Take your turn saving the world!
''Welcome to the future. It's not a pretty place. Not since the creatures took over anyways. What's left is a rag-tag bunch of human survivors who live in squalor, battle their multidimensional overlords, and wax nostalgic for better days.
Future Tactics: The Uprising is a turn-based shooter developed by Zed Two and published by Crave in the US and Jo Wood in Europe, released for all major platforms in 2004.
The game features Low, his sister Pepper, and a group of other ragtag survivors After the End, who must battle a race of malevolent interdimensional creatures that have invaded and taken over the planet. A ways into their mission they meet a fellow survivor Scallion and steal a MacGuffin from the creatures, which may be a means for them to Save the World. Most missions involve simply getting through hostile territory, but it has its fair share of Kill Enemies to Open missions and even a few "blow up a structure" type-affairs as well. If you can imagine what Fort Nite would be like as a turn-based strategy game, you basically have Future Tactics.
The game's primary selling point was its fully destructable environments akin to games like Worms 3D, where quite literally everything from the ground, to walls, and buildings, and objects can be destroyed and sent flying by both your and the enemy's attacks. The map gets reshapen as you fight, allowing you and the enemy to create trenches to slow and block their opponents or to destroy cover to leave them exposed. However, while this was impressive for its time, the game received mediocre reviews and is largely forgotten nowadays save for a small cult following.
This game gives examples of:
- And This Is for...: One of Low's win quotes is "And this is for my Dad!"
- Action Bomb: Hubriks, the weakest creatures, attack by getting close and blowing themselves up with dynamite. They do a ton of damage, but also die in one hit.
- Anti-Frustration Features: The game features a fast-forward button that can be used not only during cutscenes, but also during the enemy's turn.
- After the End: Creatures from another dimension invaded Earth, and now humanity has basically been reduced to a medieval level but with laser guns.
- Artificial Stupidity: The creatures can think, but not very well. They have a habit of wandering over their own mines, and if a Hubrik can't reach you it'll just blow itself up seemingly for the hell of it.
- Boisterous Bruiser: Scallion, who just sort of shows up, introduces himself as "the man with the ten-ton gun" and then muscles his way into Low's battle.
- Card-Carrying Villain: The creatures are cruel and sadistic to humans for the sake of it, as evidenced by their Enemy Chatter when hunting you during battles. Even according to an Apocalyptic Log in the manual, when they first appeared humans attempted diplomacy: the creatures responded by blowing them to pieces Mars Attacks! style.
- Chivalrous Pervert: Scallion. He asks for a night with the daughters of a town he helps save (naturally, they put the run on him), and when it's revealed Peace is pregnant, General immediately assumes Scallion is responsible.
- Combat Medic: Caraway's secondary ability allows her to recover ally HP... by shooting them. Hey, if it works it works.
- Crutch Character: Low's father, who is basically Low on the highest level possible, is your partner for the first mission.
- Death from Above: Characters like Scallion and Pepper are able launch Ballistic Trajectory attacks on enemies, allowing them to remain behind cover while doing so. Eventually Grenadaks how up who can do this to you.
- Death Is Cheap: The creatures revive a half-hour after being killed, and even taunt you about this when taking aim with quips like "Go ahead! Kill me!" Losing one of your party members is an instant Game Over though. Once you steal the Infinity Engine, death becomes cheap for you, and permanent for the aliens.
- Doomed Hometown: More like "Doomed Camp", but Low and Pepper lose their home after the first mission.
- Draw Aggro: You can take advantage of how enemies have to spot one of your allies before knowing where they are to lure them into traps, or draw them away from your weakened or vulnerable allies.
- Earth-Shattering Kaboom: The game ends with you quite literally blowing up the creature's planet!
- Elite Mooks: Patrioks are basically a combination of a Sentrik and an Insidiak: they have a crapton of health, hit like a truck, can snipe from across the map, are basically immune to Hand To Hand, and if that's not enough they can also heal their allies. Thankfully they're rare: you only have to content with them in two missions.
- Enemy Chatter: The creatures loudly announce things like "There he is!" when they spot you, and things like "I think he ran away!" when they lose sight of you. They'll also goad you into firing on them, threaten party members, and gloat when they land a hit.
- Everything Breaks: The game's defining feature. You can blow up buildings, blow holes in the ground, and knock down walls. You can even do this on purpose to create makeshift barracades, or to create slopes to reach areas faster. Of course, the enemies can do this too.
