Terminator Salvation (Xbox 360) Review

Summary [5.5 out of 10]

Terminator Salvation is a terrible game whose unfinished feel, technical hickups and terribly scripted sequences all punish the player for trying to play it. Terminator Salvation has the feel of a game that only had 8 months of development time in order to make it’s launch along-side the movie. I wouldn’t even bother renting this title regardless of how much you enjoy the Terminator universe.

The Great

• Nothing…

The Good

• The Cover System — It feels like GRIN pulled this right out of Wanted: Weapons of Fate and re-purposed it for Terminator Salvation… while blatant re-use like this is lame (given that the transition animations are almost the same), the cover system still ended up feeling pretty good so we didn’t mind. Not as polished as Gears of War 2, but pretty good.
• The weapon/item/NPC highlight indicators are easy to spot as they “hover” in the world like a HUD indicator which is important in a game like this with blown-out environments and rubble everywhere, otherwise it would be hard to find ammo and other items in the world.
• Your NPC team members are actually useful. You can hide for entire battles and they will take out the enemies. If the NPCs had been useless, that would have made this game impossible to play, so this was one redeeming design choice.
• LT + RT aiming and shooting worked as you would expect and felt natural.
• Hit-detection is liberal which makes up for the crappy shooting mechanic so it’s not too punishing to try and put down enemies.
• Picking up ammo and items is as easy as walking over it — I prefer this mechanic over “pressing X to pickup” type of approaches — is it odd to anyone else that this game is so barren I’m praising the ammo-pickup mechanic here? Not the sort of thing you would see in a Gears of War review…

The Bad

• Cutscenes and scripted sequences were very roughly animated — in a handful of sequences character’s mouths didn’t even move as they talked and all the animations we saw were canned “robot-esque” animations with nothing touched up by hand. So robots, humans and everything else moved in a very herky-jerky or unnatural fashion.
• Actual flow and telling of the story in the cutscenes and scripted sequences was garbage. Early on in the game you have sequences that make no sense, characters are ridiculously stupid like any D-list action movie that goes straight to rental and the Terminators behave slow, cumbersome and retarded exactly like real terminators would not. This can be summed up as “terrible acting”, but when you think of animated cutscenes that may be absurd… but you get the idea.
• Weapons sound pretty good, but feel/look terrible. Almost no muzzle flash, fire, tracers or good impact effects help to make you feel like you are firing an unimplemented weapon in an example play-level or something.
• NPCs never stop cycling the same 20 or 30 lines over and over. “We gotta get going”, “Stop holding us up Connor”, “Nice shot Connor!”, “Nice job Connor!”… usually while you are already doing something.
• You are apparently John Connor — and apparently John Connor looks nothing like Christian Bale… my guess is that the publisher knew this game would be a flop and didn’t want to lay down the cash for any likeness licensing. That kind of “attention to detail” permeates the whole game.
• Gameplay is completely predictable — you walk through some alley or blown out building, come into a “scene”, X number of enemies spawn infront of you, you kill them, and then someone says something and you move forward again.
• When you walk into each “scene” or “arena”, especially when there is a weapon you are suppose to use, enemies will “post up” at certain locations and in certain positions to ensure that you go to the right spot to kill them or use the right weapon… once you start noticing the pattern you realize this completely nullifies the re-playability — not that re-playability was a huge concern, but not even enemy AI seems to be implemented, it’s all scripted.
• There is absolutely no gore in this game… I don’t think the dev team sampled a single effect/texture that is actually “red”. I’m not saying we need to be knee deep in blood but besides being a barren experience, this game also plays like a PG-rated title which makes it mind-numbingly boring.
• The actual game didn’t look as good as any of the screenshots the Terminator marketing team released to game sites — those screenshots looked a lot more colorful and sharper, the actual game looks about 10% more blurry and less detailed.
• The weapons in the game is a pretty plain lineup of grenades, machine guns and shotguns. Not a whole lot else going on.

The Ugly

• No online co-op, just offline co-op.
• Loading… seriously, if you added up the entire play time it takes you to start Terminator Salvation, play it and finish it, 35-45% of that time is spent looking at “Loading…” screens — even for levels that don’t last any longer than 3mins of gameplay.
• Lack of effects — The game, likely due to it’s short dev cycle, lacks most world/environment effects you’ve come to expect from a shooter, overall it just ends up feeling “dry”.
• Clipping issues with gun fire (both friendly and enemy) in the environment was frustratingly rampant. Leaning out from behind a wall and shooting a rocket at an HK resulted in the rocket exploding in our faces because it clipped the wall somehow — no worries though, the useless health system kept us alive.
• Frequently we would see enemy fire coming straight through block walls and hitting us as the Terminator on the other side lay into us with no concern for there piece a massive piece of clipping level between us and them.

Worth Noting…

• If you skip cutscenes you can finish this game in 3hrs on Easy… given that it’s such a poorly executed title, I can’t figure out if this is a bad thing or a good thing…

Conclusion [5.5 out of 10]

There is nothing redeeming about this game that would cause me to recommend this as a purchase to anyone or even as a rental. Sometimes low-budget games like this will have a particular gimmick that might make them redeeming, like over the top stunts, gore or nudity — but in this case, this game literally has nothing redeeming contained on it’s disk.

Just skip it — go rent Mercenaries 2 if you haven’t for a slightly buggy game that was hilariously fun.

Areas of Improvement

Like our other game reviews, we don’t feel right criticizing a game without providing constructive feedback on what could have been better, so here goes:

• Better/More complete animations. Even more so than “better graphics”, improving the animations would have gone a long way to make the game feel like a higher-quality production.
• Online co-op
• Gore, not such PG-themed gameplay… so boring.
• Destructible environments or use of physics anywhere in the game to make the world feel more real/alive.
• Better graphics, effects, world/environment details
• Better weapons and more of them
• Introduction of minigames or QTEs for the more epic sequences/boss battles.
• Boss battles… of any kind

Screenshot Gallery