Terminator Salvation

Terminator Salvation has created much spite in the gaming community. It has been describes as perhaps one of the most shittiest games ever to grace the Xbox 360 and while I thought it was not the best, it most certainly doesn’t deserve the title of ‘worst game ever.’ It is still really shitty though, but more on that later.

The story line follows John Connor in events that I can only imagine took place before that of the movie as he is not the leader of the rebellion against the machines at this stage. Instead of being evacuated from a random starting battle in the post apocalyptic world, John decides to embark on a rescue mission with one other comrade (co-op utilisation) to save three people who would otherwise have been left to be killed by the machines. It’s meant to be the whole ‘never leave a man behind’ scenario but the story shits all over itself half way through.

You meet up with several people along the way and one of them sacrifices their life to save the others. Afterwards John is upset because he feels responsible for her death, however your comrade mentioned above says, ‘what are sad about? You inspired her.’ And now she’s dead. Well done. And so much for the ‘never leave a man behind’ thing.

The graphics, I was led to believe would be rubbish, however they aren’t as bad as some of the other games I’ve played recently. That said, the environments are pretty repetitive in looks after the first few levels and consist of similar looking blown up buildings and streets. In a game with only nine levels, it is quite the achievement to have such little variety in level design.

In addition to this, you have to fight your way through a series of chest high walls which you can hide behind when robots are trying to kill you. The layout of these is so glaring that you pretty much know when you are going to be faced with a fight due to the series of chest high walls laid before you in the middle of the street along with blown up cars. The cars make sense. The perfectly formed chest-high walls do not.

In addition to the level layout there are a very limited amount of enemies. Let’s see, there’s small flying robot, larger flying dropship, spider robot, two types of man style terminator and... that’s it. There also vehicle sections where you have to shoot from the back of a car taking out machine bikes. That’s six different types of enemies. And nine levels.

The music is in keeping with the Terminator theme however, it was pointed out to me that the repetitive nature of the music was infuriating and I was only playing with company for about an hour so that’s saying something.

The gameplay can make or break a game, however Terminator Salvation was already a write-off before going down this dark path. The aiming is clunky, the shooting accuracy is questionable and you remember the chest high walls I mentioned earlier? Well, John can pop out over them to shoot stuff however, on several occasions, when he would aim ‘around’ a wall, he would fire directly into it instead. It was the most annoying aspect of the game by far. This was even more apparent during the last level when I fired a rocket ‘over’ a barricade only to have it explode in my face. I didn’t die though which made me think that the friendly fire coding is questionable/non-existent as well.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 11 Achievements

Earning all the achievements can be gained by playing the game through on hard and despite the gameplay frustrations mentioned above, this can be done in less than five hours. There was only one aspect that was difficult. In chapter seven you have to fight off robots while keeping your team alive. It’s a small area and you have to fight off two of the super hard robots. It is only a matter of figuring out the pattern though and after a few tries firing grenades into walls directly in front of me I got there.

Completing the game on hard caused a lot of debate in the gaming community. Apparently there is a trick where you can manipulate your save file to complete the game on easy and then fix it by deleting your save and doing something with a second profile but it was all a little convoluted and apparently you can have your gamerscore reset by Microsoft if you do it as manipulating save files is against their rules. For a game that isn’t even that difficult on hard mode, it’s really not worth taking the risk, especially with the amount of effort involved too.

Downloadable Content – N/A

I really don’t think the game deserves the horrible reviews despite my unforgiving comments. It’s bad but it’s not bad to the point of burning the disc and sending it to hell. Another complaint is that it is a poor movie adaptation but personally, I would rather play a game where I don’t know the ending rather than rehashing something that would always be better in the cinema.

LEGO Indiana Jones 2: The Adventure Continues

This one is simply taking advantage of the franchise. Only one more additional movie and they create another full Lego game? Madness. That said, they have redone the original three movies to give six brand new levels so I can’t complain too much about it being a cash-in.

The idea of story is kind of pointless with any movie remake, especially that of Lego where there is no dialogue. As are the visuals because, once again, it’s all Lego.

