Terminator Salvation

Terminator Salvation

You're John Connor. Go save LA again.

By Avinash Bali

Terminator Salvation is not a nice game. In fact it’s a downright horrible game. It had tons of potential no doubt but none of that gets realized during the course of the game. It’s like someone literally put a gun to developer Evolved Games' head and said "Make a crappy game for me or I’ll blow your brains out on the table." And guess what, they obliged.

Loosely based on the motion picture of the same name, Terminator Salvation puts you in the boots of John Connor as you strive to liberate what’s left of Los Angeles from Skynet and their nefarious robots. The story unfolds via some horribly compressed cut-scenes, awkward animations, terrible lip synching and voice acting by actors who were terribly bored or just plain talentless. If that wasn’t bad enough, you’re subjected to one of these ghastly cinematics after nearly every enemy encounter so it’s like five minutes of gameplay followed by another minute of terrible cut-scene. Cinematic? No! Annoying? Yes!

Terminator Salvation plays out like your standard third person shooter fare with a cover system inspired by Gears of War. Unlike Gears where you could press the cover key even if you were a few inches away from cover, in this game  you have to be close enough to kiss it and only then will Connor slap to the surface. Once you’re latched onto cover you can move in any direction via some pretty slick and fluid sliding animations. From behind your cover you can blind fire or look up, squeeze a few rounds and duck back into cover again. For some  incomprehensible reason this is the first game in which blind fire seemed more effective than aiming and shooting at enemies.

Machines are a bit tougher to kill than humans so a full frontal assault isn’t recommended. Instead you’re encouraged to flank these machines and shoot their sensitive parts (no not those you pervert) from behind while your teammates distract them from the front. I’m sure this concept sounded pretty cool on paper but it fails miserably because of a bunch of reasons. For starters the friendly AI in this game is unbelievably daft. Either they left their brains at home or they were born without one because they simply refuse to understand the concept of distraction. Through nearly every enemy encounter I ended up doing all the work while they sat there shooting the sky uttering useless lines that were as annoying as they were unfunny. To make matters worse the game doesn’t even support online co-op, which could have redeemed the game to a certain extent since I’m guessing a human teammate would have been a lot more pro-active. Co-operative play is limited to splits-screen only and if like most of the people I know you game on an HD monitor, it’s just no fun.

Even if gameplay was semi-enjoyable I wouldn’t have felt so bad but I guess it just wasn’t meant to be. You’ll fight pretty much the same variants of enemies throughout the game interspersed by maybe a boss fight or two that’ll get over even before you can say “Boss Fight”. Gun play is extremely unsatisfying and repetitive and since the above mentioned concept of flanking foes falls flat on its face, there’s actually really no form of respite  or redemption whatsoever for this game.

Visually Terminator Salvation is passable. Lead characters and certain enemies are well detailed and certain animations like sliding between cover look pretty slick. Unfortunately enemy design is insanely repetitive and you’ll fight pretty much the same enemy 99999999 times throughout the course of the game. The levels look pretty much the same since you’ll be traversing through highly linear urban locales while fighting off wave after wave of similar looking enemies. In addition to all this the game’s painfully short and there’s no multiplayer in there so if for some inane reason you do end up buying the game, you should know that it offers zero replayability.

So yeah as you can see there’s hardly anything positive I can say about the game. Maybe if the game had been polished up a bit we could have been looking at a mediocre movie-to-game adaptation instead of an atrocious one. Avoid this game at all costs.

RATINGS

Third person shooter

Terminator Salvation

– avinash@tech2.com