.com
What do you think about this?