That just leaves the sound and the gameplay. Now the sound you would expect to follow the movie franchise and it does. However, I don’t recall the music being as infuriatingly annoying as it is in this game. I can’t even remember that much annoyance from the first one. It is repetitive, drone-like and doesn’t portray the sense of adventure which is present in most other Lucas Arts titles.

The gameplay is absolute shit from the start. I’m not even sugar coating it. This almost allows me to go back and all complaint about them cashing in on the franchise comment but I won’t because I’ve hashed that about five-hundred times already. What confused me though, is that the vehicle mechanics appears to have taken a U-turn and dived into an abyss. This is by far the worst Lego experience... no, make that the worst ever experience of vehicle sections in any game I’ve ever played. They make you play one vehicle specific level per episode so that’s six times I’ve had to subject myself to the painful process of getting into a vehicle, having the vehicle tip over at every opportunity, having the vehicle explode because it caught on a rock, having a vehicle not be able to avoid going off of a cliff, having said vehicle respawn facing the edge of the cliff you just went over so that no matter how you pull away, you drive straight back over the cliff again. FUCK OFF!

And that’s extremely frustrating without even mentioning the fact that you can continuous get stuck on scenery and the standard Lego glitching out and freezing – although to be honest, LEGO Indiana Jones 2 didn’t freeze out as much as the other Lego games I’ve played.

The last gameplay frustration I can think of is the AI. Never before have I played a Lego game that is so geared towards having two people play it. Even more so than LEGO Star Wars: The Complete Saga which actually had an online achievement. The AI are so lacking in intelligence, that they should just be called A. In many areas, you have to stand on two switches to get things to happen. This requires the AI to be intelligent and work out that you want him to stand on a switch next to you. When he doesn’t do this and get you get fed up and switch to the other character, the character you were controlling moves off the switch and comes over to say hello. FUCK OFF!

There are also airborne vehicles in the ‘sandbox’ areas which exist simply to make the gamers want to hate the obligatory shit camera angles and scream at the TV after having no idea where the next race checkpoint is until it’s too late. They have also introduced a new feature called build your own adventure, but more on that in a bit.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 38 Achievements

I was hoping this would be quick and painless and I was sort of right as I completed most of it in a week. I won’t go into too much detail as the majority of the achievements are for getting 100% and are covered off in that. If you are going to play a Lego game, I don’t see why you wouldn’t strive to that so it’s not going out of your way. However, there are two missable achievements and one of them is for 100% and here’s why.

The other missable achievement is for unlocking all the bad guys and the reason it is missable is because there is an extinguishable item that you need to unlock one character and if you pick this item up, don’t use if for what it is intended for and leave the game, the item will disappear forever. That’s right, you can miss out on 100% completion because of an unintended glitch. And with the technology available to game developers today, the fact that this was never patched is simply unacceptable. Bad coding should never be a reason why gamers cannot play a game in the way it is intended to be played so Lucas Arts and Traveller’s Tales... FUCK OFF!

There are a few achievements for using the Build your own Adventure feature and, annoyingly, they count towards the 100% game completion. This means that you will need to buy everything there is that you can put into your own really-shit-by-comparison levels; build a level; build a character; build your own adventure and complete the obligatory tutorial levels which show you how to use the thing you will resent being there in the first place and never use again once you have earned the applicable achievements.

As with all Lego games, there are also the ‘do x with x character’ achievements which are always secret not obvious and you probably won’t unlock without knowing what they actually are.

And now for my favourite of the lot. Once you have completed all the levels in the story mode, avoided the horrendous glitch mentioned above and fannied around completing nonsense actions, you then get to complete ALL the main story levels AGAIN in QUICKPLAY MODE. For one last time, LEGO Indiana Jones 2, FUCK OFF!!!!1one!

Downloadable Content – N/A

I will not, I repeat not, play this game ever again. I’ve thrown it into the kids arena never to be seen again and have already left the room twice while they have played it. It was one of those games I enjoyed for perhaps the first five minutes and then it shat all over itself and died. No more. Ever again. I will be playing LEGO Lord of the Rings and LEGO Marvel Super Heroes and as stupid as it might be, I’m expecting a lot better from those. Wishful thinking? Perhaps, but I am hoping that LEGO Indiana Jones 2 is the last rushed-out-for-money Lego game. Please. The funny thing is the last Indiana Jones movie was slated anyway.