Traveling through time across jungles, Egyptian temples, and futuristic cities — all in one adventure? Future Wars promises it, but the result is more of a messy attempt at something grand, where the system sometimes sends you in the wrong direction and leaves you trudging through unsolvable situations.
It's a point-and-click adventure created by a French studio that takes you through different periods and locations — from prehistory to the distant future. The goal is to uncover a conspiracy threatening the world and get rid of a mysterious enemy. The story tries to be ambitious, but it's unnecessarily convoluted.
Gameplay revolves around clicking on things and collecting objects. It makes for a pretty linear and frustrating experience at times — use the wrong object in the wrong scene and you're done for. The graphics are decent for 1990, the colors are vibrant, but the character animations look rather stiff. The music holds the atmosphere together, though these days it tends to grate more than anything. The dialogue is entirely in English with no Czech translation, which wasn't unusual back in the '90s.
From today's perspective, it's mainly a curiosity — one of those attempts at gaining the reputation of an "epic" adventure that slips from memory faster than expected. The game was a big deal, but it left itself with too many weaknesses. Veteran adventure fans could have taken it as Monkey Island with a time machine, but without the wit and elegance.
If you want to go back to detective adventures where everything was more complicated and less forgiving, you'll find it in several emulators. There's no reason to skip it entirely, but it's not the kind of game you'd remember as something special. More like an experiment that almost worked out.
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