Terminator: Salvation (The Game)
Foliage > Man > Machine > Good Games
Good: Co-Op, Occasional Graphic Brilliance
Bad: Enemy Diversity, Weapon Diversity, Story, Length, Variety, Level Design
Let us pretend, for the moment, that we're in an infomercial. There are two products being showcased, let's call them Product A and Product B. Now, product A is a general mashup of the industry. It's got 8-10 hours of battery life, doesn't look out of place in your house, connects with other product A's, and is generally a solid product to use for your banana mushings. Product B, on the other hand, runs out of batteries in 2 hours, will only occasionally connect nicely with others, and then only with limits, and stands out like Kiss member in the heart of Manhattan's financial district. Which one would you buy? Oh, and as if there needs to be more things to heap on, they both retail for the same exact price.
The same could be asked of Terminator: Salvation. Third person movie tie in shooters are generally bad, but will Terminator: Salvation manage to break the trend or merely add to the pile of pitifully bad games?
Review
In Terminator: Salvation (A name that really doesn't want to have any sort of catchy nicknames) you play as John Connor, a man who looks absolutely nothing like the OTHER 4 John Connors we've had to suffer though. You start off in a very run down part of a city, and spend the rest of the day attempting to rescue 3 stranded survivors. The plot detours....alot....but you never really lose sight of the final goal. Sadly, the plot is about as twisty as a highway through the midwest, with the occasional blatantly obvious light turn tossed in every hour or so for good measure. If you absolutely, positively, mustilutely have more Terminator story, however, the brand new material should be serviceable. Thankfully, if you're not a Terminator fan, the game doesn't drop *too* many references, and so long as you know the basics (IE: Skynet = teh badz), you should be able to follow the plot. Not that there's much plot to follow, period. The game clocks in at a blazing two hours and thirty minutes. This would normally be a markdown in a game, but, in a game such as this, it's a blessing in disguise.
Everything about the game reeks of pure bad. Let's take the health system. It's regenerating....sort of. See, when you're in combat, it doesn't regenerate, and when you're out of combat, it does. Sounds like a great solution to merely sitting for 2 seconds and having full health, right? Wrong. It quickly becomes a source of frustration, as your characters slow movement speed and the clunky controls will get you stuck time and time again in your enemies line of sight. To rectify this, the game has a barely passable cover system. You tap A to get into cover, and press the joystick towards another piece of cover and tap it again and you'll quickly rocket over to it. The system immediately runs into problems, though. To disconnect from cover, you have to press A again and NOT merely attempt to move away from cover. It's very unintuitive and leads to many more deaths than are required. On top of that, the 'cover to cover' system rarely works as your teammates (and I use that in the loosest sense of the word) will routinely hog up most of the cover, leaving you stuck behind the one piece of cover that's still around. As the final nail in the coffin, you have to be standing *right* on top of the peace of cover you want to lock into, instead of being able to 'slide' into it from several feet away.
So, the cover and health systems are fatally flawed. Well, that's all fine if the gunplay and enemies are both varied and fun. Sadly, Terminator: Salivation (If I can't shorten it, I can at least mock it) fails on this front as well. There are a mere 5 guns, and 2 of them merely do something SLIGHTLY different than 2 others, meaning that there are essentially 3 types of guns in the game. That matches up somewhat nicely with how many enemy types there are in game, as there are essentially 5 different enemy types, with one of them being reserved as a sort of miniboss halfway through the game, and two others essentially being the exact same thing. The game tried to give these 3 types of enemies diversity by making one of them fly, the other move really quickly and force you to hit its weak spot, and the other one (Okay, two) require a metric ton of rounds to kill, but even this falls flat. The guns and enemies aren't TOTALLY bad, however: Killing the flying enemies with the shotgun has a strangely satisfying 'eff you' feel to it, and what weapons and enemies they have in game mostly work (With the occasional 'shotting the cover instead of the enemy' problem).
It's not just lack of variety that hurts the enemies and the weapons, however. It's the AI, or, more specifically, everything your 'teammates' have ever done. Remember those quick moving, hit the weak spot enemies I mentioned above? Well, they're pretty much in every group of badies that you face, which necessitates that you or your AI pals flank the enemy to take it down. This system quickly breaks down. In only about half the fights will you have an area to flank them in, and in the areas that you DO have the ability to flank them in, the vulnerable enemies will merely back up into a corner somewhere and refuse to show either you or your allies their weak spot. When they do show their weak spot, however, it's not a given that they'll die; it takes quite a few shots to finally bring them down if they're not facing you, and, if they are, your AI quickly gains a case of Stormtrooper aim and has trouble hitting anything other than the ground. This quickly leads to explosives being the near required method of bringing down 3/4ths of the enemies, and explosives usually means grenades. This leads to yet *another* problem, however: the gun switch menu. You're only able to carry two weapons at a time (Not really a big deal, as you've only got 5 to chose from), but you're able to carry both frag grenades and pipe bombs. Switching between the two requires that you hold down the B button and very gently maneuver the joystick to the one you want. At the fear of sounding like a broken record, it's very clunky and unintuitive.
