Thursday, June 18, 2009

Belated Game Review: Terminator Salvation

This review is not so belated as the game's only a month old :)

Something interesting to note with this game is that the same parent company produced both the game and the movie. You would think that the game would be much better then because they could work with the concepts that the movie side is coming up with without really having to wait until the movie is finished. However, that promise is unfulfilled much like this game. That's not to say Terminator is necessarily a BAD game, but that it could have used another month or two of development time.

You play as John Connor (naturally) and the game story takes place before the movie. In the game, John Connor is just a solidier in the resistance who is doubting his place in the world and in the army. While in the midst of a battle he gets a distress call from a team deep in Skynet territory and against orders goes to save them, picking up people along the way and learning what it means to be a leader.

The game studio was able to get every character's likeness and voice from the movie except for Christian Bale (who just happens to be the lead freakin' character). So in his place is a non-descript created lookalike who doesn't look real at all (it's always the eyes, they can never get them right).

Essentially the game consists of 2 parts, urban fighting where you are trying to find cover amongst the rubble and take out the various terminators that are sent and rail shooting, where you ride a set path and try to destroy the terminators that are chasing you.

The urban part is fairly decent, the big mechanic of the game is that while under cover, if you sneak to the edge of cover and hold the Left stick toward another piece of cover, you will get a pop up of the points you can run to. When you press X John will sprint to the next piece of cover. You can use this to get behind the enemies. The movements look really fluid and natural so that's at least one thing they did right. I would like to see that used more in other games.

You need to be able to get behind the terminators, because for a lot of them that's where the weak spot is. The AI in this game is semi decent as well because you can keep a terminator occupied and they will actually shoot it in the back. The other nice thing is that you can also play co-op if you want another person to help getting to the backside.

Rail shooting is frustrating though, there are too many machines and it's damn near impossible to center on them long enough to shoot. You will be able to make it through but it's tough.

That's realy all there is to the game. You can tell it's lacking as there's only 8 different weapons and 7 different terminators. The game can be knocked out in hard mode in 6 hours and as far as trophies go there's only 12, but they can all be gotten in 1 playthrough on hard and they are all gold.

Final Verdict: An otherwise promising game cut short by having to release on the same day as the movie. It's worth a rent, but not much more than that. I give it a 5.5/10



PS3 Trophies


cycoivan

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