- Foreshadowing: The game drops tons of hints that The Stranger is actually an older Low from the future. He consistently shows a ton of concern for Pepper and remarks that he knows exactly what Low is going through when she dies, he wears similar armor with the same steel-toed boots, and he gets similar abilities. Most notably, is he uses the exact same gun with the exact same HUD in a game which makes a point of giving every other character, even Temporary Party Members like Low's Father, their own unique gun and HUD. He even goes so far as to comment on how obvious it is when his identity is revealed.
- Glass Cannon: Hubriks die in one hit from no matter what since it detonates their dynamite. Insidiaks can easily be One Hit Killed by a headshot, and even the powerful Sentrik's are very vulnerable to melee attacks.
- Infrared X-Ray Camera: One of the upgrades allows characters to toggle this on in first-person view, making it very easy to spot enemies at a distance or even on the other side of an obstacle.
- Land Mine Goes "Click!": The game features land mines as an "obstacle." Since enemies have a nasty habit of stepping on their own mines as they trudge toward you, you'll likely never get near one of them. Alternately, you can shoot them yourself to set them off and catch creatures in the blast.
- Let's You and Him Fight: Low has a beef with "The Stranger", and challenges him to a duel. This serves as Mission 7.
- MacGuffin: The Infinity Engine, which serves as the crux of the game.
- New Game Plus: Beating the game once unlocks a harder mode where only one character may move each turn, and turns are rotated between characters.
- Optional Stealth: Enemies only know you're there if they get a bead on you via line of sight, and will communicate to their allies when they spot you to move in for the kill. You can take advantage of this to lure them into traps, or hide your injured characters long enough until enemies lose track of them.
- Plot Line Death: Low's Father, Pepper, General, and Wardwarf all bite the dust at various points of the game.
- Respawning Enemies: Most maps involve some manner of this to a degree. Often each enemy turn ends with one more Mook entering the fray, ready to fight next turn.
- Set Right What Once Went Wrong: The Stranger is actually Low from one possible future, who was sent to the past to put things right.
- Schizophrenic Difficulty: The game is all over the bloody place in terms of difficulty. The game throws you right into the frying pan from the get-go with Respawning Enemies and a Boss in Mook Clothing in the very first level, then throws an outright boss battle against you for mission 2 that, again, makes heavy use of respawning enemies. There's also no tutorial at all, forcing you to learn how the games obtuse mechanics work by just running blind with them, and probably to learn the hard way that if any one of your teammates dies it's Game Over. Then the game's difficulty drops dramatically once you get your hands on the MacGuffin that allows you revive lost teammates after battles and you start getting much more powerful allies like Scallion, and then just sort of randomly goes up and down from there.
- Schizo Tech: Humans live on farms and in Romani-style camps, but have laser guns and high-tech armaments. Even the creatures make use of low-level tech like dynamite and catapults.
- Spider Tank: The second-to-last mission is against a big four-legged walking tank with a gun controlled by the severed head of a Patriok.
- Splash Damage: Scallion's unique upgrade is Scatter, which makes his projectile burst into numerous smaller ones before hitting the ground.
- Stock Sound Effects: You'll recognize nearly all the sound effects in the game, save for the grunts and yells of the creatures. Especially the laser sound of enemy Mooks that has been in countless video games.
- Target Spotter: All enemies do this. If they spot one of your characters, they relay the info to all their allies and begin converging.
- Technical Pacifist: Peace is very much against combat, but knows diplomacy isn't an option and will fight when necessary. One of her win quotes is even "I hate taking life!"
- Too Much Information: This bit, between Scallion and Low:Scallion: Well, I can normally tell if something's up by my, er, plumbing. And you can rest assured that I'm still as regular like clockwork first thing every morning. One time I had this cold, and I was so gummed up I—Low: Ugh, please! Too much information, Scallion!
- We Have Reserves: This is the creature's modus operandi, as they don't care at all if their allies are killed or even if they are killed, and will taunt players who have them in their sights with statements like "go ahead, kill me!" and even resort to attacking by strapping dynamite to their backs. Since they have a machine that resurrects them after death, their dying is of little consequence. Notably, once you steal this machine and make off with it, they abandon this tactic and stop using Suicide Attacks.