In fact, the entire *game* feels clunky and unintuitive. The game is in love with cutscenes, and sprinkles one every couple of fights or so. About half of them are your standard plot exposition, but the other half will literally be a character stating a single line, or, hell, even 5 seconds of ABSOLUTELY NOTHING before jumping you back into the action. In fact, there's almost nothing done while you can control your character. Hell, if the game wanted to tell you to scratch your nose, it'd do it in cutscene form. It's very jarring and, dare I say it, unintuitive and clunky! At least you can suffer through Terminator: Slipnslide with a friend, even this is somewhat head scratching. The only co-op option is over XBL, and although other games have done this (Crackdown, Blood on the Sand), no game so focused on co-op has done this before.
Not that you'd want to force anyone you'd consider a friend to play this game. The level design is, here it comes, clunky and unintuitive! You go down repeated linear paths, every once in a while running into a proliferation of chest high walls that mark a spot where you're going to get shot at. Every couple of those chest high walls spots will have a tiny alcove to try and flank the weak spot enemies, but, once again, due to the bad AI these spots will rarely be used as anything more than another spot to try and grenade your enemies from. As if the linearity wasn't enough, they block off alternative paths in the worst of ways. I was once stopped from going up a flight of stairs by a disobedient shin high house plant. Really? I can fight metal death machines of the future, but god forbid I come up against *FOLIAGE*? Oh, and lets not even get started about the cardboard cutout characters that accompany you on your foliage fearing adventure. You'll go through so many teammates that you'll start to wonder if Connor had brought a curse down on himself lately, and those that don't die are so stereotypical that it's barely even worth mentioning them. Look! It's the black guy that gets grabbed by a terminator through a wall horror style! Look, it's the originally down and out recruit that finds hope due to...well, due to whatever it is you do! Look, it's the sarcastic team member that somehow manages to survive! Look, it's....well, you get the picture. The only aforementioned character I cared about was sarcastic guy, and that was only because he was a minority who managed to survive to the end of a game.
The level and character designers weren't done there, though. You see, it wouldn't be a total loss if it didn't have vehicle sections, and boy does this game have them. There are a handful of vehicle sections, each one worse than the last. It's not just that your gun overheats after merely looking at an enemy robot the wrong the way. It's not that whoever's driving really should of been dragged into the streets and stoned to death. It's not that the other two to three vehicles usually get in the way of your muzzle. No, it's, once again, the horrible level design. Let's take one level in which I'm driving a dune buggy with a grenade launcher on it. The driver quickly guns it up a ramp and lands a few floors up inside a gutted office building. He then proceeds to drive with the support columns of the building both two feet away and between me and the bad guys. The game also decided that then would just be a peachy time to zoom in on the group of enemies I was trying to blow up. Which meant that I ended up hitting the previously unseen support columns more than I hit the enemies, and with a grenade launcher a car *really* close to said columns, I ended up blowing off more of my health than of the enemies health. Bad level design doesn't even start to cut it here. It's a bad process from beginning to end, from the guy who first suggested this level to the play tester who was asleep at the wheel.
At least the badly designed levels look somewhat good. The graphics engine manages to make the game world feel...well, feel abandoned, and it has it's brief moments of brilliance, such as a spot of light in a train station perfectly illuminating a NPC. The character models are passable, although the second they open their mouths the horrible lip syncing becomes quite obvious. The games sound is rather lackluster as well, as most guns and explosives sound...well, tinny and weak, while the games soundtrack alters between decent and 'I think my CD is skipping' bad. The voice work isn't much better, but aforementioned sarcastic minority man manages to have a few decent lines.
Conclusion
Is Terminator: Sammich a bad game? Certainly. Can you do worse on a PS3, Xbox 360, or PC? You'd be hard pressed. Everything in the game comes together to make a perfect storm of pure bad, with each horrible moment building off the last to create new and unintuitive lows. If you're absolutely, positively starved for the trials and tribulations of John Connor, a co-op game, or if you really want to waste 60 USD to experience the bad for yourself, it's a barely passable experience. For everyone else, I suggest a Don't Touch It!
-edit- If you catch any grammatical/spelling errors, or if you have any suggestions for my writing style, please let me know!
