Buy Terminator: Resistance

As long as there's been a "Terminator" movie, there's been a video game for it. The unstoppable deadly killing machines make fantastic enemies, and all sorts of other games (from Contra to Mass Effect) have borrowed the design. As far as Terminator games go, none have been definitive. On the surface, Terminator: Resistance had the potential to finally be the Terminator game, but unfortunately, it runs into the same problems as the rest.

Resistance is set in the distant future as envisioned in the "Terminator" and "Terminator 2" movies. The rest of the movies are completely ignored, including the new "Dark Fate." You take on the role of Jacob Rivers, a private in John Connor's future army. When his entire squadron is wiped out by a single disguised Terminator, he's forced to reconnect with the main Resistance forces to figure out where the Terminator came from. This leads him into the middle of the war against Skynet, where his actions determine the fate of the world.

Story-wise, Resistance is a mixed bag. I liked hearing the various characters talk about their experiences with Judgment Day and the time that followed, but the main plot is painfully predictable and relies on a twist that is given away almost immediately. The big selling point for Terminator fans will be playing through the Future War. It isn't the first time that games have offered it, but Resistance is more in-depth than most. It also relies heavily on a plot that doesn't make a lot of sense, considering Kyle Reese's dialogue in the first "Terminator" film. I'm not sure why a disguised Terminator is treated as such a big deal when Reese mentions they've been doing it for a while.

There's some player choice in Resistance, mostly resembling Telltale Games. You get some down time when you can talk to people you're traveling with and learn about them. Dialogue choices let you alter people's decisions and even their eventual fate. There are even romance options, complete with a tremendously awkward first-person sex scene. It's a neat feature and adds some personality and meaning to what would otherwise be forgettable characters. In my experimentation, the choices essentially boiled down to, "Do they live or die?" and the indicators were pretty obvious.

As weird as this may sound, Resistance most resembles Fallout 3. While it lacks the VATS system and the open world, most other things about it feel like simplified versions of what you'd see in that Bethesda offering. It even features the same lockpicking minigame and a very similar hacking minigame. However, Fallout 3 wasn't particularly known for being an engaging shooter without the rest of its surroundings, so Resistance ends up feeling awkward. It's almost like you're playing a Terminator-themed mod for Fallout rather than a Terminator game.

That may sound kind of awesome, but it's hurt by the fact that the comparison is only superficial. Resistance doesn't offer much exploration. There are side-quests and objectives, but once you look at the map of your current level, it becomes clear that you're not exploring too much because the invisible walls in the environment form fairly linear paths with a couple of branches. It's not an open-world title so much as a mostly linear shooter with a Fallout-style skin. This isn't necessarily a negative, but the general aesthetic and design make the comparisons stand out.

With that said, there is a nice amount of variety in how you can enter certain areas. Most environments have multiple paths, such as air vents, doors with pickable blocks, walls that can be blown up, hackable turrets, and so on. Usually, the loud route is the easiest, but it's nice to have the option, and the game rewards you for exploring alternate ways to handle things. Going in loud was usually the easiest method, but you can hack and sneak more if that's your preferred play style.

There's a limited selection of enemies in the game, including tiny spider bots, floating drones, larger spider-bots, Terminators with guns, and giant super-terminators. In theory, there's a lot of difference between them, since some are armored or rush at you. In reality, their HP feels slightly undertuned, so it's tough to care about their gimmicks beyond the early game. Instead, you just aim for the red glowing weak points and fire.

One of the weirdest issues with Resistance is how it handles Terminators. In the early game, there are a lot of indications that Terminators are supposed to be dangerous and scary. They are immune to most standard weapons and can only be stunned by a shotgun, so you need to sneak past them and hide. There's even a tense stealth sequence where you need to go through a room of them. Immediately after that sequence, you get a plasma weapon, and the danger vanishes. Terminators become another easily disposable enemy, and since they all carry plasma weapons, you'll almost always have ammo. What is built up as a very scary and intimidating foe quickly dissolves into cannon fodder. Oddly, the game keeps trying to treat them as big deals by warning you to hide from or avoid them, but a handful of shots to the chrome skull solves the problem with far less stress.

This is emblematic of what Resistance faces. It has a lot of different gameplay mechanics, but none of them feel sensible. There's a crafting mechanic, but ammo is so plentiful that there's no need to touch it. There are different weapon types, but plasma is the only one that matters since it's the only one that can be upgraded. There are stealth kills, but it's faster and easier to shoot enemies. You have theoretically limited health, but by the endgame, I had over 100 full healing items. There's a leveling system, but I had enough points to buy everything (except, ironically, the faster leveling skills) long before the endgame. There's even a flashlight mechanic, despite no locations being remotely dark enough to need a flashlight. At the end of the day, no matter what you do, there's no reason to engage with the various mechanics instead of just shooting things. It feels like the developers went for quantity over quality of gameplay mechanics, and the title suffers because of it.

The game is still playable, but it feels bland and repetitive. There's no variety in the enemies or objectives, there's no real danger from foes, and there's no need to swap weapons. It's fun enough to shoot Terminators for a while, but once I reached the end of the game, I had little desire to play it again, even with the promise of differences due to the choices I made when interacting with characters. It took me about eight hours to finish, and that was going relatively slow.

Resistance's graphics are pretty basic and look like a upscaled PS3 game. The character models are pretty dull, and the lighting effects are unsatisfying. There's not much I can praise about the visuals. The aforementioned sex scene, which is prerendered video rather than in-game graphics, seemed to get more effort than anything else in the game. The soundtrack is quite good, and the music fits the tone of the franchise, but it relies a lot on the Terminator theme. Likewise, the voice acting is solid and does its work well.

Terminator: Resistance is reminiscent of the days when tie-in games were released with practically every action movie. It's playable, but it's forgettable. It's fun to get your chance to shoot Terminators in the face and see John Connor being John Connor (instead of the mess he became in the various sequels), but beyond that, there's not much to recommend it. If you're a die-hard Terminator fan who is eager for a chance to visit the future of the original movies, then it might be worth a go. It's difficult to recommend for anyone else, though.

Score: 6.5/10