Terminator Salvation

"Did I die during Judgement Day and go to Hell? No, I'm just playing Terminator Salvation..."

Terminator Salvation is the tie-in to the film of the same name, but make no mistake; it doesn't follow the storyline of the film, but rather tells a plot that takes place some two years before the film's. Unfortunately, in an attempt to release the game at the same time as the film, production was rushed, and what we ended up with was along the same idea as if you were to mix up some cake batter, put it in the oven, set the timer for twenty minutes, and let it bake for only five...doesn't taste too good, does it?

Storyline - 5

Basically, John Conner being a macho leader as far as the films go was a total crock. He's a whiny boy that gets ordered around by everyone and is actually losing faith in humanity due to the war that he's supposed to be taking control of. As Arnie would say, he's a girly-man. Two years before the events of the film, John's team is engaged in battle and ends up being captured. The rest of the game involves John, controlled by you, heading to Skynet on a rescue mission. Along the way, there are some interesting moments, but nothing jaw-droppingly shocking or awe-inspiring. It's not the best story out there, but for what it's worth and in the context of the world the game is set in, it gets the job done.

Strangely, it really doesn't do anything to set up the film's plot, which makes me wonder why it had to be rushed so much in order to meet the release date.

Graphics - 7

The graphics are pretty good. Now and then, some issues occur though. This game is basically the most unpolished game ever. However, there are some nice visuals to be seen. The environments, though sometimes empty and lifeless, usually look pretty good, and you'd believe that you were in a post-nuclear-holocaust LA. Ruined buildings full of cracks and holes blasted out of the walls, surrounded by rusted cars and debris amidst the untamed grass that grows wildly from the crevasses and cracks in the roads make up most of what you'll be traversing. Characters are also nicely detailed, and the weapon models in particular are nice to look at.

Unfortunately, as I mentioned the lack of polish, characters' faces have very little emotion, and no attempt to lip-sync was made at all. Instead, whoever's talking will just wiggle their eyebrows as their mouths open and close continuously until their voice stops, which will undoubtedly make you reminisce about the good ol' old days of the PS2. Clipping is also a common occurrence, with static 2D grass everywhere, broken pipes that spew streams of water down and through characters, puddles that reflect things that aren't even in the area (like the tops of buildings and trees while you're inside a subway tunnel, for instance), and enemies that sometimes feel a little lazy and decide that it'd be much easier to walk through a wall than to go around it. Glass can't be shot out or broken, much of the environment is indestructible, though some obstacles can be destroyed by gunfire, and everything more than about fifty meters away becomes incredibly blurry, which is a big problem because many of the enemies that you'll be battling will be that far away or more.

Other things, such as everything, seem to randomly blur out as well, but it's not quite as noticeable. The bad being said, explosions look really nice, the lighting system is simple yet superb, some nice use of blur actually is used purposefully (when you aim, for instance, the camera zooms in and John becomes blurry while the muzzle of his weapon sharpens, which is a small detail, but it looks pretty nice). I also liked that, unlike many other games, there weren't huge plumes of flame erupting from your weapons when you fired them; most other games make rifles look like flame-throwers. Overall, the game looks nice enough, but you'll certainly notice a few bugs along the way.

Sound/ Music - 7

The sound is generic. Bangs, clangs, muted gunfire, and soft explosions. Voice-acting is also pretty bland, with no real emotion in anyone's voice. Common and Moon Bloodgood reprise their roles from the film, both in likeness and in voice, but Mr. Bale apparently opted not to lend either...I guess he got a chance to play this game first, eh? EH!? Meh...a poor attempt at humour. Anyway, like I said, none of the voice-work is that good anyway, and for some reason, everyone's voice has a really strong echo, as if they were inside a tunnel, which sounds great when you actually are inside a tunnel, but kinda throws you off when you're outside in the middle of an empty street.

The music, on the other hand, was quite fitting, for the most part. Lots of classic Terminator tunes were thrown in, and the original stuff is usually on the money, save for one totally random techno/head-banging rave track that plays for a few minutes in one part of game...you'll know it when you hear it. Overall, a pretty piss-poor attempt at sound and vocals, but the music makes up for it.

Controls - 6

Why 6? Because you'd better get used to them. Aside from inverting the up/down input and adjusting your look-speed, the controls are uncustomizable. They work well, but if you could, you'd change at least something. And even after you get used to the controls, the look-speed is still jacked. I had mine cranked up to the max and I was still turning slower than...well, something that turns pretty damn slow. Don't want any TOS violations, now do I?