Foliage > Man > Machine > Good Games
Good: Co-Op, Occasional Graphic Brilliance
Bad: Enemy Diversity, Weapon Diversity, Story, Length, Variety, Level Design
Let us pretend, for the moment, that we're in an infomercial. There are two products being showcased, let's call them Product A and Product B. Now, product A is a general mashup of the industry. It's got 8-10 hours of battery life, doesn't look out of place in your house, connects with other product A's, and is generally a solid product to use for your banana mushings. Product B, on the other hand, runs out of batteries in 2 hours, will only occasionally connect nicely with others, and then only with limits, and stands out like Kiss member in the heart of Manhattan's financial district. Which one would you buy? Oh, and as if there needs to be more things to heap on, they both retail for the same exact price.
The same could be asked of Terminator: Salvation. Third person movie tie in shooters are generally bad, but will Terminator: Salvation manage to break the trend or merely add to the pile of pitifully bad games?
Review
In Terminator: Salvation (A name that really doesn't want to have any sort of catchy nicknames) you play as John Connor, a man who looks absolutely nothing like the OTHER 4 John Connors we've had to suffer though. You start off in a very run down part of a city, and spend the rest of the day attempting to rescue 3 stranded survivors. The plot detours....alot....but you never really lose sight of the final goal. Sadly, the plot is about as twisty as a highway through the midwest, with the occasional blatantly obvious light turn tossed in every hour or so for good measure. If you absolutely, positively, mustilutely have more Terminator story, however, the brand new material should be serviceable. Thankfully, if you're not a Terminator fan, the game doesn't drop *too* many references, and so long as you know the basics (IE: Skynet = teh badz), you should be able to follow the plot. Not that there's much plot to follow, period. The game clocks in at a blazing two hours and thirty minutes. This would normally be a markdown in a game, but, in a game such as this, it's a blessing in disguise.
Everything about the game reeks of pure bad. Let's take the health system. It's regenerating....sort of. See, when you're in combat, it doesn't regenerate, and when you're out of combat, it does. Sounds like a great solution to merely sitting for 2 seconds and having full health, right? Wrong. It quickly becomes a source of frustration, as your characters slow movement speed and the clunky controls will get you stuck time and time again in your enemies line of sight. To rectify this, the game has a barely passable cover system. You tap A to get into cover, and press the joystick towards another piece of cover and tap it again and you'll quickly rocket over to it. The system immediately runs into problems, though. To disconnect from cover, you have to press A again and NOT merely attempt to move away from cover. It's very unintuitive and leads to many more deaths than are required. On top of that, the 'cover to cover' system rarely works as your teammates (and I use that in the loosest sense of the word) will routinely hog up most of the cover, leaving you stuck behind the one piece of cover that's still around. As the final nail in the coffin, you have to be standing *right* on top of the peace of cover you want to lock into, instead of being able to 'slide' into it from several feet away.
So, the cover and health systems are fatally flawed. Well, that's all fine if the gunplay and enemies are both varied and fun. Sadly, Terminator: Salivation (If I can't shorten it, I can at least mock it) fails on this front as well. There are a mere 5 guns, and 2 of them merely do something SLIGHTLY different than 2 others, meaning that there are essentially 3 types of guns in the game. That matches up somewhat nicely with how many enemy types there are in game, as there are essentially 5 different enemy types, with one of them being reserved as a sort of miniboss halfway through the game, and two others essentially being the exact same thing. The game tried to give these 3 types of enemies diversity by making one of them fly, the other move really quickly and force you to hit its weak spot, and the other one (Okay, two) require a metric ton of rounds to kill, but even this falls flat. The guns and enemies aren't TOTALLY bad, however: Killing the flying enemies with the shotgun has a strangely satisfying 'eff you' feel to it, and what weapons and enemies they have in game mostly work (With the occasional 'shotting the cover instead of the enemy' problem).
It's not just lack of variety that hurts the enemies and the weapons, however. It's the AI, or, more specifically, everything your 'teammates' have ever done. Remember those quick moving, hit the weak spot enemies I mentioned above? Well, they're pretty much in every group of badies that you face, which necessitates that you or your AI pals flank the enemy to take it down. This system quickly breaks down. In only about half the fights will you have an area to flank them in, and in the areas that you DO have the ability to flank them in, the vulnerable enemies will merely back up into a corner somewhere and refuse to show either you or your allies their weak spot. When they do show their weak spot, however, it's not a given that they'll die; it takes quite a few shots to finally bring them down if they're not facing you, and, if they are, your AI quickly gains a case of Stormtrooper aim and has trouble hitting anything other than the ground. This quickly leads to explosives being the near required method of bringing down 3/4ths of the enemies, and explosives usually means grenades. This leads to yet *another* problem, however: the gun switch menu. You're only able to carry two weapons at a time (Not really a big deal, as you've only got 5 to chose from), but you're able to carry both frag grenades and pipe bombs. Switching between the two requires that you hold down the B button and very gently maneuver the joystick to the one you want. At the fear of sounding like a broken record, it's very clunky and unintuitive.
