Future Wars

Future Wars is played by left-clicking for character movement, and right-clicking for character actions. The actions available in the right-click popup menu are: Operate, Examine, Take, Use and Inventory. "Use" had a subcategory which enabled the player to drag and select the items in their inventory.

The gameplay of Future Wars was unforgiving - the game suffered from an extremely linear story coupled with the fact that quite often, items found at certain stages of the game would be used much later. As the game did not exactly give hints about the missing items, a player progressing through the game without the help of a walkthrough was forced to restore the game from some arbitrary earlier moment to check for any missing objects. Some objects in the game spanned only a few pixels, so to find them, the player would often have to resort to pixel hunting. The fact that the game used a "realistic" approach to examining on-screen objects, so descriptions varied depending on how far from an item player was at the time, did not help either. All that meant that the game could be quite challenging despite its seemingly simple, linear story. Adding to the difficulty, the game also featured a few time-based puzzles as well as arcade sequences, which could pose difficulties for less arcade-savvy players.