William Shatner's TekWar is the technological future of crap

Being an avid fan of 2.5D ray casting engines, I have a strong fascination with Ken Silverman’s Build Engine, which was the foundation upon which Duke Nukem 3D was built. That somehow led me to William Shatner’s TekWar.

Despite Duke Nukem 3D being what made the Build Engine famous, it wasn’t the first game released on it. There were a few that came before it, and Capstone was responsible for more than one of them.

Capstone Software is a kusoge topic in itself, as much of their catalog is either crap or sub-crap. While researching DOS games to cover in this column, many of their games rose to the top thanks to the preservation efforts of SNEG. However, a good many of Capstone’s worst games were based on terrible licenses, so they are no longer available. One of these unavailable titles is 1995’s William Shatner’s TekWar which, for a multitude of reasons, I’m pushing for having it re-released. Come on, Nightdive.

William Shatner’s TekWar is based on a 1989 novel called William Shatner’s TekWar by William Shatner (ghost-written by Ron Goulart). In the early ‘90s, William Shatner’s TekWar was picked up for comic books, a TV series, and this game as a way to prove that William Shatner’s face was an effective marketing tool to sell garbage.

It was poorly received, but people are still trying.

If you don’t know who William Shatner is, he played a small role in a niche 1960s TV series called Star Trek. Since then, he’s coasted on that success and recognition, mostly in the aforementioned effort of selling garbage. Today, you might know him from shows like Weird or What and The UnXplained where he tells you that, while it’s just a theory, Alien Nazis definitely built the pyramids. Aliens just love piles of stone and use them to refuel their invisible spaceships. His entire existence now seems to be thrashing against the forces of irrelevancy, and he will tell you anything you want to hear if you’ll just make him feel important.

Unsurprisingly, William Shatner’s TekWar starts with an ad for the TV show, William Shatner, elaborate logos, bad CGI, and William Shatner. 

You’re an ex-police officer who is awoken from cryosleep imprisonment by William Shatner. It’s maybe the 2043, and there’s a new drug on the market called Tek. It’s an addictive experience that puts its users in a blissful simulated environment where they can briefly feel happiness until the drug kills them.

That may have sounded nefarious in 1989, but these days, it sounds like the next product that Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg would take credit for.

In the future, the cure for a drug problem is murder. William Shatner forces you to use your police skills of assassination to take down seven drug lords and stop their plan to spread addictive happiness through the internet. You’re judge, jury, and executioner all in one, and rather than try and get to the societal root of addiction, you’re just going to kill the people supplying the demand. Law and order 101, baby.

You’re given the choice of seven “TekLords” to take down, and I don’t know why. Judging by William Shatner’s lectures and the environmental storytelling, there’s a chronological order by which you’re supposed to tackle the levels. Nothing fancy, just left to right, but I’m not sure why they bothered giving the option.

Not that it matters. You absolutely can tackle the levels in any order. Aside from William Shatner trying to tell William Shatner’s TekWar in a linear fashion, there’s no real difficulty curve. Each level starts you off on a subway platform with your pockets emptied down to the bare essentials. Every time you enter a level, you have to rebuild your arsenal. Only keys carry between areas, and they get taken away when you go after a new TekLord, anyway.

I don’t even know how I would quantify difficulty in William Shatner’s TekWar. Every level has you entering a city area. You’re supposed to avoid causing too much commotion, and if you keep your weapon holstered, rent-a-cops will ignore you. However, it won’t take long before someone who doesn’t like your face just starts blasting at it from some unseen corner of the map.

One of the best parts of the Build Engine is its handling of map sectors that allow level designers to create the illusion of verticality without true room-over-room. This enabled the creation of levels that resemble real-world environments, which was something that games were pushing for in those days. So, William Shatner’s TekWar features areas that, in superficial ways, feel like urban environments. However, Capstone fell into the pitfall of those early games, which is that the levels are designed to feel like real places first, and how they function as the setting for gameplay is a distant second.

As such, many of the rooms and areas you enter are entirely pointless. Much of William Shatner’s TekWar is pointless.

You’ll undoubtedly find yourself circling areas trying to locate the chosen TekLord without success. That’s because, while each TekLord drops you in what seems to be the same subway platform, the levels are often broken into different stops. So, one TekLord might require you to disembark at one spot, scour the level, and then, when you find yourself stuck, return to the subway to move to another platform and repeat the process.