In fact, the entire *game* feels clunky and unintuitive. The game is in love with cutscenes, and sprinkles one every couple of fights or so. About half of them are your standard plot exposition, but the other half will literally be a character stating a single line, or, hell, even 5 seconds of ABSOLUTELY NOTHING before jumping you back into the action. In fact, there's almost nothing done while you can control your character. Hell, if the game wanted to tell you to scratch your nose, it'd do it in cutscene form. It's very jarring and, dare I say it, unintuitive and clunky! At least you can suffer through Terminator: Slipnslide with a friend, even this is somewhat head scratching. The only co-op option is over XBL, and although other games have done this (Crackdown, Blood on the Sand), no game so focused on co-op has done this before.
Not that you'd want to force anyone you'd consider a friend to play this game. The level design is, here it comes, clunky and unintuitive! You go down repeated linear paths, every once in a while running into a proliferation of chest high walls that mark a spot where you're going to get shot at. Every couple of those chest high walls spots will have a tiny alcove to try and flank the weak spot enemies, but, once again, due to the bad AI these spots will rarely be used as anything more than another spot to try and grenade your enemies from. As if the linearity wasn't enough, they block off alternative paths in the worst of ways. I was once stopped from going up a flight of stairs by a disobedient shin high house plant. Really? I can fight metal death machines of the future, but god forbid I come up against *FOLIAGE*? Oh, and lets not even get started about the cardboard cutout characters that accompany you on your foliage fearing adventure. You'll go through so many teammates that you'll start to wonder if Connor had brought a curse down on himself lately, and those that don't die are so stereotypical that it's barely even worth mentioning them. Look! It's the black guy that gets grabbed by a terminator through a wall horror style! Look, it's the originally down and out recruit that finds hope due to...well, due to whatever it is you do! Look, it's the sarcastic team member that somehow manages to survive! Look, it's....well, you get the picture. The only aforementioned character I cared about was sarcastic guy, and that was only because he was a minority who managed to survive to the end of a game.
The level and character designers weren't done there, though. You see, it wouldn't be a total loss if it didn't have vehicle sections, and boy does this game have them. There are a handful of vehicle sections, each one worse than the last. It's not just that your gun overheats after merely looking at an enemy robot the wrong the way. It's not that whoever's driving really should of been dragged into the streets and stoned to death. It's not that the other two to three vehicles usually get in the way of your muzzle. No, it's, once again, the horrible level design. Let's take one level in which I'm driving a dune buggy with a grenade launcher on it. The driver quickly guns it up a ramp and lands a few floors up inside a gutted office building. He then proceeds to drive with the support columns of the building both two feet away and between me and the bad guys. The game also decided that then would just be a peachy time to zoom in on the group of enemies I was trying to blow up. Which meant that I ended up hitting the previously unseen support columns more than I hit the enemies, and with a grenade launcher a car *really* close to said columns, I ended up blowing off more of my health than of the enemies health. Bad level design doesn't even start to cut it here. It's a bad process from beginning to end, from the guy who first suggested this level to the play tester who was asleep at the wheel.
At least the badly designed levels look somewhat good. The graphics engine manages to make the game world feel...well, feel abandoned, and it has it's brief moments of brilliance, such as a spot of light in a train station perfectly illuminating a NPC. The character models are passable, although the second they open their mouths the horrible lip syncing becomes quite obvious. The games sound is rather lackluster as well, as most guns and explosives sound...well, tinny and weak, while the games soundtrack alters between decent and 'I think my CD is skipping' bad. The voice work isn't much better, but aforementioned sarcastic minority man manages to have a few decent lines.
Conclusion
Is Terminator: Sammich a bad game? Certainly. Can you do worse on a PS3, Xbox 360, or PC? You'd be hard pressed. Everything in the game comes together to make a perfect storm of pure bad, with each horrible moment building off the last to create new and unintuitive lows. If you're absolutely, positively starved for the trials and tribulations of John Connor, a co-op game, or if you really want to waste 60 USD to experience the bad for yourself, it's a barely passable experience. For everyone else, I suggest a Don't Touch It!
-edit- If you catch any grammatical/spelling errors, or if you have any suggestions for my writing style, please let me know!
