Do you want to design a terrible adventure game, but just don't know how to approach it? No worries, Future Wars is here to help you with that.
Now, if you've ever read this blog, you probably know from my various coverings of Sierra games, that they often had some bad design choices in their games. Some of them were thus mostly because they were meant to prolong the games, the longer the players were stuck, the longer the games lasted. Makes sense, no? So what would happen if you'd make an adventure game with mostly those bad design choices?
You get something like Future Wars. One of the absolute worst adventure games ever made, if you count only developers with some name recognition, as was the case with Delphine Software. Besides, I just want to vent about this game, not get stuck in the semantics of the existence of worse games than this.
The intro sets the story: a group of men walk in a forest when suddenly a gigantic ship hovers above them. Lasers blast back and forth, but the end result is clear; the men in purple jumpsuits are dead. Cue to somewhere else, somewhere more interesting. Cue to a side of a glossy skyscraper and a man in a window washers cart, doing his job, which surprisingly enough is washing windows.
A window above him opens and another man glances outside. The washer, this is you, accidentally stumbles on his water bucket and the man, your boss, gives you an earful. Asshole. In any case, you head in and for some reason decide to stick a full water bucket on the top of the bosses door. Hilarity ensues when the bossman is dripping wet when the bucket hits his head.
Because you probably are a thief of some sort, you decide to search an empty office while you are in. You rummage every cabinet, find a typewriter and with a minuscule flag you found from a toilet, you open a secret door hidden behind a map. You end up in a room with a ceiling crashing down. Luckily, you read a door code from a typewriter in the previous room. Or you did if you found the cabinet key hidden under the lobby carpet, again for reasons unknown. Who would hide their cabinet key in a lobby instead of their room?
You do end up in a bizarre room with strange electronics in it. Blindly you do stuff, use things on other things until you figure to put a paper in a slot of one machine. The machine spits out a document you grab, but at the same time, an alarm blares. You stumble into another machine, which ends up in a blinding flash. Somehow you are now standing on a swamp.
Some pixel-perfect navigation later, you are stopped by a swarm of insects that will instantly kill you. You have to, in a very pixel-perfect manner, stand in front of the insects and spray them with insecticide you hopefully took with you from the office toilet. If not, it's time to restore the game, as there is no way back to where you came, as you are now in the middle ages.
After a genuine time jump, before exiting the swamp, you notice a small glint in the sun. It's a medallion of some sort. You are now stuck at a lakeshore, as if you go forward, you are killed by monks. So the most logical thing to do is to search the roots of a nearby tree. You'll get a rope, which you then use to climb that same tree.
Sitting in the branches, you fall asleep, only to be wakened by a man, who goes skinny dipping. This is your moment, you steal his clothes and head on down to the village. No more monks. The next stop is behind the castle, as you need to push a tree there so a coin will drop down and you can in pixel-perfect manner pick it up from the ground and head on to the local pub to have a drink At least you know where the coin dropped, so that eases things a bit.
After hearing some stuff, you finally get to the castle by showing the pendant to the guard. The lord of the manor then asks you to find his daughter. She is in the monastery, but it is guarded by a big ass wolf. You get rid of it by throwing water on it by using a plastic bag you took from a trashcan at the office. If not, restore and play the game all the way here again.
And I can hear you ask, why does water get rid of the wolf? Because it was a robot. A thing that was not hinted in any way or form by anyone. You just have to know that you need to carry water in a leaky plastic bag and throw it at the wolf. I guess that is common knowledge in some parts of the world.
Before entering the monastery itself, you need a monks robe which is hanging on a tree, only reachable with a long pole. The only problem here is the need to stand in a pixel-perfect location under it so you can actually get it. The monastery is another trial of pixel-perfect walking by using the surprisingly clunky walk detection. The swamp was already a trial by fire, this is almost worse.
