Watching the movie 2hrs = $A20. Playing the entire campaign 5hrs = $A100. Priceless.
Graphics: 4
Sounds: 4
Value: 3
Tilt: 6
Actual score: 4.7
When I set my eyes on the first Terminator movie way back in 84, I was totally dumbstruck of that opening sequence where you get to see the future L.A. 2029 – that hunter killer flying above searching for humans and naturally those T-600s stamping their territory and shooting anything that resembles humanity. At that time I thought to myself that this will make a very cool video game blasting robots with the biggest weapons available. Developers like Bethesda Softworks, Virgin Games and most recently Atari Europe took on this task but sadly, to date not one game truly made its mark to captivate James Cameron’s Terminator’s world.
So here we are in 2009 where the dawn of the new Terminator movie about to hit the screens, developers Grin and Halcyon Games took the honours and released the next Terminator PC game which the title coincides with the movie of the same name: Terminator Salvation. Yet the game’s timeline is two years prior to the movie: i.e. in the year 2016 where you play the soldier John Connors before he was the leader of the Resistance. During the course of this game, you’ll get to witness ‘first hand’ John Connor as a soldier to ultimately at the end, the hero that he’s currently renowned for.
Thus what to expect in Terminator Salvation is your stock-standard shoot-all-robots with no questions asked approach (do you really want to reason with a killer machine?). There’s really nothing wrong with that as that’s what Terminator is all about – humans using big weapons trying to exterminate (excuse the pun) their adversaries; like Starship Troopers blasting bugs.
However the entire feel for the game is somewhat unpolished; granted the controls are simple enough (e.g. left mouse to shoot etc) however seeing John Connor taking half the screen doesn’t do much justice when spotting robots. In addition, Terminator: Salvation took that ‘cover’ approach from Gears of War where hitting the spacebar makes your character ‘glue’ to the closest available cover. To some, this is a great concept however for me it’s a royal pain as many-a-times I just want John to sneak up on enemies instead of being glued to a wall or needed to press the spacebar again to unstick because I want to collect that rifle which is only two metres away; only then to get belted as he’s incapable of crouching. So what is boils down is that John acts more of a robot than those Skynet abominations.
Giving credit to where it due is that the entire game actually feels somewhat cinematic – that is from the amazing car chase with the hunter killer to a brief encounter with the harvester to escorting a bus actually enhances the game play. When going for that ‘morning jog’ the screen will shake a little and stabilises when staying still however beware to those who gets motion sickness. The introduction to the only three robots is cool indeed yet as stated before there’s only three and considering you have three main ways to fire (explosion, auto and shotgun) it really doesn’t take long to find what weapon does the most damage to what foe. There are other robots like those bike thingies however their appearance is quite limited. Yet there’s one quite puzzling incidence is the healing system; I originally thought that at every major combat sequence your character heals up but there are times I never healed after an intense fire fight yet others I just ‘jogged’ to another area within the same combat area and voila instant health – the mind boggles.
I’m no graphic whore however when playing a futuristic game I do expect some form of eye candy and this is where this game truly tumbles. The entire landscape is quite bland to look at and even the character models looks like someone just slapped a high-def face image on a stiff-like body – not a pretty sight indeed. In addition, the character movements are almost stiff-like – robotic even. Looking in hindsight maybe John Connor was the T-800 but didn’t know this. There are some good special effects like leaves rustling in the wind or papers strewn about however if I need to describe these elements as ‘good’ I’m telling you that I’m really struggling to say anything decent.
Sound wise it’s a mixed bag of goodies: the musical scores are actually superb and feels like you’re watching a flick however you really cannot go wrong with it as it’s a direct copy from the motion picture. Everything else is just dismal: explosions to gunfire to the weak stomping from the terminators are nothing earth-shattering. The voice-acting is bland to listen to as sadly the two main characters Blair Williams and Barnes are actually actors from the movie itself (Moon Bloodgood is Blair and Common as Barnes).
I have read many articles about the length of modern games and why they are progressively getting shorter and shorter. On one side of the argument the reasoning is that people are having shorter attention span hence the concept of episodes (e.g. Half Life and Starcraft II) yet others argued that considering movies are typically 90mins long, games are not getting shorter as even a six hour blast festivities is still better value. Well, in this game expect to finish the entire campaign within four to five hours with no multiplayer to speak off. But there is that ‘cool’ coop feature where two players can play simultaneously using the ‘spilt-screen’ system or you can play the entire campaign at the next difficulty level…
*crickets*
You may think that in today’s environment where technology has increased by ten-folds and gaming engines galore, it really shouldn’t be a difficult task of making James Cameron’s world a reality where players get to play the part of the human resistance fighting against the machines. Sadly, and for unknown reasons, not one developer actually brought this world any real justice. Monolith brought the Aliens world justice with AVP, Eurocom Entertainment with 007: Nightfire yet not one (maybe with the exception of Terminator: Future Shock) brought the Terminator franchise any real justice. Ironically so, Quake 2 felt more ‘Terminator’ than those Terminators games. That said Terminator Salvation is certainly not a complete failure as at times you can feel the intense fire fights between the humans and robots and witnessing the devastated future L.A. is somewhat convincing however like most movie tie-ins, a little more development time will be your best friend.