Terminator Salvation

The Short


Pros
- Has atrociously easy achievements
- Reminds you of how good Gears of War is in comparison
- Co-op? Actually, it makes the game harder. Never mind.

Cons
- Short
- Looks awful
- Plays like an drunken third-person shooter
- Only about three enemy types in the whole game
- Turret sequences are overly difficult
- Weapons aren't fun to use, don't carry over between levels
- None of the voice actors come over from the movie. Not a huge surprise, as I can't think anyone would want to be associated with it.
- Loading screens are insanely long
- Based on a mediocre movie, what do you expect?

I'll save you some time right now: don't buy this game

The Long


I'm going to keep it short, because I have better things to do than review this, like play the tedious Final Fantasy XIII or make myself a hotdog or pretty much anything else in existance. Terminator Salvation is a boring, short, stupid game. It's based on a movie that was also pretty stupid, but this game is very good at proving that it wants to be the best, even if being the best means being the worst. Aka IT SUCKS.

It takes place directly before the events of the movie, which was so unmemorable I literally do not remember anything from the movie except Christian Bale is in it and he kills a robot with a USB stick. You play as John Conner, and everybody who knows anything about Terminator knows who that is, and his band of resistance members fighting against the robots. The game is a cover based shooter where you...go into cover and then shoot things. Pretty simple. Except there is next to no gun variety, limited grenades, enemies that you can only hit from behind (but that means you have rely on your stupid AI teammates to distract them. That really works well), and these horrible flying enemies that come out of nowhere constantly. It's a mess.

It's your usual "destroyed civilization" shindig. Never seen that before. 

So basically you go through a very small number of levels jumping from cover to cover blasting robots. Which doesn't sound that bad except that 1. There's only like four enemy types, 2. The controls are kind of crap and not fun to play, and 3. The game is atrociously short. Seriously, were are talking 4-5 hours at most. As an added bonus, there is no multiplayer, which means when this game came out it was $60 for a 4-5 hour experience. A bad 4-5 hour experience. Why do we allow this?

The game offers co-op, if you want to share this short, miserable experience with a friend. Honestly, on the harder difficulties this actually makes the game more difficult in some sections, because on the turret levels the AI does a pretty good job shooting stuff down for you (and knowing exactly where enemies are, which is a big problem when you are in the turreted vehicles) while your human buddy might not be as good. Trust me, I learned all this from experience. The AI is dumb as bricks during the third-person shooting parts, though, so having a friend will help speed this experience along. So it'll be a 3 hour game instead. Lovely.

RAMMING SPEED. 

The game's cheap deaths (of which there are many) are only exacerbated by the fact that the game has awful loading times, even when installed to the HDD. I complained about Lego Rock Band, but at least on those I didn't have to reload for 15-20 seconds every time I died. You get to spin a giant terminator head while it loads, but even that moves too slow to be satisfying. Yep, even the little loading screen distraction annoyed me. 

If there is a glimmer of hope in this movie-tie-in-mess, it's that the achievements are stupid easy. Playing through the game once on hard gives you them all. Yep, every single one. No other things to achieve, it seems. The other positive point is...um...I was going to say it was sort of fun from time to time but I'd just be kidding myself. This game doesn't deserve to have a bone throne. It really doesn't.

At least they got the terminators looking like they should.

I see literally no reason to ever buy this game. I borrowed it and beat it on normal because I hate myself and like achievements more than I like my free time. I guess that even under all this crap the game is still playable, which is better than PowerGig was for me (go die, calibration), but it just seems like such a massive ripoff it almost offends me. People like the Terminator movies, and they seem ripe for making really awesome games. Some poor child, who was only allowed one present on Christmas, might have wished upon a star for this game and gotten it. And then it punched him in the face and became a $60 coaster after 4 hours.

So yeah, buy it for $0. Or just don't even bother acknowledging its existence. Still, it got me 850 easy gamerscore, so have one star out of five, Terminator Salvation. 

But know I gave it out of pity.