Playing as a sequel to the popular Terminator Rampage, Terminator: Future Shock pits you as a resistance fighter battling the mechs controlled by Skynet. If you have seen any of the movies you know the storyline. After getting out of hostile enemy territory in Mission 1, you hook up with John Conner, the leader of the resistance and from that point on you are their main resistance fighter. The setting is the future, Los Angeles year 2015 and the affects of Skynet's uprising in 1990 has rendered most of humanity dead, and control is now in Skynet's hands. All around is death and decay (what else would you expect), with shattered remnants of a past society lying all over.
That is the background of the game, but what is the game all about?
I hate to say this but it is another 3D First person perspective
game a-la Doom, but with some things thrown in that make it
different. Mechs is one, everything you fight against is a
mechanized creature, taking the forms of airborne craft, tanks, and
of course T-1000 and T-8000 Terminators. The game plays only in
320x200 VGA, and the graphics are not as good as Descent or
System Shock, two other first person games. There are alot of
polygon mountains and things that could have been done better in
my opinion.
There are plenty of objects around to make the game play slow on a 486DX/33 but there are different graphics levels to accommodate slower systems. I tested it on a P5-90 w/ 16 megs of RAM and a Matrox Millenium video card, and also a 486dx/33 w/ a Tseng 4000 1mb Video Card. The lower graphic setting seemed to play fine on the 486, while I had no troubles with the highest setting on the pentium. All in all however, the game does play much slower than your normal doom / descent type game. The characters move at about 1/4 of the speed. I'm not sure if this is do to a poor game engine or them making it more a thinking type game than action.
The sound is one thing that I noticed right away. The music fits
the scenes of the game perfectly, with changing background music
depending on the room, or area you venture into. The stereo SFX
are really nice also, getting louder and softer as you move closer
and away and allowing you to find out which direction that T-1000
is coming from. The game supports just about every sound card on
the market through it's use of HMI drivers. It sounded great in
Ensoniq General Midi and also on a regular SB 16.
Shock to the System
The gameplay is better than the average Doom clone, with little tricks throughout the first few levels in order to pass the levels unlike the usual kill everythig mentality. Each mission has a direct purpose, not just to escape a maze. Jumping is a key element in this game unlike other First Person games that don't utilize jumping as much. (You get to jump from rooftop to rooftop in the first mission.) Crouching is another widely used element in Future Shock. effective ways to kill an enemy is to crouch down behind a piece of rubble and blast away at him. The game not only incorporates a first person perspective from your vantage point, but also that of you behind the wheel of a jeep and later on in the game, an assault aircraft. This gives you more firepower and more weapons, another of Future Shock's strong points. You start with a iron bar, and build your way up to Laser-Guided Rifles and Rocket and Grenade Launchers. You also have secondary weapons such as Molotav Cocktails and Grenades to assault your enemy with. Killing enemies is also in all directions. You can sit on a balcony and pick off enemy drones below or watch as an enemy ship falls on you and kills you. :)
The AI in the game is average. Mechs will go after you with reckless abandon if you are not careful. The T8000 is especially hard to get around because it operates just like you and can do the same things to get you as you do to escape it. Some of the enemies have more than just guns to assault you with. The Spider Bot for instance will impale you with it's jaws if you get to close to it as well as shooting lasers at you.
Other quips about the game are that I wish it had been done in
hi-res. I can see now with the large amount of objects this would
be slow even on a Pentium. The game does play sluggishly at times,
and the control of your character is not very easy with just a
keyboard, or joystick. A mouse+keyboard setup is needed in most
cases. YES, it is Win95 aware, or at least VMM aware, and does run
under these conditions. Sometimes
when Win95 starts accessing the
disk, the game slows down and is jerky, but nothing major. Sound
and whatnot play flawlessly on a SB16 and Ensoniq Soundscape.
Big Loss
No network play. For all you Doom fans that enjoy the network stuff, this is the biggest turnoff of the game. I'm not sure why they wouldn't make it without network play but they did. This will be a big thumbs down for a lot of gamers out there. The game would be awesome as a network play due to the terrain which consists of valleys and mountains, and multiple obstacles to hide behind. Also the fact that it is a wide open area with no enclosed walls at all would make it lots of fun, there would be almost no cornering of people at all. Anyways, it's not there.
Overall, this is a prertty decent game with some flaws. I feel having network play would be a necessity in this game and the fact that the game does play a little slow. But to all of you that love the Terminator series and movies this is a title you might not want to miss. For those of you that like Doom clones and whatnot, I'd wait and spend my money on Quake, or Lifebane, or Into the Shadows, when those games come out.
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