When Nightdive Studios announced that they were going to remaster AFTERI thought they were joking. It was April 1st and they released a trailer that starts off pretty confusingly. But here it is. I’m not sure I really wanted to play AFTERbut now I’ve played them all.
AFTER was originally released in 1995 on the doomed 3DO Interactive Multiplayer, then ported to the PlayStation in 1996. The first-person shooter genre was still in its infancy, and while those early years yielded classics like Holocaust, Earthquake, AND Duke Nukem 3Dit is also a cemetery for countless others that are now largely forgotten. If it is not obvious, AFTER belongs to the second category.
I hadn’t played it before. There was a copy in one of those early cardboard PS1 boxes in the basement of a game store I briefly ran, and I hadn’t touched it. There was probably a reason it was in the basement (disc rot, I suspect), and I hadn’t This intriguing. However, the reviews at the time of release were not terrifyingAlthough it probably should be.
AFTER has enough merits to stand out from the FPS games that were coming out at the time. Interestingly, using the SlaveDriver engine, the game was much better in 3D environments, even though they were incredibly basic. It’s also a lot weirder, with the default weapon being a frying pan, the main character a chef, and walking butts as enemies.
The story follows Ox, a protagonist who finds herself stranded in the far reaches of space where the locals are hostile. There isn’t much of a storyline in the game itself, so it doesn’t stray too far from many FPS games of the period, down to the abstract environments.
But the level design is completely different than most of what you saw at the time. The environments are often huge, open spaces. You move around using a jetpack most of the time. That’s pretty impressive, considering the hallways were a major location for gunfights in the ’90s. Never mind that many surfaces are just flat-shaded, at least we’re not looking at filthy walls.
Having enormous environments meant that the game’s creators were delving into uncharted territory, and while I dare say there’s a fair amount of talent in the game, AFTERit does not create a pleasant whole.
The goal of each level is simply to find the teleporter, but the developers had to make it a challenge somehow. Often, that means searching through labyrinthine environments looking for that damn thing, but there are also times where the objective isn’t so clear. Sometimes you have to kill all the enemies in the area, while other times you have to activate a series of switches to advance.
The maze-like environments are bad enough. As I said, many of the textures are just flat colors. This can be incredibly disorienting, especially when you add AFTER propensity for verticality. I never got stuck, but I think that was largely just random. However, I often felt uncomfortable and regularly very disoriented. Sometimes I stumbled upon the location of a teleporter within moments of starting a level, and of the game’s three secret levels, two of them I found by complete mistake.
I did not do to want find those secret levels. The normal levels were painful enough that I didn’t want to drag it out any longer. These were the first balmy teleporters I could cuddle up to, and they betrayed me.
I found myself comparing AFTER Down William Shatner’s TekWar for most of the game’s duration. TekWar also liked to experiment with open environments. But most strikingly, they both have the same approach to balancing difficulty.
Since many levels are enormous, open areas, this can mean that there will be a lot of enemies constantly shooting at you from all sides. The worst enemies are the flying ones, as they are incredibly arduous to hit on medium settings. Even if you stay mobile and fly around with a jetpack, you will still get hit a lot. There is not much choice, the damage will happen.
To balance this out, AFTER gives you a huge health bar and scatters healing items in stacks all over the place. To make later levels harder, they just reduce the number of health stacks they provide. I mean, it works, but it’s the least thoughtful and elegant way to do it. It also means the screen flashes a lot and your dude constantly grunts. It’s not a very fun experience.
Speaking of sounds, there’s almost no music. I had to check to see if it was just a bug that prevented music from playing during levels, but there really isn’t any.
This Final Edition is undoubtedly the best way to experience AFTER. The switch to the KEX engine means it can handle higher resolutions and interpolation to polished out movement. It also means you can look with a mouse, something that wasn’t possible on the 3DO or PS1.
Nightdive did a great job of improving AFTER. They didn’t go all the way with it, like they did with some of the previous titles. I asked business development director Larry Kuperman if they had updated the graphics in any way. “Yes, in terms of graphics,” he said. “More improved than reworked.” He also said, “I’m not sure I want to compare what we did for AFTER to anything close Dark forces“Zoey.”
So, compared to Star Wars: The Dark Forces remaster, it’s not as thoroughly reworked. Enemies are still low-res pixel conglomerates. There were no cutscenes to remake either. It’s largely “just” a source port, but it still does wonders for the game. But considering that AFTER it is not a guaranteed seller like in the game with star Wars the name is on it, so it’s no wonder they didn’t do a major facelift.
The best thing I can say about AFTER is that it can be completed in about three hours. Other than that, I really didn’t like it. It’s not the worst first-person shooter I’ve played. For all its problems, at least it’s not flat. It has its strengths, shows a capable development team with a willingness to experiment, it just didn’t result in a fun final product.
I also have to praise Nightdive for having the courage to remaster a game that can’t even claim cult status. AFTER It’s not insanely bad, but it would probably be better if it was. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard it mentioned in conversation. I might never have played it if it weren’t for Nightdive, and for that I’m grateful in a very strange way. Even when a game is unclear or just plain bad, I always like it when they dust it off and bring it back up to speed. I just never want to play it again.
