Back in the Wastes

Bethesda was really keen on building the TerminatorIs it a series about a future nuclear war and the survivors of the aftermath? Is it a series of chase movies set in the present day? Is it a series about time travel? That fact is that the Terminator series is all of those concepts. The mash-up of genres and ideas shouldn't work, but the films have proven adept at mixing into a heady series unlike any other. franchise in a popular 3D shooter series. We are now four deep into their run, after The Terminator, The Terminator 2029, and The Terminator: Rampage, and the company continued to work to improve and refine their shooters to be solid, fan-attracting works for the genre. Considering we’re 30 years removed from their games and barely anyone talks about them now, clearly Bethesda’s grand ambitions didn’t entirely play out. But for the time they were at least trying, working again and again to do something other than just another cheap, cash-grab, licensed game, and it’s hard not to respect that.

This fourth entry, The Terminator: Future Shock, is another big step for the company. Released three years after The Terminator: Rampage, this game pushed beyond the engine and controls of that title, creating a work that could stand up against all that id software had cranked out in the previous years. While The Terminator: Rampage could be rightly dinged as just another Wolfenstein 3D clone released right as id rocked the world with Doom, making it already feel like an ancient title, the same cannot be said for this fourth game. The Terminator: Future Shock stands head and shoulders above Doom on a technical level, doing things that id’s games had yet to accomplish. And, in fact, it would be a whole year before id fired back with their own next generation shooter: Quake.

So if this game was such a technical marvel, why does everyone still remember Quake and no one talks about The Terminator: Future Shock. Well, I think we can point to a couple of different reasons. The first is, of course, saturation of the market. While id hadn’t fired back yet, plenty of other companies had, with games like Star Wars: Dark Forces, Rise of the Triad, and Duke Nukem 3D all coming along in the interim, pushing the genre forward. There were so many games to choose from that it was hard for any one title to stand out.

Beyond that, Bethesda had helped to saturate that market all on their own, releasing (as we noted above) one Terminator game after another, year after year, and most of them weren’t that great. By 1995, after a two year break for Bethesda, you could still see the Terminator as a tarnished brand, with fans saying, “ew, another Terminator 3D shooter? Those are never good.” It’s hard to recover from something like that, even with a good license to play off of, and however good The Terminator: Future Shock could have been, fans weren’t going to care.

But then, The Terminator: Future Shock just isn’t that great of a game. Yes, on a technical level it does a lot of things many other shooters (those designed in the style of Doom) weren’t doing. It had huge, expansive, multi-storied levels built on 3D polygon platforms, with all kinds of nooks and crannies to explore. Just about everything was done with 3D graphics, not sprites, and it was all assembled to make a huge game that could take hours and hours to clear. From that alone, the game was impressive. But the devil is in the details, and when it came to actually playing the game, that’s when The Terminator: Future Shock fell flat.

The first issue with the game is that it’s just not that pretty to look at. Every mission of the game takes place somewhere out in the wastes, with your soldier running (or sometimes driving or flying) through the landscape, looking for objectives. Everything is dark, brown and greys for all the surfaces, with the whole of the world having a blasted out look that, yes, does match the look of the future-set sections of the films. But because it’s all the same, it leaves all the stages feeling very samey. Nothing stands out, nothing looks different, and it leaves everything feeling very bland.

That graphics don’t even have the same level of personality as those in The Terminator 2029, as that game at least had detailed sprites for all its structures, characters, and backgrounds. Here all the textures are flat and blurry, leaving the eye without much that’s interesting to look at. The few things that are sharp and detailed are the various power-ups you can grab (like ammo and armor), and those are all done as flat sprites (the few things that are). Graphically it’s impressive that Bethesda could make a 3D shooter before anyone else, but much like how many of the earliest Nintendo 64 games all look flat and untextured, so too does this PC title.

The massive, explorable levels also don’t provide a lot to do. Yes, you can go anywhere and get lost among the nooks and crannies, but the game has a mission-based system that only cares if you hit your objectives. Kill all the enemies or not, collect everything or don’t, the game doesn’t care either way. Your goal is to get through the stages and you can do that quickly (completing each in a matter of minutes) or slowly (spending a half an hour or more looking for everything) but it doesn’t change the outcome of the game either way. At a certain point you’ll just start ignoring everything and rushing to the end out of sheer boredom.

It doesn’t help that the enemy A.I. is generally pretty bad. Most of the time you can simply run past everything and avoid them and their damage. You aren’t frequently forced to actually kill things, so while many stages can be packed with enemies it’s only specific targets you have to focus on. Everything else is just padding, and bad padding at that. Why spend bullets and time shooting down drones and infiltrators when it’s not necessary? They’re just a waste of resources and, by the very structure of the game, you have better things to do.

Oh, and the game is hilariously broken. Among the various control keys is a side-step that, in theory, gives you quick strafing action. It would be good for getting in and out of cover as needed. But amusingly, as noted and used by speedrunners, it also has a weird property to it where, for a few frames, your sidle acts like you’re balanced on perfectly stable ground, even when you’re clipping through terrain or floating out in the middle of the air. You can link these together to clip through boundaries, or fly across aerial sections, getting to objectives long before you should, avoiding even more of the game. It’s not that hard to pull off either, and is something many players could have picked up on just during normal play.

Now, if you want to play it straight and do things properly, the game does offer decent action and a lot to explore. That’s true and I don’t want to take away from that. I wouldn’t classify it as really great shooting, and it happens in a lot of drab areas that are easy to get lost in because they are so expansive, but still, you do get a lot to shoot at and a lot to explore which could make this game seem like it was worth the price of admission. The game even has a few driving and flying sections, missions set in cars and planes where you’re getting across the blasted out city, looking for places to go and things to destroy.

Like, as a basic package I respect how much content is in The Terminator: Future Shock. As a single player experience, the game isn’t necessarily bad… it’s just also not very good. It sits in this middling place between Bethesda’s ambitions and the reality of what was possible. It’s just that the engine is still limited, and the graphics aren’t that great. It would take a truly great shooter to come along, see what Bethesda did, and refine it into a truly great experience. You know, like id did soon after with Quake. Funny how that works…