Gameplay - 6

Okay, let's say this right off the bat: this game is a mixed bag. On the surface, it looks pretty good, and in all honesty, it is. Unfortunately, it lacks some very key components that it so desperately needs.

The game plays more or less like a clone of Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter 2. Everything, save for one part of the game, takes place in 3rd person over-the-shoulder view. John can run, John can walk, John can aim, John can take cover behind certain objects, John can shoot and throw grenades...John cannot do anything else. The bulk of the game has you and at least one other AI-controlled team-mate running through linear levels and making frequent stops to fight off groups of machines. During these fights, the name of the game is to take cover, flank the enemy, and take them out, as Skynet decided that the best design concept for it's human-hunters would be to have the rear of their chassis constructed of Lego. Shooting your enemies head-on is a waste of ammo and your health so you need to get behind them.

Most of the time, there are many different areas that you can move to to get the advantage on the baddies, but many times throughout, you'll be unable to get anywhere advantageous, and end up having to take the enemy head-on. Your team-mates, AI-driven and totally autonomous, are the key to flanking the enemy, as their primary role serves as creating a distraction for the enemy while you sneak up from behind...unfortunately, the key doesn't quite fit the lock. Enemies, once they spot you, which is usually impossible to prevent as you move from cover to cover, will usually focus all of their fire on you, and though your team-mates will constantly fire at enemies (if they feel like it), you can't give them any commands whatsoever, so they go where they feel like and shoot at who they feel like when they feel like. This makes the battles very tedious, as you almost have to plan your strategy around what your team-mates decide to do. Often, rather than using them as a distraction and sneaking around to flank the enemy, you'll end up being the distraction yourself...I guess John's still waiting to get onto the Resistance's leadership course or something. To add insult to injury, throughout the battle, you'll hear John yell things like "We've got to flank them!" and your team-mates shouting out things like "Let's flank this one!" only to have them not actually do anything. And if the battles couldn't be more annoying, well, they are. The cover system, which looks good upon first glance, is incredibly broken. Basically, you press a button to pin yourself against something. From there, you can pop out, exposing yourself to enemy fire, and shoot back accurately, or you can safely-yet-inaccurately blind fire. You can also shimmy back and fourth, and if there's another object close by, you can execute a move that quickly moves John to that piece of cover. It sounds good, but the flaws with the system are enough to practically make it useless.

First of all, you can only advance from cover to cover; you cannot withdraw or move backwards. It doesn't sound like a huge deal, but consider the fact that John can't crouch...yes, I'll say that again, John cannot crouch. This is a shooting game, and you cannot crouch. You can pin yourself to waist-level cover and John will duck behind it, but if you need to move somewhere that the cover system won't allow you to, you need to unpin yourself, forcing you to stand up, and run to wherever you're trying to go. You can fire your weapon inaccurately from the hip as you run, but since the principle concept behind the design of Skynet's machines is that whole "it has no fear" deal, they won't be running for cover when a few 5-5-6ers come their way.

This brings us to problem numero deux: only certain objects can be used for cover. Usually, you'll be able to find something close by, but as the machines close in on you, especially the T-600s, you'll need to relocate from time to time, and apparently, the machines in the game have indeed become self-aware and have begun to learn on their own, because the developers, for the most part, only programmed the majority of cover objects to allow you to take cover on one specific side of whatever it may be, even if you should be able to take cover on either side. Here's a perfect example of what I mean: You take cover behind a box. A T-600 comes walking towards you. Now if a T-600 gets close to you, it will lazily swing its arm, killing you instantly regardless of whether it actually touched you, whether you're behind cover, etc. So you unpin yourself and move to the opposite side of the box as the T-600 passes on the other side. You attempt to take cover again, but you can't...uh...yeah, John Conner to Command, I'm an idiot, over. So now, you've got to do things the old fashioned way; stepping out, firing a few shots, and retreating before you get lit up.

Problem # 3: you can't switch the perspective of the camera; it's ALWAYS over John's right shoulder, which is great if you're trying to look around a left-hand corner...not so great for right-hand corners. The enemy sees you long before you see them, since John is always taking up the entire left-hand side of the screen, and the camera is facing John's left, forcing you to look much farther to the right than necessary in order to aim, exposing you to more fire than necessary, and draining your life bar.

Let's discuss problem four, shall we? Here we go: you have an auto-regenerating life bar. That is to say that your life automatically fills up...after you kill everything. Unless you kill everything in an area, you can't heal yourself at all. Well, okay, every now and then, your life bar will fill back up, but I think it's a randomly occurring glitch, because near as I can tell, it happens whenever it damn-well feels like doing it. And since machines take so much damage to go down, a hasty retreat may be necessary instead, so you turn around and see an obstacle blocking your path.

