William Shatner’s TekWar

TekWar doesn’t have much of a legacy attached to it, good or bad.  You’ll most likely find it slumming around the bottom tier of review scores, and otherwise left completely unmentioned.  I, budding game archeologist that I try to be, decided to see if any of this was actually warranted. Some of its purported ideas intrigued me, and negative hype isn’t always correct.

Well, it is this time, baby.

Shatner’s Tekwar was a series of novels and a TV show that I never read or watched, respectively. Apparently, Shats did indeed write the novels, but I’m not as clear about his involvement in the TV show. It seems to me like a late night Sci-Fi Channel original that Shatner dropped an appearance or two in. I know it was cancelled after one season, so that ought to tell you something. I’m also not sure why it became a hot property for a game to be created out of, but here it is. Anyway, I can’t comment on how the game compares to the show or novels, as everything I know about both comes from the game:

In the future, a new drug called “Tek” is rampaging through society. Tek-addicts become violent sociopaths, detached from reality. A group of eight drug kingpins, called TekLords, run the streets. Their henchmen carry out their bosses’ nefarious bidding, and ensure the drug keeps flowing. You play as a renegade TekCop, thawed out from prison to bring down the TekLords and end the deadly TekWar. Are we seeing a TekPattern here? The storyline is pretty standard, and the problem is compounded as the gameplay is TekShit.

In fairness, the game does have a few generally good ideas. The futuristic city is clearly the star of the show. Each boss runs a unique district of town, and you take the subway to decide which one you want to pursue in which order. These areas look distinct, and feature blocks of futuristic buildings; the huge majority of which are open to your exploration.

Civilians mill about the buildings, streets, and plazas. They flee at the sight of a weapon, and alert police officers, who will fire on you if you draw in the middle of a crowd. If you wanted to be an evil TekCop, you could crouch behind panicked innocents and use them as human shields, or slay everyone in sight and let TekGod sort them out. Goons loiter around their hideouts, or stroll casually down the streets, wearing much the same clothes as innocents. Many fire on sight, but some wait a little bit before attacking, resulting in situations where a “civilian” seems to suddenly pull a gun on you. You can’t walk around with your weapon out without bringing heat down upon you, but you must always be prepared for a fight.

It seems like a good setup to a “living” city, but the execution pretty much destroys all hope of amusement. Textures are bland, pixelated, and oversized. Architecture is basic and blocky. The scale of the world apparently was never decided on, as some regular doors tower eight feet above you, and all ammo clips are about waist-high. Outdoor and indoor areas are rendered without pausing, but those indoor areas are barren and rudimentary. A surprising number of room are simple empty boxes, and single, reused tiled textures make up the walls, ceiling, and floors.

If there is decoration or character to the architecture, it is sparse, consisting of square and rectangle shaped objects like fountains or benches. Some areas attempt more detail, like the outside of a hospital or the inside of a museum (with individual exhibits) but the engine stutters as a result. Even these areas are just giant rooms with a few large, unique sprites. Open areas also call attention to tiled reuse of the same texture.

Furthermore, the city has no discernible layout. Usually you’ll see a door sunken into the wall, go inside, and find another basic room. You can sometimes tell what a few areas are supposed to be, like a hospital, bar, or bank, but these still require great leaps of imagination on your part, or a read of the signs posted outside. The textures also make many areas, especially indoors, look “busy” when they really aren’t. There’s the intial high hopes of entering a new room and seeing some new wallpaper, but you’ll quickly realize that there’s very little to do, look at, or hide behind in any of the rooms.

Now granted, this is a stepping stone between games like Wolfenstein, that couldn’t hope to possibly recreate a real city, and games like Duke3D which basically do just that. It even runs on an early edition of the Build engine. It was a fairly good try at realism for the time, and I guarantee the screenshots on the box got a fair amount of people excited about the game. However, this one feels a little too photorealistic for its own good. As you play, you get the sense that the engine can’t support the textures well, or can’t crunch the amount of objects required to make the locations look like more than empty sets.

