William Shatner’s TekWar

It’s the early 90s, and William Shatner is tired of being forever associated with Captain Kirk. He’s focused now on being something of a Hollywood renaissance man – writer, director, actor, horse trainer, and now, video game producer. A contemporary interview in the game’s official strategy guide revealed Shatner had a lot of grand plans for multimedia entertainment. There was a “TekWar: New York” sequel already being discussed. He formed a “Shatner Interactive” label with Capstone, with the intent to produce more projects. The fact that all of this died a quiet death should give you an idea of TekWar’s quality. This is a game that kills empires.

TekWar the game is based directly off of Shatner’s series of TekWar novels, TV show, and TV films. In it, you play as series protagonist Jake Cardigan in everything but name – you’re a cop, framed for corruption and later thawed out of cryo-prison by the enigmatic Walter Bascom (Shatner), head of a private security firm. The “Tek” of the name is a digital drug that causes users to hallucinate their fantasies, with irreparable brain damage from extended use. Tek had previously been delivered locally by data disk, but in tonight’s gripping episode, the seven TekLords of Los Angeles have found a way to covertly deliver Tek through the Matrix (the series’ future Internet). Your job is to shut this system down before it infects millions of unwitting users.

To pull this off, you’ll be taking on each of the seven TekLords in a district of the city they control. You select which boss to hit next from the main menu. A central subway acts as a hub, with different “stops” opening up depending on the TekLord selected. You’ll be searching early areas for color-coded keycards, which open up the boss’ lair in a stop on down the line. Defeating the boss gives you a Matrix key. With all seven keys, you can enter cyberspace yourself and shut down the Tek distribution node.

It’s heavy stuff for a 1994 game, with ambition worlds away from blasting monsters in a maze. The futuristic city is clearly meant to be the star of the show. Each level has a different style, including downtown at night, beachfront shops, a filthy slum, and – as it’s a 90’s FPS – a sewer level. Cars and boats drive around town in preset loops. Civilians mill about the buildings, streets, and plazas. Bathroom mirrors function. The aforementioned subway actually works, in that the train car will move around an indoor track and pause at platforms. Cops patrol the streets. Some effort has been given to provide a purpose to each building you can enter, including corporate offices, bars, museums, and hospitals. Many of these buildings have clearly designed lobbies, patient rooms, atriums, and shops.

Even the gunplay has realistic limits. Your weapons are concealed by default. Pressing the Fire key draws a pistol from your coat, causing nearby civilians scream, cower, or flee. Police will draw their own guns and command you to drop yours. If they see you shoot, they’ll spend the rest of the level trying to take you down. There’s even consideration given to using non-lethal weapons versus very lethal ballistic ones – kill civilians and and Bascom’s FMV debriefing will change to an outright browbeating. Civilians can also get caught in the crossfire and you’ll get blamed for that too – even if their death was clearly not your fault.

Your opposition consists of each boss’ minions. Most of these fellows make no attempt to hide their affiliation – they’ll shoot you mercilessly on sight. Though advanced AI was promised here, it doesn’t appear in practice. Goons will freely open fire in full view of police officers, who show no reaction whatsoever. Fire your own weapon in defense and now both police and goons team up to take you down. Perhaps the cops are corrupt and “on the take,” but it’s one of many points where the virtual city starts to break down. Also, forget about enemies taking cover or using tactics – it’s all standing around or patrolling in limited areas. When they spot you, they’ll shoot relentlessly, ignoring all damage, until one of you falls.

In fact, the whole game is a similar combination of big ideas and small execution. It seems clear that the development team ran out of time. Many buildings are blatantly unfinished, with barren rooms, hallways to nowhere, or stairways that dead-end at a second floor that was never built. There also aren’t enough textures to go around. For every unique location (like “Stinky’s” bar, or the hospital), there are countless buildings with repeated, tiled textures and generic, “rough draft” rooms. Textures are so scarce that I sometimes missed doors because they reused a texture that had been a wall in a previous level. Scale also never got a final pass. Civilians must be about seven feet tall, while ammo clips and medkits are as large as barrels. You’d have to use both hands to grab them!

There’s also some apparent struggles with the Build engine. Many textures are misaligned. There are a few sections where you can duck underwater, but you simply move around (and breathe!) as if on land. Ladders were clearly hacked in and climbing them is ridiculously slow. Most decals (like the subway maps) float a few inches in front of the geometry they’re supposed to be stuck on. And many switches are unintentionally hard to hit – see the one hidden behind the boss’ desk in level 2 (hint – crouch in front of it and hammer the “use” key as you stand up).

