BUY IT FROM AMAZON: RIGHT HERE!PLATFORM: Xbox 360 (reviewed), PS3, PC
ESRB RATING: T
DEVELOPER: Grin
PUBLISHER: Warner Bros Interactive Entertainment
This game is living proof that Skynet will never rise. Computers are just not that smart.
THE PITCH
“We already fucked Terminator fans by giving the latest film to McG, so who cares if the video game is good? Just make it!”
Not-Christian Bale plays John Conner, as he fights waves after waves of the same robots alongside Moon Bloodgood and Common while hiding behind destructible cover.
THE PLAY
While Grin did a decent job with Wanted: Weapons of Fate, they really dropped the ball here.
Terminator Salvation controls like Gears of War-lite. It’s all about hiding behind cover and sliding to more cover. It controls almost exactly the same as GoW actually, with the same buttons and combos- you can even blind fire or hold down the left trigger to pop out and aim at your foes. When it works, that is. The game is really buggy and will only allow you to aim when you’re hiding behind certain points of cover and aiming in certain directions.
You fight alongside some fellow soldiers who are actually pretty good at taking out enemies themselves, sometimes letting you just hide behind cover and take a nap while they take care of you problems. Some hero of the resistance! You have a life bar that will replenish itself magically when all the enemies in the room are dead. Here are all the enemies in THE ENTIRE GAME and the strategies to beat them!
Little flying robots. One shot from the shotgun will bring them down, or around four bullets from a machinegun.
Big crawly robots. You have to get behind them and shoot them 3 or 4 times in their weak spot, or just shoot an rpg at them from the front. Simple!
T-600s. Two shots from the RPG or Grenade launcher, or two pipe bombs will take them down no problem.
T-600s with rubber skin, aka skinjobs. Same!
CHUDTIP- Don’t buy this game.
Hunter-Killers. Just shoot at them, they’re big and mean but less of a threat than the T-600s, and there are only two or three in the whole game.
Besides a couple of enemies you shoot at during on-rails chase sequences, that’s it. It doesn’t help that every shooting sequence is exactly the same. You’ll face three of the flying guys at a time, a couple of the spider robots and then maybe a Terminator or two. Each section of the game (which you’ll know you’re at because there are plenty of the infamous waist-high walls around) only lasts a few minutes, and then you run down a corridor or street for a bit until a cutscene starts up. Rinse, wash, repeat, contemplate suicide.
CHUDTIP- Do you hate money? Seriously, don’t be a sucker.
Your choice of weapons is a shotgun, two machineguns, an RPG launcher and a grenade launcher, but none of those matter since by the end all you’re going to be doing is hurling pipe bombs. That’s the easiest way to kill the T-600s, and when you figure this out the game becomes less about getting into cover and strategically shooting the enemy than it does finding stockpiles of weapons and just spamming the robots. Thankfully there are more guns, grenades and pipe bombs than you can ever use- every little section is simply piled with them.
To make things absolutely fucking stupider, there is no dedicated button for pipe bombs. It shares the same button with grenades, and to switch between the two you have to hold down the B button and move the analog stick to the top left or bottom right along their stupid weapon selection system. Not that it’s the most difficult thing in the world, but there are multiple buttons on the controller that are not used. Would have been too hard to make a dedicated button for pipe bombs, eh? This is what you get with lazy (or rushed) game development.
CHUDTIP- You could buy every single Terminator movie for less than this game.
To spice things up (hah!) there are sections interspersed throughout the game that have you shooting turrets with unlimited ammo in on-rails shooter fashion. You’ll be hanging on the back of a truck or a train shooting a turret of some sort at any enemies that come near you. Boring, predictable, and utterly without challenge.
Oh and how about an end boss to the game, some sort of giant robot? How about even fighting off a Harvester that you run into (and away from) in the middle of the game? Nope, nothing like that. You just fight off about five or six of the same goddamn boring T-600s you’ve been fighting the whole game, and then you walk off and watch a boring cinema and regret wasting your time on this when you could have been doing literally anything else with your life.
THE PRESENTATION
Well it SOUNDS like a Terminator film (what with the DUH-DUH, DUH DUH DUH blasting every five minutes) and the graphics are decent enough. Too bad the Terminators aren’t as terrifying or tough as they should be.
The game might have the distinction of the most annoying and lengthy load screens of any game released, ever. You get to stare at a grinning Terminator skull whose blazing red eyes look almost like the Xbox 360’s Red Ring of Death for so long that you might hope that your Xbox finally does give it up and end your communal suffering.
While they got Moon Bloodgood and Common to play their characters from the film, they couldn’t get Christian Bale, who was busy being grumpy about something and regretting being the worst part of The Dark Knight besides Maggie Gyllenhaal. Good for him for dodging this bullet, and all of the horrible, horrible dialogue within it. For instance- at one section of the game you have a Hunter-Killer, a mechanical Angel of Death bearing down on you, splattering rockets all over and around you, and what’s going to be your first instinct? Oh, I know, to flirt with the girl on the other end of the comm! Of course! Great script!
CHUDTIP- If you buy this game for your kids they will hate you forever and stick you in a nursing home.
Also, do you love games where the characters do stuff during cutscenes
that’s a billion times cooler than anything you actually get to
control? Well then you’ll love this game! Boy how exciting some of
those scenes are! Sure glad I didn’t just see the movie!
THE REPLAY
The game will take you under four hours to complete. No joke, four hours max, start to finish, including the lengthy cutscenes and horrendous loading times. You can play through the game’s 9 tiny chapters with a friend, but why would you possibly submit a friend to this? What kind of person are you? Asshole. Grab a real co-op game.
Considering how short and easy the game is, this could definitely be the next King Kong for achievement whores. There are 11 achievements, all of which can be obtained just by beating the game on Hard.
THE VERDICT
There is absolutely no reason you should play this game. A frustrating, short, buggy experience- playing it is a waste of both your money and time. Don’t get suckered in by the name and don’t help this piece of garbage turn a profit.