Chacal 3D

Chacal 3D are three words that in the nineties meant primarily one thing: whether the game would run on the computer you had at home. They released this thing in 1997 on DOS and it was a first-person shooter that tried to make something more out of the source material than just the pixel-art we remember.

It's a modern take on the older Chacal — a game where you move around a map, collect stuff, and shoot everything that moves. There's no more mosaic here, but terrain with a three-dimensional aspect that you could navigate with the camera, though not as smoothly as in Duke or Commander Keeper. The setting is classic — dark blue night, bricks, grass, your guy with a shotgun, and lots of enemies spawning from nowhere who want to have a word with you in bullets.

The controls are simple, as they should be: keyboard movement, mouse or joystick shooting, automatic item collection. The mechanics are definitely not complex — you go forward, you shoot, you collect ammo and health if you need it. The problem is that it's nothing that pulls you back. The shooting has weight, the maps have their own feel, but twelve levels you'll get through in an evening and the urge to keep playing vanishes. It's not a disaster — it's a solid shooter from the time when people were trying to force three-dimensionality into computers that didn't have the horsepower for it.

Chacal 3D will mainly appeal to those looking for a pedantic look at the history of computer games today. It's not a classic that would turn you away, but it's also not something you'd pick over Half-Life or Quake. It generates an almost comic-book look in places — characters are just chunks, and when you die, you fall apart like Lego. That has its charm if you look at it curiously, not with indulgence.

These days you can play it in an emulator if you're curious about how people tried to do this stuff in the nineties on a single-core CPU. It's not a waste of time, but it's not a discovery either. It's average, it served its purpose, and now it remains only as a memory of a time when you couldn't watch a video on YouTube and had to buy the game yourself on floppy disks.