A group of fellow monks walk around the main room, following a slim path rounding the walls. You have to, several times I may add, visit three other rooms until you manage to solve all the puzzles needed to save the lords' daughter. This means following the same path as the monks, as if you step too far off the path, they'll kill you. If you walk backwards, they'll kill you. Fun, ain't it? The puzzles here are actually very simple, it's just that they are separated by an artificial barrier made worse by the mechanics of the game itself. In a word, it feels like the developers were intentionally using the worst implemented features of the engine against the player to make the game feel longer and more challenging than it is.
After you've managed to rescue Lo'Ann, it is revealed, that she is from the future as is her father. They have come to past to locate a bomb planted there by an alien race called Croughons and you've just helped to disarm it. You explain your own situation and they decide to take you to the future to talk with the council because you've learned things no one in your own time knows. The next bit is actually pretty toleratable, you just have to search every crook and nanny to find all you need.
First, you have to Walz through a war-torn cityscape to a sewer. There you need to rescue a woman and her child, to which you need a blowtorch you can find above ground from one of the rubble piles. The next step is a metro ride and entry to a plane, but hopefully, you remembered to get a fuse from before entering the sewer, as there is no going back now, unless you restore. When you are finally in the plane, it gets captured by the aliens and you are imprisoned.
To escape, you need a key, a newspaper and a gas canister. The key you've dragged along since the beginning of the game, so no problem there. The gas canister is in the middle ages, so there is a possibility you might have missed it, as you need to pick it up before rescuing Lo'Ann. The newspaper you hopefully picked up from the metro station.
What follows your escape from the aliens is surprisingly enough to most annoying part of the whole game. After almost getting executed, the future humans take trust in you and send you back in time with Lo'Ann to disarm the final bomb. There the first thing is to shoot dozens of aliens. This bit takes a couple of tries to get right, as the game engine isn't really ideal for this kind of a thing. Savescumming helps here, a lot. After the shooting, there is the fun 6-minutes long corridor maze run.
See, you are now in the main base of them pesky aliens. You have 6-minutes to reach the main computer so you can detonate the bomb prematurely. The levels you need to go through are filled with finicky pathfinding, as not even walking down a ladder always works here as it should. And really, you only have about 3-minutes to get to the main computer, as if you take too long, you don't have enough time to get to the escape shuttle. So, you know, this is actually a timed side view maze, marred by poor controls. What a way to end a game.
The funny thing is, when Future Wars came out, it got mainly positive reviews. It was praised because of its graphics, understandably as it does look very nice and its soundtrack, which sounds great as well, especially on AdLib. The story got mentioned as well. Then again, even back in the day, the reviewers pointed out the many minuscule pixel hunt moments as well as how the game often intentionally hindered or restricted the player movement. Yet still, the game got good reviews, which just shows how much times have changed since the 1990s. What was once acceptable game design can now be seen as terrible design. But I'd argue this wasn't a good design even for the time the game was released.
Future Wars is one of those titles which could really benefit from being remade. It has solid ideas in it, things to like, but the way it all is put together mars it. It relies on pixel hunting and pixel perfect movement. It asks you to know things you can't know because none of it has been explained or foreshadowed, so there is a lot of trial and error involved. In a word, it is a game best played with a walkthrough in hand, but not necessarily because it is particularly difficult, but because it is just annoying.
Another funny thing is, I still do kinda like the game. I originally played it when it came out and found it utterly difficult, largely for the same reason I find it now annoying. But I always was a bit mesmerized by it. So, if you do decide to get it, I'd recommend the disk version over the existing CD version, as the only thing the CD adds is CD music, which doesn't really work that well with the game thanks to some issues with playback. And honestly, I think the AdLib audio sounds better than the CDA versions of the soundtrack. Especially the title theme sounds far blander in CDA.
Just like with most other Delphine titles, no digital storefront carries it. So if you want it, you can either hunt down a copy from eBay or try some other venues. I can't really recommend it, as I do think it requires a certain amount of nostalgia especially if you want to endure it through.
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