Problem number five (yeah, we're still going on with this): John can't jump. John can't climb over stuff. John has to run around something if it's in his way, even if it's an ankle-high piece of debris. Hell, I'd be surprised if John could even fight his way over a bumper that's fallen off of one of the rusted cars that block his path through 90% of the journey. Furthermore, if you're on what the developers deemed to be the "bad" side of the obstacle, you won't be able to take cover on it either, so you're running out in the open.

Does this sound like fun yet? Okay, I'm being a little too harsh here. The battles generally play out well, and these issues aren't constant issues. But every now and then, you'll find yourself in a situation where you'll think back to this review, because you know that after reading it, you're gonna try the game out just for kicks, and you'll say to yourself "Yeah, that 'You_Need_A_Life' guy was a total D-bag, but he was so right on the money with that review!" On the plus side of things, there's loads of enemies to battle at a time...well, it's the same enemies over and over again, but there's a lot of them at a time...sorry for the confusion. T-7 Spider bots, T-600 Terminators, and Aero-Stats attack you in constant waves, and a few other enemies show up here and there, but those three are what you'll be dealing with for the majority of the game. Not a lot of variety, but it's not like Skynet really gives a damn about personality, eh? A really cool aspect to the enemies is that they all show damage in real-time. The fins on Aero-Stats get blown off with each hit, panels and guns get torn off of the T-7 Spiderbots as they absorb your rounds, and the Skin-job T-600s show up fully skinned, and as you pelt them with 5.56 x 45mm NATO Ball cartridge, their rubber flesh gets shredded apart, revealing the hyper-alloy combat chassis within, as sparks fly from their tattered breast-plates, too damaged to contain the electrical charge powering their frame within.

Different weapons have different effects too, sorta, but it's minimal, and what you have access to is minimal as well. You get an Assault Rifle, a Shotgun, a Light Machine Gun, different types of ranged explosives, and two types of grenades. The problem here, as you know by now that there's a problem with everything in this game, is that you can only carry two different weapons at any time, and very little ammo is available. I mean, you can carry a lot of rounds usually, but good luck finding them. Usually, you'll be carrying no more than four magazines for your rifle for instance. They're forty-rounders, but still. After a single RPG round direct to the chest, it still takes up to two magazines to finish off a T-600...and now you understand that by saying that you can carry two different weapons, I really mean you can only carry one weapon, because you're kinda gonna have to always have a Rocket Launcher on you. Sure, you could use your Grenades, but consider this one: you're limited to five Grenades and two Pipe Bombs. It takes about three Grenades to kill anything weaker than a T-600, and I'm doubtful that all five would be capable of taking one down. Pipe Bombs are about as powerful as an RPG round, you get two of them, and you remember what I said about a single RPG round being incapable of bringing down a T-600. Your ranged explosives are also limited to three or four rounds depending on what you've got, so each battle basically consists of you firing a rocket at each T-600 and then hoping you've got enough ammo in your Rifle or Shotgun to finish them off, because no matter what, your team-mates will never carry or use any type of explosives.

When you run low on ammo for the Assault Rifle or Shotgun, your team-mates usually give you more, but you need to actually touch them to get it, which means making your way all the way back to them without a jump button or a crouch button, and I've been in situations where my team didn't give me any ammo even after I made my helpless ass back to them, forcing me to backtrack in hopes of finding something else to use. On the plus side, by the time I got back, most of the enemies were dead, so I guess the team isn't totally out to lunch. Though yet again, here comes that catch: if you wander too far from certain battles, you get a game over for "leaving the battle." Are you having fun yet? What else is kinda funny is that enemies, until they're alerted to your presence, will usually patrol the area, searching for something to kill...why this is funny is because they usually only care about John Conner...Skynet probably just wants to put him out of the misery that is this game so badly that it forgot to program its machines to hunt for other people. What I'm getting at is that you enter an area with your team-mates, they spot the machine, disperse, take up positions, and begin firing at it...while it walks back and fourth, scanning the area until it actually spots you, the player. Until that happens, you might as well pull up a chair and watch your pals pelt it with bullets for a few hours until they break through it's armour. That aside, the scanning effect is actually pretty cool, so it's not all bad!

