Terminator: Future Shock (DOS)

By: The J Man

If you're a constant reader of the site (amazingly, yes, we do have them) then you know it's no particular secret that I'm a fan of the Terminator franchise. You may also know that I am still waiting for the "Future War" movie that, whether it's in planning or not, needs to be made, and needs to be the final film in the franchise. What occurs during this hypothetical film is not really important, except that it would vastly expand on the brief future sequences we saw in Terminator 1 and 2, and would end with John Connor sending Kyle Reece back in time. The entire series would thus come full-circle. At the time of this writing, there has been no such movie. Luckily, Bethesda has endeavored to answer some of the questions left open by the films, and address some of the ideas of what being in the human resistance might be like, with this game.

Future Shock is Bethesda's next attempt to show the post-apocalyptic world of the Terminators, after succeeding mildly with Terminator 2029. As I said at the end of that review, the ideas they were going for were indeed better-realized in this game. Future Shock is a true three-dimensional world with mapped textures and polygonal enemies, a little less than a year before Quake was released. The results are mostly what you would expect - an engine not as refined as Carmack's, with a couple of growing pains not quite worked out. Yet for the time, they were astounding, and captured the idea of being a dogged member of the resistance with far more clarity than any previous game, or many of the comics.

For me, the definitive example of the ashen Terminator future comes during Kyle's dream in the first film. He's running solo, dodging fire between hulks of cars and concrete slabs, loses his partner, but destroys his objective. Yet he doesn't even get a real victory before air units are sweeping in and he's trying to escape in a truck. All of those moments and feelings are captured in this game. Everything is mission-based, everything has an objective, you will dodge gunfire between nuclear ruins, you will drive trucks, and you will have nearly every victory stolen from you by the machines' response. If your imagination was captured by these scenes in the films, or they sound even remotely interesting, then this is the game you have been waiting for. Unfortunately, there are still some gameplay issues that keep it from being everything it could be.

From the very beginning, you can see that presentation is foremost on the mind of the designers. There's a brief cutscene setting up your liberation from a machine death camp, during which a pursuing robot is destroyed and your rescuer is shot. Next screen is a briefing where you are holding your dying comrade and he instructs you where to go next. Then the game loads up and you find yourself in the 3-D world standing beside the corpse of the man, and around the pieces of the robot blown apart in the cutscene. That's how much the story, and putting you right inside that story, means to this game. Every single mission you will undertake has a briefing before it, laying out objectives and backstory in dialogue screens with animated characters "speaking." Every single mission then accurately references that briefing in terms of directions or objectives. If someone tells you to go down the freeway until you pass a warehouse and turn right, you damn well bet you'll be doing just that. If you're ordered to go into a complex and disable a generator, sure enough, you'll find a generator, plant a satchel charge, and run like hell. Many games before have tried to set up this level of interaction with the world and then copped out or given you false directions. But Future Shock comes through in spades.

It's not a pretty future, but Future Shock recreates the look of the films' nightmare futurescape quite well.

It's also one of the earliest first-person-shooters to require you to move your character with the keyboard and look around with the mouse. Previous games of this type would simply put everything on, mostly, the same plane. Later games like Marathon or Rise of the Triad would allow you to look up and down, usually with the Page Up/Page Down keys, but this was cumbersome and rarely needed. Future Shock not only requires you to keep a full 3-D awareness, with constant harassment from high turrets and flying bombers, it stellarly provides you with all the control you need to survive in the world. It took a bit of adjustment at the time, but if you're used to playing a modern FPS then you'll be able to jump right in, and can even configure all the controls to something you're more familiar with. You'll need the precision to stay alive.

The world Bethesda created is eerily beautiful. "Beautiful" might mean something different to you if you're used to modern games, but at the time, the realization of standing on an empty street with cold wind whistling through the tilting, shattered skeletons of buildings was unmatched. Terminator 2029 offers a good example of these previous attempts - they were mostly a lot of barren plains and indistinguishable rubble. Here, you're stepping over twisted rebar and weaving between buildings, you're driving the I-10 to Santa Monica, etc. I was standing, looking out over a field of crumbled buildings and scattered fires, when I turned to notice the Hollywood sign on the hill above me. You'll have ample other opportunities to make recognition of the world that was and remember why you're fighting, and plenty of opportunities to dive behind various kinds of rubble while robot killing machines stalk you. You can even enter nearly any building you come across, as long as it has an unblocked door. These lead to apartment buildings or stores you can raid for useful loot, or just take a moment's rest in.

