Terminator Salvation

"Loading Screen: The Game"

Terminator Salvation has a great deal of potential in the medium of video games. Think about it: computers taking over the world, mankind struggling to survive and reclaim the world, and lots of neat weaponry. As an original concept for a video game, this might have been excellent. As a quick movie based cash in, it's not. Let's find out why.

Graphics – 5/10

Since we're almost 4 years into the life of the Xbox 360, even quick cash in movie based games have at least mediocre graphics. Terminator Salvation is no exception. The graphics are simply mediocre. It's nothing to get overly excited about, but the world does look pretty good. Salvation paints a pretty good picture of a desolate world, with much of the landscape including destroyed buildings, cars, and other such things you would expect in a post-apocalyptic world. The character models are decent. As long as you can look at them without looking at the animations that accompany them, you'll probably be pleased with the models. The buildings you explore and see in the background look fine, and the enemies look pretty cool the first time you see them. Oh, and the loading screen looks cool the first time you see that, too. Really, the graphical foundation itself is passable. Everything else dealing with graphics is bad.

Let's start with the animations. They suck. You'll notice the lip-syncing right away. There isn't any. The characters move their lips with generic animations that never match up with what they're saying. This might be nit-picking, but this heavily detracts from the seriousness of the game. The post-apocalyptic world is meant to be quite serious. Besides lip syncing, the animations during cutscenes are rather kerskuffled as well. The animations are pretty jumpy; sometimes you expect characters' heads to roll off of their shoulders when they're moving. You've seen it before if you've seen any sort of animations that simply have the barebones animation down but are lacking any sort of polish. It's not fun to look at. You won't have much fun looking at weapon damage, either. Enemies emit a slight blue aura when heavily damaged or destroyed, and their parts disappear. Worse are the explosions from your weaponry. I'm pretty sure one of the weapons was supposed to be a grenade launcher, but to us, it was a Deku nut launcher. Really, it wasn't even that good - Deku nuts definitely had better explosions than the grenade launcher in this game. The RPG suffers the same pitiful explosions, and the physical damage you do is generally underwhelming. It doesn't make you feel powerful, or, you know, like you're having fun.

When you're making a game, there are certain graphical techniques you can use to make the world you're creating more believable. Stuff like drawing objects off screen THEN showing them, or rendering objects under an overlay THEN showing them are good techniques to avoid objects popping in the screen and making it completely unreal and thus detracting from players' absorption into the game. This is especially important during cutscenes. You really can't avoid all pop-in while playing the game, but during the cutscenes, what the player sees should be completely controlled by the developers. There are parts of Salvation that must have put the QA department asleep enough that they didn't notice some obvious graphical flaws that don't use the techniques listed above. An example that immediately pops into my head (pun intended) is a cutscene with a bus on the highway. The bus just magically appears right in the middle of the highway after you've gotten about a second to stare at an empty highway, then it starts moving and it becomes the bus the characters are riding in. This isn't a game breaking flaw, but it's a simple place where some polish would have done a lot. Oh, and whenever you see the train, there's nobody in it, even though there are supposed to be lots of people in it. The game simply needed more polish in this area. It could have been much better.

Sound – 6/10

Let's start with the music. It's good...for the most part. I hope you like the Terminator theme, as you will be hearing it a lot. I like the Terminator theme, but I don't like hearing a million variations of it and nothing else. There are times in the game when you aren't hearing the Terminator theme, like the loading screen, but you'll be hearing some variation of the theme more often than not. When the theme isn't playing, you'll hear some soft music that doesn't hurt your ears and is actually appropriate. I thought this was well done. If the music isn't going to be awesome, at least make it unobtrusive. There were a few parts that the music escalated to a respectable amount of epicness and I felt like I was playing an actual game with the actual desire to destroy some machines and save some soldiers, but these moments literally lasted only a few seconds when the games flaws game back to hit me in the face. Example: the music gets epic when John tells his companions to ignore the machines and run to the exit near the end of a particular level. The music supports this, you feel epic, and you run to the exit...and die in seconds. Why would John command his units to commit suicide and play great music to back up those suicidal actions? I don't know, but I definitely died there after thinking the game actually wanted me to do something different than fight repetitively. My bad. That was off topic; I apologize. More flaws aplenty wait in the gameplay section.