Anyway, that's the bulk of the game. Every now and then, you'll take on the challenge of riding in a vehicle and attacking enemies with a mounted weapon. These segments are a little amusing, but feel really tacked on, and only last for a couple of minutes anyway. One such segment, however, is actually designed really well, and that would be the instance of you controlling one of the Hunter Killer Tanks, with a complete HUD detailing weapon status, a functioning radar display, a compass showing where your turrets are facing in relation to where your tracks are facing (not that it really matter, since you have no control over any of the movement that your vehicles make during these segments, but it's cool nonetheless), and a targeting reticule that displays both your level of accuracy when targeting an enemy and an info panel about the machine that you're looking at. A very cool segment, which unfortunately ends almost as soon as it begins.

Overall, the game pretends to be fun, and if you can ignore the countless problems, such as frequent slow-downs, freezes, system lock-ups, graphical glitches, and crappy design in general, you'll certainly have a blast. And if not, the game will certainly make you have a blast anyway, most likely in the form of holding a gun to your temple and squeezing the trigger. The game is also very short...make that incredibly short. In eight hours of my first experience with this game, I beat it once on Normal mode, and once on Hard mode. There are nine levels, and should they allow you to play through without something screwing up and forcing you to reset/reboot/etc., they last about ten minutes a piece. You'd think that with such a short game, they'd have had time to fix all of the crap that they screwed up on, but I guess the entire production team was comprised of the night-staff janitor or something. Also, when John walks, we wiggles his butt like snooty girls do when they walk. Just thought I'd throw that one in there for good measure. At least the loading screen is really cool, until it freezes and crashes your PS3.

Multiplayer - 5

Online multiplayer...what shooting game needs it? Well, just about all of them, whether it be Player Vs Player, or straight-forward Co-op. This game features no online play at all. Yay? Well, there is a local, as in split-screen Co-op mode. It's actually pretty welcome here, because the game is so low on the quality scale that you won't really be looking to have a deep, compelling multiplayer experience anyway. Instead, you'll hook up with a buddy, toss them your spare controller, and spend a few hours playing the game as it was actually supposed to be played, flanking the enemy and out-maneuvering them, and laughing about how the game is so bad that it's actually good, much like those hilariously awful Steven Seagal films, and then they'll go home and you'll have probably lost that person as a friend for making them play the game.

The nice thing about the game is that, unlike other games that feature Co-op modes, you can play Co-op right from the get-go; no having to complete the solo campaign first to slow you down, and all three difficulties are available from the start as well. Not many games these days allow for split-screen gaming anymore, so it's kinda nice. You can also play Co-op mode right in the middle of the game as well, so if you're halfway through the game and your buddy hasn't seen how incredibly wonderful this game is, you might be able to trick him into playing it without having to start from the beginning again. You can't choose your character though; player 1 is always John, and player 2 is always Blair Williams. I guess if your friend happens to be a tomboy, she won't mind. Otherwise, I guess you'll be fighting each other for controller 1.

Replay Value - 3

Like I said, everything is open from the start. That's difficulties and the Co-op mode. What you see is what you get; there's no bonus content, no secret levels, no cheat options to unlock...in fact, the only thing you unlock by completing the game is a level select option, so that you can go back and replay your least-hated mission whenever you want...well, if the game doesn't crash first.

There is Trophy support, but get this: you get a Gold for beating each mission on any difficulty, so that's nine right there, plus a Gold for beating the game on Normal or higher, plus another Gold for beating the game on Hard, which makes eleven Golds, and a Platinum for getting them all, and when you consider that Hard mode is available right away, you can finish this game 100% and get that Platinum by simply beating the game once on Hard mode. They didn't even bother adding anything for beating the game in Co-op mode...guess they didn't want to force players to make their friends endure it, which probably would result in hefty law-suits over personal grievance or something. So that being said, you beat the game once on Hard mode and you're done.

Some parts are fun and all, so, you could replay the game if you really want to, but you won't find anything that you missed the first time. The Co-op mode tacks on an extra two points to the Replay score. Otherwise, the game would get a 1.

Overall - 5

The game tried, and the developers failed. The sad thing is that this game probably could have been really good. If you love cheesy shooters with no real substance, you'll probably like the game until the bugs get the better of you. Co-op mode might be a little more enjoyable, but you seriously might as well play GRAW2 instead. It's basically everything that this game wants to be, only, y'know, good.

Try it out if you're interested; I read about how bad it was and just had to see it for myself. Luckily, since they were right, I was able to get the game brand new for $30 as opposed to the retail cost of $60. Nonetheless, $30 is still way too much, even new, so if you're gonna get this game, either rent it, wait for it to hit the bargain bin which it should already be in as far as I'm concerned, or better yet, just steal a copy. Whoever the original owner is, chances are that they'll be better off without it...just don't tell the Officers that I told you to do it!

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 11/09/09

Game Release: Terminator Salvation (US, 05/19/09)