Not so iconic game from the iconic developer
Psygnosis is an iconic company, that made Lemmings, Wipeout, G-Police and other memorable games. It is a company that stated that they invest and hire the best artists to draw graphics in the days when many developers did both code and art. Psygnosis changed the look of games.
During Playstation 1 era Psygnosis made 2 not so popular but incredible from visual standpoint games: Tenka and Shadow Master. These two games were released for PlayStation but not so many know and even less played their PC versions.
Tenka is a first person shooter. Assumption would be that as a shooter it feels much better on a PC than on PS. Psygnosis enjoys to surprise – the only thing PC release does better is maintaining FPS.
But let’s start from plot. It’s more a vibe than a story but in comparison to Doom guy Tenka talks A LOT.
Tenka’s plot
Tenka is, by the way, a name of a protagonist who is fighting an evil corporation. This corporation performs unethical genetic experiments on people. Somehow across the levels this starting point turns into a rocket shooting spiders.
When you play until the end it’s barely possible to connect the story events and levels. At some point I gave up and just moved with the flow.
I would say everything in this game looks severely unethical. So I’m not so sure why it’s wrong to edit the genes of people and why to even do this when you have spiders with rocket launchers, but Tenka takes a high moral ground and eventually becomes a cyborg. Sadly, not a spider with a rocket launcher.
From the level of my understanding one corporation is using Tenka to take down another corporation. During the process of making a cyborg out of Tenka they broke into the security and corrupted the process so Tenka saved his personality. And got the most powerful gun you could find on this planet just randomly laying in a garbage in a semi abandoned building.
Story is told to you between the levels as a form of a monologue or a dialogue (depends on perspective) with the voices in Tenka’s head. Poor guy didn’t have painkillers to fight his headache and look how it ended up.
Before one mission you’re told that the next facility will be a prison but in locked cameras they hold items, door keys and enemies. So it’s like a story for a very abstract shooter. A very abstract story. With a very abstract shape shifting gun. With abstract PC bugs.
Why Tenka on PC looks so bad
Technologically the game is based on DirectX 3.0 but it is used only to display picture, gather input and overall for hardware abstraction. The game is using software renderer.
Right from the start you see all the limitations of PC port.
PS1 version of the game has an interesting ripple effects over menu’s background when PC’s version of the game lacks it.
They cut out the transparency. Instead of it we have an old school dotted pattern. Some tubes that were transparent in the PS version now use this dotted pattern together with the explosions. Sometimes – dotted patter crosses over each other and explosions behind such transparent objects simply disappear.
It’s done for performance reasons. I get it. But surprisingly Tenka was released in the same year as Quake 2 so there is simply no excuses for looking so inferior to Quake 2 other than just inability of programmers to make it. Psygnosis offered their FPS engine for licensing but expectantly they didn’t have any success.
The final nail to the coffin of PC release is that the game has really severe problems with game speed. I ran the game under Windows XP and it is faster than it should be.
To play Tenka on later Windowses than 98 you simply need to be a better player with better reaction speed.
It went smoothly until the levels where you needed to bring bombs into a disassembly facility. After you pickup a bomb on the level you’re given a timer and you need to make it back to the facility before the time runs out. And there are 10 or so bombs laying around such level. If you don’t make it in time – bomb explodes and you receive damage.
Because speed of the game is broken it doesn’t matter how fast you can reach the facility – some bombs will explode on you even if you’re Sonic. First bomb levels are relatively easy so you can make it even with a broken timer.
But in the later level I simply stuck and wasn’t able to beat it no matter how much I tried.
The only solution was to open my save file in hex editor and rewrite my level to the next one and continue playing.
Look art, don’t look inside
From the game design stand point the game is terrible. There are some weapons that are literally unusable like mines. There is a bigger chance you will kill yourself with your own mine than anyone else. Rocket launcher is only effective in the hands of the enemy. For you it’s usable only if you run out of laser ammo, even if it’s given to you after the laser.
Combat based on the pure reaction to avoid rockets. Basically all other weapons enemies have possess almost no threat.
When you run out of ammo game just makes you wait for a minute before giving you 6 bullets. There is no melee weapons. You have a gun that is literally changing its shape for different kinds of ammo, projectiles, lasers and rockets, gun that produces bullets, but it is unable to perform any basic melee attacks.
Game consists entirely of corridors. There are some open spaces but they are rare and mostly uninspiring. Combat is repetitive, there is no bosses.
This famous visuals
But the visual design is oh well.
How about heads with 3 legs. You can shoot off legs one by one and make the head stuck on the floor watching you. Also they are mostly harmless aside of specific super fast heads that are given ability to eat you. Mostly they just produce sounds and run into you without a reason.
Or flesh eating frogs – you can shoot off their legs as well.
Cyborg dinosaurs.
Rocket spiders.
Heads cemented into the walls at canalization levels. I assume all failed experiments are just dumped into canalization and cemented.
Sadly at some point it feels like developers stopped investing as they did in early levels. I have a feeling they understood that what they are making won’t be a banger and they also needed to release the game before the release of Quake so they were in hurry.
After the first maybe 7 levels I stopped paying much attention to the game until I met rocket spiders. Then I stopped paying attention again until the end. Level textures and enemies start to repeat at some point. Game adds new ones from time to time but later 3/4 is definitely made lazier than the first 1/4.
It’s not nice to be Tenka
Quake 2 is just entirely on a different level. Still Tenka is somewhat fun to play if you like the atmosphere and futuristic designs of Psygnosis games, but not on PC.