A terrible game, even for a Terminator tie-in
ONE can only imagine the boardroom meetings during the conception of the latest Terminator video game tie-in atrocity. Aesthetics and form must have been the only two things discussed and budgeted for, because rarely has a game with so little substance or function been smeared with lipstick and shoved out the door without a thought given to whether it actually plays well or makes any sense whatsoever.
Like the latest Terminator movie, Terminator: Resistance ignores the events of every Terminator flick past the second effort, casting you as a soldier in John Connor’s army and tasking you with defending against the ‘annihilation line’ of terminators who are doing their best to wipe out all life on Earth. Had it not been for the most hilariously terrible writing and voice acting, there may have actually been a passable back story here but, alas, blowing your budget on visuals and underpaying your voice actors does not a good performance make.
In fact, the visuals are probably the only good thing about Resistance. Usually movie tie-ins will skimp on just about anything they possibly can, with the publishers being very aware that the name alone will sell the game just as well as any other facet of the development process. It is a somewhat pleasant surprise, then, that Resistance looks just about as good as you’d expect from a relatively modern first-person shooter. Particle effects are abundant and the lighting in general is particularly impressive.
Resistance also provides a healthy amount of dialogue options, allowing the player to make a large amount of choices. While these choices may seem consequential at the time you make them, they unfortunately sum to zero towards the end of the game. These choices do indeed change the ending of the game but the changes are presented in a lazy image-based storyboard format which takes away a great deal of the fun.
The campaign will take you roughly ten hours, though it will feel like about thirty. It takes a full two hours of shooting the exact same robotic spider things before we even see a single terminator, and when they do make an appearance it is with so little fanfare that you may actually laugh out loud. What’s worse is that they are only marginally more difficult to kill than the robotic spiders and present about the same level of danger.
Terminator: Resistance is a terrible game, even for a movie tie-in. If you really want to play this game then perhaps wait a year, when you will find it in the bargain bin.