Your foot speed seems designed for open areas as well, and you run at a Doom-like pace even in what are supposed to be small office lobbies. It ruins any chance you have at either slowing down to take in the scenery, or accurately and nimbly using the environment for protection during gunfights. It’s just another way to call attention to rooms and levels with very little actually in them. Yet even if the entire game looked like the best locations in it, the gameplay ruins the fun by feeling completely incomplete.

The game is heavy on exploration and shooting, and good at neither. You’re given briefings by Shatner before every mission, but don’t expect to rely on these. This might be because every mission simply involves you finding the keycards to crack a TekLord’s lair. However, there are no hints like, “this TekLord works out of the Amalgamated Tetrahedron Building” or clues you can find along the way. You’re left to wander around, enter just about every open building, and shoot the goons until you pop the one with the keycard needed to continue.

All this occurs while the problems laid out in the last paragraph make you hardly excited about exploring the game world at all. You’ll have to shoot plenty of goons along the way, but it’s hard to tell if you’re even connecting. Neither you, nor any enemies, show clear indications that they’ve been hit. Your enemies continue their jerky animation, and a bullet hit at the most seems to throw off their timing or make them freeze for a moment. You on the other hand never display any reaction or force to getting hit by a bullet, and it’s sometimes hard to tell who’s shooting at you at all. Your screen will turn red, your health number will drop, but that’s about it. In these situations I just shot everyone around me until my screen stopped turning red, and moved on.

The AI isn’t very sharp either. Every character has a neutral walking or standing mode, and an activated mode – cops will shoot, goons will chase, civilians will flee. That’s it, and once you’re trading shots with someone, they will simply stand in place and fire back until they die. Some enemies are even transparent holograms, and disperse when shot. Why? Don’t know, because they behave the same and still somehow cause damage to you. That’s right. A hologram shoots real bullets.

Furthermore, the cops scattered throughout the level will turn and shoot you if you pull your gun in their view, for any reason. So, a goon shoots you, you draw on the goon, and now the cop and goon are both shooting at you. Even if you put your gun away, the cops will still dog you for the rest of the level. You can’t show your credentials or otherwise let them know you’re on their side. Apparently they didn’t get that memo. Instead, you often just have to stun them; a mild hassle of switching to a different gun that does less damage while you’re being pounded with real bullets, or simply shoot them, which earns you a poor rating at the end of the mission, and a browbeating from a pixelated video of Shats.

If you manage to stumble through the chunky levels and awkward controls to kill your first TekLord, you get a key from them that allows you to enter “The Matrix.” This is a virtual representation of the city’s computer network, and somehow is related to the distribution of Tek. I presume that as you kill more TekLords and get their access cards, you uncover more of the game’s razor thin plot. However, no detailed documentation on the Matrix exists, like hazards, goals, or what the hell its purpose is in the first place. The manual really only tells you that you have a time limit before you’re automatically pulled out. If you thought you were confused by trying to scour through the regular levels, wait until you get into the completely alien world of the Matrix. This gives you even less reason to want to trudge through the game.

Sadly, I actually want to like Tekwar. It could have been great with some RPG elements, like the ability to talk to civilians for info, or visit the bars to get clues on how to enter the gang’s hideout – I suppose something similar to Deus Ex. Still, the basic game is interesting enough if it just worked. Playing as an undercover cop in a futuristic city, picking bad guys out of crowds of civilians, and engaging in action-movie gunbattles while innocents flee the streets, seems like it would be my bag. Yet the game never reaches this point, making the engine trouble and design problems all the more frustrating. Good ideas, but sunk by terrible, lazy, or rushed execution. Not even worth the trouble.

 

The Good

Large, futuristic city for your mostly nonlinear exploration. Engine can create some attractive, realistic areas when it wants to.

The Bad

Terrible AI and animation. Lazy level design. Boring combat. Poor documentation and briefings leave players too confused, too often.