DOS

William Shatner's TekWar

Tekwar är stort, annorlunda och svårt. Det är en rejäl utmaning som alla actionspelare med muskeldatorer borde testa.

Un bon soft qui vaut le coup d'oeil pour sa réalisation, mais qui ne dispose pas du rythme qui aurait pu le rendre excellent.

Sharp, living game world with moving vehicles and innocent civilians. Unsophisticated combat, inaccurate manual, tedious searches, and flat special effects. It's a fun game to play on a high-end machine at least for a little while but it's no Doom-killer.

Tekwar is one of the more immersive and polished looking, sounding, and feeling games on the market today. If you like DOOM, Hexen, or any other such game, Tekwar is a must have!

Shatner, bleib bei Deinem Raumschiff: Captain Kirk hat sich mit dieser mäßigen Umsetzung seiner eigentlich guten Romane keinen Gefallen getan. Dabei ließ sich Capstone noch einiges einfallen, um Tekwar von anderen 3D-Actionspielen abzuheben.

Unfortunately, those addictive qualities don't carry over into the real-life electronic product. TekWar is essentially a spiffed-up clone of Doom, with the requisite stomach-churning 3-D-rendered views and assortment of nasty weapons. You go through sections of the city, dodging bullets and other hazards while searching out your quarry. While the game boasts some interesting features (such as multiple-player capability and hookups for real 3-D display), the visceral fight-or-flight experience doesn't match such similar PC or Mac titles as Doom II, Descent, the Star Wars-inspired Dark Forces, and Marathon. Still, Shatner, who reads you the riot act if you fail your assigned mission, displays an enthusiasm for the work that sets TekWar apart from CD-ROMs with more or less indifferent celeb participants.

TEKWAR has an interesting story line and is certainly a nice anti-aggravation device, but it fails to accomplish anything else.

TEKWAR tries to be something new, and with a bit more effort and probably a lot more money, it could have been in the same league as SYSTEM SHOCK. But the reality is that this game is just another first-person shooter and not, by any stretch of the imagination, “The most advanced game ever made.” Game players who never get tired of this sort of thing will probably like it, (although I suspect the body-count of “non-combatants” will get rather high, once gamers hear the high-pitched panic noises they make when shot) and of you live for DOOM-clones, or just like to fantasize about William Shatner being condescending to you, then this could be your bag. Alas, even network capability doesn't drag this retread into the world of relevancy for me, and after spending more hours playing it than I should have, I came away feeling only one thing: Tek-Bored.

Sadly, I actually want to like Tekwar. It could have been great with some RPG elements, like the ability to talk to civilians for info, or visit the bars to get clues on how to enter the gang's hideout - I suppose something similar to Deus Ex. Still, the basic game is interesting enough if it just worked. Playing as an undercover cop in a futuristic city, picking bad guys out of crowds of civilians, and engaging in action-movie gunbattles while innocents flee the streets, seems like it would be my bag. Yet the game never reaches this point, making the engine trouble and design problems all the more frustrating. Good ideas, but sunk by terrible, lazy, or rushed execution. Not even worth the trouble.

William Shatner war scheinbar nicht für das Qualitätsmanagement während der Produktion von TekWar zuständig. Sonst hätte er bemerkt, dass sein Lesestoff zu allergröbsten Spieleschrott verwandelt wurde. TekWar ist mit Sicherheit eines der schlechtesten auf der Build-Engine basierenden Spiele und besitzt heutzutage keinerlei Existenzberechtigung mehr. Nicht mal für Sammler interessant.