Your metal foes are indeed plentiful, including everything seen or referenced in the films, plus some inspired by. Everything, of course, wants to kill you. You'll find floating mines that track you, two-legged walkers that chase you over all varieties of terrain, and even giant spider robots that stalk through the streets. Various flavors of the flying machines from the film patrol the skies, making it worth ducking inside a building or under a freeway to avoid their plasma fire or bombing runs. The giant tank from the film also appears, though it shrank a little in size to accomodate the game engine, but it's still plenty nasty. And of course, there are the Terminators. Part of the plot of the game involves the development of improved models of them, so while you start with the naked steel skeletons, they'll soon be sheathed in rubber skin and worse. They are also the toughest of the enemies (except for the massive tank), which is appropriately befitting of the canon. Your early weapons, Uzis and shotguns, are almost ineffective against them. As you start to collect plasma and other weapons that allow you to deal with them properly, they will likewise increase in numbers. Yet they always manage to surprise you. You can kill one with a grenade, but the next one may take the explosion and keep coming. It seems you can never quite nail down exactly how much punishment is needed to reliably kill one, and blowing up a gas station while one of the damn things still walks, unscathed, out of the explosion is awfully cool.

Your weapons range from pre-war automatics firing bullets, to technological marvels like the phased plasma cannon. Each number key has a corresponding "class" of weapon - bullets, lasers, and plasma, and most of these weapons have three different guns to them. You'll start with a pistol-type weapon, then graduate to rifles and cannons. You can cycle through the three flavors by pressing the same key repeatedly. Though each new pickup in that class is really an upgrade of the previous weapon, it is sometimes valuable to stick with a mid-class version to save valuable ammo. You will frequently be short on supplies, and the heavier versions of the guns, while certainly stronger, eat greedily from their pool of ammo. Other "stand-alone" weapons like rocket and grenade launchers have no upgrades, use their own ammo, and are fantastic against tougher opponents. You also have a separate repertoire of thrown weapons like pipe bombs and molotovs, selected by the function keys and thrown by the right mouse button. This allows your grenade-type weapons to always be ready to be thrown at a moment's notice. Not only can these thrown weapons be directed through doorways or aimed near enemies to hit them with shrapnel damage, any hit on a robot with an explosive always produces desirable results.

The night scope is another nice addition inspired by the film. It really works, though without much magnification, but you'll need the patch to activate it.

You also, in the course of the story, will encounter driving and flying levels. These are all individual levels that count toward the total - 17 levels/missions in all - and you will not be able to run along and hop in a Jeep, or stop driving and leave on foot, inside the same level. These vehicle levels often work along with the plot; you have to infiltrate a complex so your first level will be to drive there, or take out some defenses from the air. There will be plenty of action along the way, of course, and having mounted rocket launchers and recharging laser cannons is balanced by the fact that most of SkyNet's nastiest machines will be after you in these sections. They also manage some pretty cool moments, from weaving around while aerial units chase you, to driving on a side road and trading fire with tanks keeping pace on a parallel freeway. The levels are worked in quite nicely, and actually do help support the on-foot missions instead of taking away from them. No one type of mission is more boring or less enjoyable than any of the others.

The driving sections are even faster than the on-foot sectons without getting choppy, and certainly without getting boring.

These sections also work to show off how enormous the levels Bethesda's X-ngine is able to create. You get a sense of almost overwhelming openness in the walking levels, but when you're driving down the freeway for miles, you really get overwhelmed. Part of this is alleviated through paying attention to the briefings and using the compass on your HUD. The other part is managed through artificial blocks that corral you into a defined mission area. The levels are actually quite linear, it's just that they're so large that they don't seem to be. Level boundaries are defined by standard "blocked by debris" tunnels or fallen buildings, when applicable, or by lingering radiation. This is actually a clever approach to the "invisible wall," as the radiation allows the level to seemingly extend beyond your sight, but kill you quickly should you try to stray too far. A geiger counter built into your HUD will give you fair warning of these areas, as well as other spots of radiation that exist within the level, like in blast craters and around slagged buildings.