The rest of the sound (SFX, voice acting) is subpar. The weapons themselves actually sound decent. The good automatic weapon sounds pretty powerful - but don't be fooled, it's not. The explosions sound fairly realistic, not overwhelming, but the sounds definitely don't match the pitiful explosions. The machines make a few sounds, like walking or firing weapons, and they're passable - nothing special. The voice acting is entirely hit or miss. Some characters were fortunate enough to get actors from the movie to voice their roles in the game. Although John Connor definitely isn't one of them, his voice is still decent. The voices that actually got actors from the movie are pretty good, and you'll be able to tell them apart from the other voice actors that were hired off the streets. It goes without saying that the other voice actors were horrible. However, what really destroyed the voice acting was the awful script. I will stab my ears with a letter opener if I hear "aerostats, oh no!" or "Oh no, aerostats!" or "Oh, aerostats, no!" again. I'm pretty sure they hit the 'random' button in notepad and that became the script. It's hard to deliver good lines when the lines themselves suck. The actors from the movie had some potential to deliver a good script, if something beyond complete garbage had been given to them. I imagine it must have been frustrating for the voice actors. To equate it to typing a review, it must have been as restricting as stringing me up by my right foot and making me type a review with only my left pinky toe...while making me play Terminator Salvation. There's simply only so much you can do with that, and in Salvation, it's not much.

Story – 1/10

I'll make this quick, since I don't want to spoil much. This isn't the story from the movie. It's a prequel, and it's not an engaging story. The character development is completely flat, except for a few cliche developments that happen late in the game. Maybe the developers found some fan fiction on the interwebs and used that as a story. It's very unsatisfying, which is unfortunate, since it's not going to help your drive to advance in the game because you know the story is so shallow. I've got one big complaint here, and a minor spoiler to accompany it (skip the rest of the paragraph if you want): the game really hypes up the Harvester enemy when he shows up and blows things up, including lots of your allies. You run away from him for about 30 seconds, unable to even fight him at that moment. I personally took this as major foreshadowing that the Harvester would end up being a pretty awesome boss, maybe even the final boss. He didn't end up even being a boss at all! John just subdues the Harvester while it's sleeping, or recharging…or rebooting, or something. It was very disappointing.

Gameplay – 2/10

Ah, finally. The meat of the game. The meat of this game happens to be a few cranberries worth of fun. Where do I begin? How about your general goal throughout the game: getting from point A to point B and killing some machines along the way. That's it. No puzzles or anything like that. It most missions, you'll be walking to your goal. There are a few on rails missions, but they're not much different. Your boundaries in each level are distinctly marked by destroyed cars and other such debris. It actually looks pretty ridiculous how nicely the destroyed cars are organized in the level design. I've heard some people complain about how the levels are somewhat maze-like, but I can't see that. The levels are completely linear. The only time I couldn't see where to go is when you need to walk up a mountain of debris that looks just like everything else. It happens a few times, but it only stops you for a few seconds and everything else is linear. If you get lost, follow a companion - they always go the right way.

Your other goal? Get past the loading screens. They are ridiculously long. Considering that the game isn't loading anything but a bunch of crap, it makes it that much worse. After seeing more loading screens than I ever wanted to see in my life, I finally figured out that you can control the camera with the left analog stick during the loading screens. You can move it down to see the terminator's teeth. Very cool. This is most of the fun you're going to have during the entire game, so enjoy it. Trust me, you have plenty of time to, since the loading takes such a long time. On the other hand, you can probably start a loading screen then head off to 8 hours of work while the game loads. When you get back, it might be halfway done. Okay, I'm exaggerating, but when actual good games take much less time to load, you wonder what's going wrong.

