Review: Terminator - Salvation

The Info Bit
Genre: 3rd Person Shooter
Players: 1-2 Offline and Online (CO-OP only)
Format Played: XB360
Available on: PC, PS3
Rating: 16 +

With every big film release comes a ‘tie-in’ game, which is usually of very poor quality both in gameplay and graphics, this however doesn’t mean you should never buy any, (in fact most sell really well which I guess just compounds the problem of poor releases but there you go), every so often a few are really enjoyable to play despite the poor development, I believe Terminator - Salvation is one such game.

I will be the first to say that the only reason I really bought this game was because Fuel was delayed by a month (a review for that will come when its released I promise). As a result I started playing Terminator with regret in my heart thinking that I’ve bought an awful game as a stop gap and questioning the decision as to why I didn’t just save my money, that was until about 20 minutes or so into the game when I destroyed the first HK, or Hunter Killer for those not familiar with the Terminator series.

Graphics in this game are shall we say ‘functional’, they’re not great but nor are they bad, they serve the purpose well, the characters are a little ‘square faced’ and the scenery looks like a city ravaged by years of war but they aren’t as polished as they could be, I suspect it was rushed out for the launch of the film and as a result they didn’t get time to finish all the polishing. Gameplay is good (although I would like to add some people might find it repetitive), basically a level will be laid out a bit like this: cutscene continuing story, walk for a bit admiring the scenery, robots appear and attack, use cool cover system to flank said robots, kill them by shooting the weak spot , walk to next fight, repeat until final cutscene of level. On face value this seems a bad thing but I found this procedure made it quite tactical at times, especially when you face the T700’s with the chain guns because you have to move from cover to cover and use your team to help kill them or you will die.

The sound effects and musical score also aren’t amazing but serve the purposes well, and I deny anyone to not get a little excited when you first see a T700 and the Terminator ‘stalking’ music starts, and yes it is the official terminator soundtrack as well, not a dodgy new made up version, now onto the bad things.

If anyone cares the voices are not the people from the film (ie no Christian Bale) but that’s not really a big deal in my book, I wished the game was longer, with only nine levels and a couple of them being only twenty minutes long, it did feel a bit to quick to complete and there was a lack of variation in the weapon choices. My only other complaint, and to be honest my main one, is that the achievement points are way to easy to get. I finished the game on medium in about eight hours, which isn’t great for a game these days but what baffled me more than anything else is that for eight hours work I got 820 achievement points out of 1000, when will developers learn to make achievements a bit harder to get, because the only one I’ve not got left is to complete it on hard which I reckon I could do in another twelve hours or so assuming I die more. This is a major annoyance for me and its not just this game that’s done it and it won’t be the last but please developers give us something to aim at.

That rant over with I reckon most shooter fans out there will quite like Terminator - Salvation and if you can get it for about twenty pounds or so (which is what I got it for) then it is certainly worth the money for a few days entertainment, if you like the Terminator franchise you‘ll probably like this game to, especially the second to last level which I won‘t spoil for you. All in all I’ve not been disappointed with my ‘back-up’ purchase but I still would’ve liked Fuel instead and there are better shooters out there.




Stars out of Five: 2 1/2