But, like I said, the only items with permanence here are the keys. So, you might think that you need to search for the keys on earlier platforms to take them to the final area and unlock the door to the boss, but that’s not always the case.

There are only two unique keys: red and blue. When searching for any given TekLord, there are always multiple places these can be found, and often there are copies in the area where said TekLord is located. This means any earlier levels are pointless. You can’t even use them to load up on munitions because, like I said, guns get dumped when you transition to new areas.

It’s so distressingly confusing. It feels necessary to search the earlier subway stops just in case there isn’t a required key in the last area. I don’t trust that William Shatner’s TekWar won’t just reload all the enemies again.

The baffling mission framework would be bad enough, but William Shatner’s TekWar isn’t fun to play to begin with. As I said, the levels are designed more for looks than function. They’re confusing mazes filled with areas that would be pointless, even if you were allowed to take your toys with you.

The enemies are just left to sort of roam the environment. Anytime you enter an area, they’ll start blasting at you indiscriminately. Since they just fire bullets that don’t show as projectiles, your character just begins taking damage. There’s no way to avoid it. Your screen starts blinking red, and your life bar starts depleting slowly. Very slowly. In the meantime, you need to try and hunt down everything in the vicinity that is making your screen flash.

In any other game, taking such constant, unstoppable aggression would mean you die a lot, but I didn’t see the game over screen too often. That’s because, in order to balance the difficulty, Capstone just piled on the health. Even while taking continuous damage, your character’s healthbar is massive. Rather than meticulously place enemies to create a fun and challenging experience like a video game is supposed to do, Capstone kept tweaking player health until you had a fighting chance. That’s, uh, a very unique way of doing it, I suppose. I mean, it feels god-awful to play, but it’s a way to ensure the player can suffer their way to the finish line.

Speaking of which, each TekLord you kill awards you with a symbol. At some point, you’re supposed to take these symbols into the Matrix (the virtual internet, of course) and put them into slots scattered throughout. I wouldn’t recommend doing this until the end, but regardless, it’s one of the worst sequences of gameplay I think I’ve been subjected to.

To its credit, William Shatner’s TekWar does a decent job of presenting a virtual world within the Build Engine. It differentiates itself from the rest of the game quite well. Unfortunately, it’s filled with inescapable traps and obtuse puzzles that take forever to solve. While I was trapped in this part, my partner asked me what I was playing. I told him.

He cringed and asked, “And how is it?”

“I’m in Hell,” I replied.

It feels almost merciful after you complete the Matrix section and you’re dropped back into normal gameplay. It’s a short fight and then William Shatner tells you what a good job you did. Speaking of merciful, there was never a William Shatner’s Tekwar 2.

I’ve discovered that playing Build Engine games as they were released is next to impossible for me. The lack of mouselook feels awkward to hands that have been trained with that control style, and I can never find keybindings that feel right. Thankfully, there’s a Build source branch called BuildGDX that supports William Shatner’s TekWar, much like eDuke32 enables Duke Nukem 3D to run on modern setups. I’m not sure how thankful I should be that someone made William Shatner’s TekWar more accessible to me, but at least I didn’t struggle with PGUP and PGDN to move my virtual neck.

One of the reasons I like playing bad games is trying to analyze the decisions that make them so terrible to play. William Shatner’s TekWar, for all its ineptitude, seems to have come from a place of ambition. 3D environments – even fake ones – were a new frontier in video games, so the playbook was still being written. When the trail hasn’t been worn, it’s easy to wander off in the wrong direction and be unable to find your way back.

If I had to imagine the design document, I’d say that the initial idea was that they’d drop players in an environment, and then they’d discretely have to find their way to the target and eliminate them. The problem there is that it’s difficult to then throw obstacles in their way, and it creates a lot of variables that need to be planned for. Eventually, when all the loose ends need to be tied together, your player winds up with a towering health bar.

We get so caught up populating pedestals with games that set precedence that we miss out on the other half of the story. But while a soufflé that successfully rises looks much better, I’m more interested in the one that collapsed after the house was shaken by a Buick driving through the front door. Anyone can succeed, but it takes talent to fail as hard as William Shatner’s TekWar.

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