So Terminator Salvation has been near the top of my “to rent” list for ages, since it came out in May 2009, for a couple of reasons; 1 I’m a massive fan of the Terminator series; 2 I heard you could get 1000/1000 gamer points really easily. Finally number 3 is, without giving too much away about Meodia’s policy of exploiting volunteers to provide the bulk of its content, I knew nobody was ever going to review this game. Hey I didn’t say they were good reasons.

 

Terminator Salvation the videogame takes place a couple of years before the events of the movie and it see’s John Connor and Blair Williams traipsing through the desolate wasteland that is Downtown LA; poisonous fumes that suffocate the city and hindered by the scorching sun Downtown LA isn’t fun to walk through at the best of times. Now it’s even worse because the machines have destroyed most of the lovely road system and have populated the city with deadly robots.

 

 

Instead of sitting in a bunker/airplane or commanding a squadron of people/ a teenager and a small child; Connor and Williams are basic grunts, given commands and expected to follow them. However an SOS call from a squad of resistance fighters pinned down in enemy territory turns on John’s hero switch, which eventually leads to the deaths of more people than he saves…but that’s okay because his heart was in the right place.

 

Graphically the game looks pretty good, nothing amazing and the lighting needs a lot of work but generally speaking the environment are nothing to complain about. The character models however are wooden and stiff, striking awkward poses as in-game cut-scenes play out, their mouths flapping up and down like a suffocating goldfish while a bored actor recites some line he’s been given. The dialogue tracks often get a bit lost in the sporadic editing of the game as well, starting just before a loading screen and then randomly popping up on the other side. Or shouting out lines that have no bearing on what is going on in game.

 

 

It’s worth pointing out that whoever was in charge of the budget couldn’t afford Christian Bale to do the voice work for the game, so we get another random Brit that sounds nothing like Bale. They couldn’t even afford the likeness of Bale so John Connor, doesn’t look anything like John Connor. Moon Bloodgood and Lonnie Rashid Lynn, Jr. however lend both their likeness and voice to the game but the models don’t look especially like either of them, and it’s clear they didn’t really care when it came to the readings.

 

Gameplay wise it’s basically a poor Gears of War clone. Yes waist-high walls are the order of the day as you take cover from the four different types of enemy in the game. They are in order the Wasp (a flying robot armed with machineguns), the Spider (a walking robot armed with machineguns), the Hunter Killer (a larger flying robot armed with two machineguns) and the T-600 (a human-like robot armed with a Gatling gun). In relation to the four types of enemy you have four weapons; wasps are to be taken down with Shoguns, Spiders with machineguns, HKs with rocket launchers and the T-600 with grenades and pipe bombs (nice reference there). Combat wise you hide behind a wall and then pop up and fire at whatever is firing at you. With the case of Spiders you have to sneak around to the back of them, using the conveniently placed path of waist high walls in the battle, and shoot out their vulnerable batteries.