[Based on the Hit Film] Replaying the Apocalyptic Horror of Bethesda’s ‘The Terminator: Future Shock’

It’s easy to forget that Bethesda Softworks, the house principally built by the likes of The Elder Scrolls, DOOM and Wolfenstein, actually dallied rather extensively in the movie tie-in business. Indeed, some years before the Maryland based outfit would fart out its own risible take on Pirates of the Carribean, it would give us The Terminator: Future Shock, a mid-1990s PC only FPS take on one of Hollywood’s most enduring sci-fi icons.

And you know what? It wasn’t half bad either.

Referring to 1995 as the start of the nuclear war that would shatter the human race and not 1997 (as, you know, the films have taught us), Future Shock nonetheless ignores that continuity faux pas and throws things forward to 2015 (the future!) where Skynet is completing the crackdown on its fleshy foes among the fashionably grey ruins of post-apocalyptic North America. 

After escaping a detention facility, it isn’t long until players join up with franchise crux John Connor, who enlists the player’s nameless protagonist into the Resistance. The first thing that immediately hits you in the face harder than Edward Furlong’s panicked delivery is the fact that Future Shock actually controls really well, and even does so when rubbing shoulders with its genre brethren.

One of the first games of that era to embrace full mouse free look, aim and WASD controls, Future Shock felt like a proper first-person shooter in every sense of the word, and certainly a world away from the somewhat stunted movement and shooting action of previous genre efforts up until that point.

As to the merits of its overarching structure, Future Shock is an objective-driven shooter that has you wrecking key Skynet enemies, stealing intelligence, protecting your fleshy buddies and generally having you become as much a nuisance to the Big S as you possibly can. In gameplay terms, this means you’ll be scavenging Future Shock’s post-apocalyptic landscape for any armor, weapons and first-aid kits that you can get your hands on in order for your plucky resistance fighter to remain attached to their mortal coil. 

As previously alluded to, Future Shock is exclusively set in the machine triggered apocalypse, the dark fate if you will, that Sarah Connor was warned about in 1984 and attempted to avert with some hardcore chin-ups and spot of gnarly home invasion in the early 1990s. 

Certainly then, perhaps most important is the fact that Future Shock looks, feels and sounds as befittingly bleak as the setting which serves as the backdrop for its genre beats to unfold against. The hardware of the time being as modest as it was, visual issues like a close draw distance actually helped to embellish the atmosphere and make the whole affair much tenser, as enemy cyborgs and robots manifest out of the darkness, often at a moment’s notice.

Likewise, the limitations of Future Shock’s game engine also meant that transitions between the Los Angeles wasteland and the many ruined buildings that litter the landscape were not seamless either. However once inside, those same structures played host to a variety of tightly knit combat scenarios, where every bit of cover and every stairwell must be used to its fullest in order to protect yourself against Future Shock’s range of highly damaging mechanical foes.

Speaking of things that can damage you, radiation too also plays a significant part in the proceedings (it is a nuclear apocalypse after all), and if you’re not careful can turn you into a pile of meaty slag rather quickly. Equally, the more difficult Terminator variants such as HK drones, T-800s and a literal Terminator Tank, in particular, can also overwhelm you extremely quickly if you don’t have the sense to retreat when you need to.

Audibly, Future Shock surprises. Punchy and appropriately thunderous gunfire emanating from shotguns and assault rifles impress (the pithy sounds of grenade explosions less so, unfortunately), while the low-key soundtrack fondly recalls the foreboding and uneasy score of the very first Terminator movie, with its melancholic electronica that snaps into something a little faster paced when the action inevitably kicks off.

The Terminator: Future Shock then is hardly a revolutionary shooter, but for its time the Bethesda produced effort managed to capture the resolutely bleak sci-fi apocalyptica of its silver screen counterparts – something that just about all the games and the movies in the franchise since the early 1990s have almost completely failed to do.