Sound is used to great effect, primarily in a solid stereo mix that allows you to track the clomping, whirring hydraulics of your robotic stalkers. It's a bit of a downer that all walking machines use the same walking noise, but it is helpful that they'll have a hard time sneaking up on you. The same goes for the quieter, but still completely detectable, flying 'bots. Your guns sound unique and convey a plausible amount of power based on their size. Trashed robots satisfyingly combust into individual polygonal pieces, which scatter around and blow up themselves in nice, discrete, and bassy explosions. If it weren't for the overall lack of variety - classes of machines sound the same and all their weapons sound exactly like yours - then this aspect would be nearly perfect.

Regrettably, there must come some serious criticism. First, you absolutely MUST patch the game before you attempt to play it. Some levels will not complete without it, others allow you to get stuck on geography or killed on inclines. Though you will get a few neat additions, like a nightvision scope on one of the guns, the patch is more for the things you won't see - and don't want to see - while playing the game. Next, the engine handles indoor areas, running from cramped apartment buildings to large machine factories, but despite their relative lack of detail, they all seem to run slower and choppier than outside (probably because of having to draw walls and a ceiling). This can cause some trouble in missions taking place almost entirely indoors, but with the same amount of enemies in much tighter quarters. Also, even in the patched version, the game crashes far too often. It is completely playable, and can be finished, but you should expect crashes along the way and save accordingly. I noticed the game seemed to become more unstable the more you saved and reloaded during a single game session, but no matter what, you don't want to get caught without a recent save when you're staring at the cascading hex code of a page fault.

Yet the biggest problem of the game isn't a technical issue at all; it's a simple design decision that will almost certainly frustrate the holy hell out of anyone trying to enjoy the game. Time travel is obviously a big theme of the Terminator films, and the game attempts to explain the backstory of this as well. As you progress though the game, machines will suddenly appear in front of you in blue flashes of light. It's confusing at first, and the "mystery" is a central part of the plot, but if you've seen the film then you'll quickly recognize the time displacement for what it is. Plotwise, it's neat to have SkyNet react to your incursion and place "reinforcements" accordingly. Gamewise, it's absolute murder.

I understand it's supposed to be unfair; that it's part of the plot that SkyNet is using time to tip the hand in its favor. But as the levels progress, the effect is steadily and increasingly overused. You'll take care of the enemies that are there, see nothing ahead, and then suddenly "BzzZAP!" - rocket turrets have appeared next to you out of thin air. Or, you'll be heading for an open doorway when a Terminator suddenly appears to block your path, firing the instant he materializes. In the last few levels of the game, you literally can't take two steps, or drive more than a couple of feet, before a new enemy appears before you. I mean, I get the point, and if it's unfair the designers want, they surely got it. It's a lot like playing Doom on Nightmare mode, except these enemies appear from anywhere and without reason. It's also not a case of just needing to stay alert - you're bumping into the same enemies you previously gave a wide berth to, like a Terminator with a belt-fed machine gun, who takes away half your life in the first second of point-blank fire. Or, you have full health and armor when a robot with missile pods appears in the same tiny room and fires an entire volley, killing you instantly.

Changing the difficulty level only affects the health and damage-dealing of your enemies, not their numbers. The frequency of these time distortions are built into the levels and triggered when you get close... real close. A simple solution would have been to have them materialize further away, or just put more enemies into the level instead of having twice the number of hidden "time traveling" foes. But, that's not what you get, and you'll have to deal with these heavily-armed phantom bots as they appear.

There are some other, minor complaints, like that the scale of the world would make most downtown multi-story buildings the size of a single small room, but the biggest trouble is ultimately the time-phasing aspect. It takes a game that is fun and engaging, and makes it absurd and frustrating by the end. Even though it fits in - I mean, it wouldn't be Terminator without some form of time travel - it drags the game down with its sheer overuse, and results in a game where you're spending more time saving than actually playing. Terminator or post-apocalyptic fans will probably forgive this, just to see the game through to the end, and it is a fantastic look at the future world of the films. However, it makes it hard to recommend to any average player, because they won't be as driven to power through to the end. Certainly enough good here to warrant a look, but don't be surprised if you don't want to see it through to the finale.

-reviewed 10/9/06 - game copyright 1995 Bethesda Softworks

An impressive rendition of the films' nuclear future. Plot and mission-based levels are used to great effect. Driving and flying levels mix up the action with experiences just as enjoyable as the regular game.

Way, way, way overuses SkyNet's time travel ability to make powerful robots appear right next to you out of thin air. Nearly shitcans all the work put into the world by ruining the fun of the game.

	8
	7
	7
	5
	67%

Future Shock on MobyGames