Terminator Salvation

By Gareth Von Kallenbach

On the heals of the release of Terminator Salvation, Warner Brothers interactive have released the video game tie in for the film. Terminator Salvation is a third person action game that puts gamers squarely into the fight as John Connor who must battle Skynet and save humanity. The Connor gamers play is prior to becoming the leader of the resistance and eventual savior of humanity.

The game is set in and around Los Angeles and involves a series of missions where players must battle Skynet to rescue some fellow resistance fighters who claim to have big news about what Skynet is up to. Written off by the high command, Connor and his crew defy orders to try to save the missing resistance members and along the way battle a deadly assortment of enemies.

Skynet is not about to miss the chance to wipe out any human survivors, and has dispatched everything from flying hunter killer to T600 Terminator units to kill any non machine they encounter. The game is done in stages and features a checkpoint based saved system that can get annoying as having to play segments of a mission again and again gets old fast.

Players have a variety of weapons from shotguns, rifles, grenades, pipe bombs, rocket launchers, and mounted weapons that are in some of the games vehicle segments as well as at certain strategic locales.

At first the game was fun, despite the aged graphics and uninspired voice acting. I was able to overlook that the PC version of the game was clearly a rushed port of the console versions and sadly only offered a co-op version of the game but get this, for players using the same computer. In 2009, I would expect some form of online play, not having to share my computer with someone to play.

The A.I. in the game is nothing exciting as enemies tend to run the same patterns over and over and only offer a challenge when in large numbers.

Another issue I had with the game was with the highly repetitive nature of the game. It was bad enough that the game was an on rails game, but to face the same enemies over and over again become old quickly. 

In the end, Terminator Salvation held alot of promise but it delivers a rushed and unspectacular game that is not worthy of the film on which is it based or the Terminator name.

Game: Terminator Salvation
System: PC
Players: 1-2
Online: No
Developer: GRIN
Distributor: Evolved Games / Equity Games Productions (EGI)

Rating: 35%

(Ratings Key/Explanation)

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