Ultimately, the biggest annoyance is that the idea of a “living” city is wasted here. The Build engine makes for plenty of opportunities for exploration, but while you can enter every building in an area, there’s nothing to see. Gameplay is a keycard hunt through blocky architecture with scarce decoration. You’ll need red and blue keycards to access a boss’ lair, but you’re never given a clue as to where these reside. I was expecting Shatner’s briefings to make use of the city – something along the lines of “This TekLord works out of the Amalgamated Tetrahedron building, go check it out.” Instead, you’re left to wander around, enter just about every room, and shoot the goons until you pop the one with the keycard needed to continue.

Shooting seems meant to take a backseat to the exploration, but it’s still a frequent feature, and it’s similarly flawed. Enemies have perfect aim from any distance, while the occasional one can shoot through walls or corners. You can only tell you’re hitting someone by a slight jerk in their marionette animation. Bullets leave no marks on walls, show only a difficult-to-see puff on hits, and only affect the occasional explosive barrel or window. With nearly no visual feedback, your weapons feel like popguns and fighting baddies feels unsatisfying. Ammunition for all but the pistol is ridiculously scarce (to encourage more exploration, I suppose), so your meatier weapons go unused. The tradeoff is that you can take an impressive amount of damage yourself, with scattered health kits around to keep you going.

Further, your foot speed seems designed for open areas. You walk at a Doom-like sprint, even in what are supposed to be small office lobbies. This makes turning and going for cover a chore during a battle, and dangerous near windows or ledges. There’s also no vertical autoaim. You will need to stop and manually adjust your view (with Page Up/Page Down) to hit anyone on ledges above you, or try to avoid them entirely. You can engage a mouselook toggle, but the view distorts sickeningly and I wouldn’t advise leaving it on.

The game’s lethal/non-lethal system encourages you to use the default stun pistol. It’s slow, but it has infinite ammo and knocks enemies out safely for the entire level. If a citizen happens into the crossfire, you can stun them without penalty. You also get a yet another different FMV debrief for capturing a TekLord alive. All of this funnels you into using the stunner exclusively, instead of swapping around as I believe the intent was. On the other hand, you can kill anyone – cops, civilians, the entire population of a level – with the only penalty being the “bad” FMV. Your game never ends, you can always try any level again, and Bascom never ships you back to cryo as he continually threatens to.

Once you have a key from any TekLord, you can enter the Matrix (though it’s probably best to wait until you have all seven). This is cyberspace at its most 90’s, and it’s a complete mind fuck. It’s a completely alien maze, by design, that gives you no help in navigating it. In general, you’re “flying” through the world with the new ability to float using crouch and jump. Most of the walls are jet black, with neon art and icons meant to simulate the interface. You can find teleport rings that move you to new areas and switches that unlock doors… somewhere. Most of your time will be spent trying to “use” everything, and that’s the intent. You’re supposed to be experimenting and decoding the visual language.

Whether you think this is any fun or not is up to you. I think it might be if you were able to move a little faster. Instead, your slow movement makes the aimless backtracking and 3D mazes that much worse. New enemies also appear here, which the manual indicates are AI defenses (geometric shapes) or other users (flying hands, like something out of Zelda‘s dungeons). You have to collect ammo for your glove to defeat them. Overall, it’s a hassle, but the combination of in-game map and quicksaves make it at least possible to complete. Once you set all seven keys – and, of course, stumble upon where to do so – you’ll have one last mission before you’ve won the game.

I have no affinity for the TekWar series, but I actually wanted to like the game. The city desperately needed more development and polish, but I like the focus on exploring it over shooting through it. I like being encouraged to keep your weapon holstered, but wish the cops would come to your aid if appropriate. I actually like that civilian and TekGoon models are reused, because it sets up situations where you potentially don’t know if someone will draw a gun on you – the overused holograms and underused exploding android enemies further play on this. There’s potential here.

Unfortunately, there either wasn’t enough time, or not enough skill, to pull off TekWar’s best ideas. It’s a playable mess, with levels that remind me of the most amateurish Duke 3D user maps. Buildings are often empty and hardly worth exploring except for powerups. There’s some early Build showcases, like moving vehicles, catwalks over levels, and seamless indoor/outdoor transitions, but endlessly reused textures and unfinished, meandering levels ultimately just waste your time. The shooting feels hollow, and even Shatner’s involvement is limited to a handful of FMV sequences with the game’s logo as the background. Check out CyberMage or Strife for much better contemporary implementations of a living city.

 

The Good

Large, futuristic city for your mostly nonlinear exploration. Variety in each of the districts. Engine can create some attractive, realistic areas when it wants to. An attempt to focus on exploration over shooting.

 

The Bad

Terrible AI and animation. Blatantly unfinished levels. Boring combat. Shatner’s briefings are no help. Good ideas that just didn’t see completion.

 

“Don’t blame yourself that Sonny Hokori got away… let ME do that.” — Bascom