You'll encounter several enemies during your trip through L.A. in Salvation. By several, I mean around 7. That's it. There's flying enemies, spiders, some terminators (the game says 2 types, but they're all the same), a big ship that's the only pseudo-boss in the game, some motorcycles, gun turrets, and a harvester. That's all I can think of. I may have missed one or two. The harvester shouldn't count, you see him for about thirty seconds and he can't do very much to you. That's all you see! On top of that, 90% of those enemy encounters are aerostats, spiders, or T-600s. It gets old fast. Perhaps the worst part is that there are NO bosses. None. The big ship I mentioned sort of serves as a boss in the first level, but he takes three hits from an RPG and he's dead. I know it takes time to make bosses in games, but then again, there's no excuse not to have them in a game like this. Maybe I was expecting a lot. When no bosses showed up in the game, I was hoping Arnold would barge in during the last level, decapitate my entire team, and I'd be forced to have a one on one match with Arnold as the final boss.

As for the weapons, there are around 9 of them. Two automatic weapons, a shotgun, a RPG, a Deku nut launcher, two types of grenades, and two types of turrets. The turrets are only available in certain circumstances, so you can't carry those. The two types of grenades are the same, I don't know why they split them up. The RPG never has any ammo except for the last level, and the Deku nut launcher shows up late in the game. You'll be using the horrible automatic weapons and the shotgun. Actually, just the shotgun, the automatic weapons suck. You're really only using two weapons - the shotgun and the grenades. There is no variety in these weapons, so I hope you like them - they only add to the repetition of the game. I already talked about the underwhelming explosions of these weapons, so you get no fun there. In short, don't expect much from the weapons and enemies in this game. It's the same thing all the way through.

But what about the fighting itself? The cover system? The...running? It's boring. Your goal for pretty much every encounter is to flank the enemies so one player can constantly shoot at the weak point. This is the case for every_single_encounter. The aerostats can just be blasted out of the air, but they're rarely alone - you'll mostly be flanking spiders and T-600s. The cover system is pretty intuitive, but nothing ground breaking. You can move behind your cover and dash to other areas of cover by holding the analog stick in the right direction and just hitting A. As you might expect, whenever you aim, you are partially exposed over your cover and are vulnerable, but thankfully they included the option to blind fire. This comes in pretty handy, and you can be fairly accurate with it. You'll be using cover the whole game, since the machines will decimate you if you are out in the open, especially later in the game. It's quite similar to Gears of War. It's quite stolen from Gears of War. You always need to be hidden by cover, and you always need to flank the enemy. Which brings me to my next item:

PLAY THE GAME WITH A FRIEND...if you actually want to play this at all. With a friend, you play split screen and it actually becomes almost fun. At least it's bearable when you're playing with a friend, and that's because there is a minimum amount of fun that comes from playing co-op with any game. It's much easier to flank enemies with a friend, and you can revive each other if one of you dies. If you play this alone, you're going to be stabbing yourself in the face because the partner AI is much less than stellar. You'll come across situations where you simply can't do anything because you can't get behind the machine because your partner is being an idiot and getting at an enemy's weak point means going to an area you can't possibly get to without dying. You just have to die there, restart, and try to do better. With two players, this problem is mostly circumvented. It makes the game playable, and extremely easy. Play it on hard if you want any sort of challenge. Unfortunately, the big problem remains the same in both styles of play: you're doing the same thing over and over again until you beat the game. Even with a friend, it is simply devoid of fun most of the time.

Replay Value – 0/10

Zero. Play it once, get the achievements, throw it away. Clocking in at no more than four hours, this game is a ripoff. There's no online anything. It's bad enough that the game sucks to play, but actually paying money for it is ridiculous. If you played the game single player, providing that you didn't stab yourself in the face after doing so, you might want to try it with a friend. Don't play it on anything less than hard if you do. Again, the game is really short with only 9 missions...but you don't really notice that, since you see so many long loading screens that you mostly refer to the game's activities between loading screens. Yeah, between loading screens 34 and 35, I killed a few T-600s. I can't say much more than that. You won't like the game, so why play it again? Use the disc as a Frisbee. Put it in a toaster. Get some fun out of it.

In conclusion, this isn't the worst game I've ever played, but it's pretty bad. If you and a friend are bored some night, please just rent this piece of crap, and only do it if you are completely out of things to do (i.e. the paint has finished drying so you can't watch it, etc). Don't buy it. Maybe if developers stop getting money for these inane games, they'll stop making them so badly. Or maybe they'll go out of business and we can concentrate on good games. Or better yet, maybe the development studios will be TERMINATED.

Score - 3/10
"I played it for the easy Gamerscore."

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 07/09/09

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