Terminator Salvation is a game that is decidedly average, at best
Unfortunately there is not too much more positive you can say for this game apart from competent. It's not especially pretty, although it's not a bad looking game, but there are far better games graphically.
The game guides you very linearly from one situation to the next, there are no opportunities for you to stray from the path and not even hidden collectables, which has become a standard for almost every game. The game also signposts every major battle by putting things for you to hide behind.
The combat is underwhelming at the very best. I would imagine that fighting against murderous machines firing at you would be an intense experience. Here it is almost leisurely affair. It involves you ducking behind cover and waiting for your team mates to take out the enemy via the weak spot, or for that enemy to focus fire on your team mates while you take them down. Occasionally you might find yourself throwing a grenade, which is a little bit of potluck which direction it may go, I could never tell if it was going to go flying into the wall or would go to its intended target.
The combat could have been enhanced and made more frenetic by providing actual destructible cover rather than the illusion of it. Your cover never disappears, no matter how long you hide behind them which is really, well, lame. Needless to say if you have a bit of time you can get through this game without ever being in danger of dying, if the AI wasn't horribly inconsistent. Sometimes the Terminators will stand there and fire in your direction or sometimes they will move around to get you from behind your cover. It made it frustrating because you never knew exactly what you were going to get.
I will give T:S a plus for the cover system. It is elegant to move between cover and it works very well although when you are in cover you can't pick up any ammo you go past which is frustrating as you will get pounded as soon as you stand up to get that one ammo pick up you need, so in ways the best feature is stunted by other problems.
I got little in the way of bugs and glitches although there were two noticeable ones, where I was standing on a raised platform and was killed by a swipe of the machines arm uh what? I also got stuck in a fence which was frustrating. Two in the space in 5 hours is arguably too many, but I wouldn't call this broken.
The game does try and mix things up but nothing that has never been done before, there is the on rails shooting section, the massive tank section all pretty ho hum at best.
On top of this the game is unbelievably short, in fact you pass 50% of the chapters in about 70% of game time. My game time for a hard play through clocked in at about 5 hours. Add to this it is extremely easy, save for a few disparate sections which I had to, grudgingly, repeat. Dying in this game is a chore thanks to the 20 seconds of loading screen after every death, there is no way dying should cost this much time.
I did have fun while playing this game but possibly this was due to the lack of length that lies within but the worst decision ever? No boss battles. Not one. With an abundance of machines you would have thought that some huge and fantastical ones could have been included. It's a shame and the biggest weakness of this title, above all the other problems.
Terminator Salvation is a game that is average in every conceivable way. It's hard to recommend it for anyone who likes games. Die hard Terminator fans and blatant trophy whores need only apply. Everyone else should avoid if at all possible.