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.