Review: Terminator: Salvation (PS3)

By Mike Koss | June 20, 2009

This summer John Connor and crew blasted their way through waves of mechanical menaces on the silver screen in Terminator: Salvation. Coinciding with its release, Halcyon and GRIN Games have brought together an interquel taking place between Terminator 3 and the movie of the same name. In a genre filled with explosions, guns, robots, and an apocalyptic future, was it able to wrap its electro-mechanical digits around all these premises and provide an engaging experience? Let’s see see if there’s a ray of hope for our bleak future.

The game drops you into the shoes of John Connor and immediately trying to desperately reach an evacuation point. Immediately we’re introduced to two types of the robotic enemies to be found in the game: the flying Aerostat and the spider-esque T-7 T. Just before reaching the destination, a T-600 appears and picks off a few members of your team. Not long into the game we’ve only seen three different enemies and unfortunately, the breadth does not grow much more. Overall there are only 3 more enemies added to the game, one of which is only found in a single level. Luckily it the game concludes before it becomes repetitive, with total playing time clocking in around a handful of hours. Another thing in short supply is the choice of weapons. This proves fortunate since you are not left hunting for specific ammo. The plot does not diverge much from standard fair, but is disappointing by its dry in-game performance by the voice acting as well as the character models. In 2009, it is not too much to ask for characters that blink, or have more facial expression than a Playstation Home avatar.

In 7 years, your '05 Mustang will be old and rusted

The game plays out in the now-becoming-standard over-the-shoulder third person view. This works out really well since you can easily swivel your view around to keep an eye on the enemies. Another nifty feature of the game is the cover system. Unlike standard cover systems where you character is attached to some wall, corner, or object until you un-cover and move to the next location, Terminator: Salvation adds the ability to quickly, easily, and mostly painlessly switch from cover to cover without sustaining excessive damage by having to walk through the fire fight. Unlike most other cover systems, this one does not seamlessly flow. If you’re aiming in a certain stance, you must un-aim, move the opposite direction and then re-aim to force the new stance just to be able to peer around a corner.  Another nagging feature with the controls is how your character has the attention span of a three year old and must be directly looking at something to interact with it. It’s little nuances like these that start to show that this game is a movie tie-in on a tight and limited schedule.

Peer into my eyes of doom

The flow of the game consists of fighting some robots, walking a short period or watching a short in-game rendered movie, maybe a second fire fight then watching the loading screen. Now this loading screen features an excellently rendered terminator skull which you can pan around during the loading process. Luckily they provided this slight diversion because you will be seeing the loading screen quite often. After playing through the game, there is no ‘hunt for the item’ or other challenges, creating very little replay ability. The trophies for the game consist of a gold trophy for finishing each level and finishing the game on medium and hard difficulties. For the trophy hunters out there, this makes it very nice to achieve a handful of gold trophies, and a very easy platinum.

Visually the game is definitely not the most graphic intensive game of this generation. While most apocalyptic future games tend to stick with dark colors, there is some color variation which is a nice touch. Unfortunately, there are some nagging graphic glitches like overlaid textures being improperly blended, caption text being drawn in the wrong location, or the occasional archaic visual effect. In particular there is a scene towards the end of the game that features a California mountain on fire, which ends up looking more like the mountain is bleeding lava from its side and it’s flowing up instead of down.

The biggest problem facing Terminator: Salvation is the lack of polish. That’s the effort placed into the development before delivery to ensure that everything plays smoothly and provides the player the best possible experience. Examples of this are the occasional pause during gameplay, or the horrible framerate in the final battles. It also includes things like how you cannot jump, walk over small obstacles, or fall off edges. Another area horribly affected by this was audio. While sporting a Dolby Digital 5.1 presentation, the audio glitches really pull you out of the experience. For instance, you can tweak the audio level for things like sound effects, music, and and thankfully vocals. Too bad the latter setting does not hold over for the movies requiring subtitles to pick out the dialog; or the second to last stage where I could not hear any of the vocals at all.

Overall the game was not terrible. If not for the control issues, my play through would have been quite pleasant. Not once did I tire of the game, but the loading screen was a different beast. Alas, all of the little problems littered throughout make it a very hard sell at the standard $60. If it had appeared for $30, with some tweaks of the audio and control, it would be an excellent deal. Right now,  I would recommend it solely as a rental for a leisurely Saturday afternoon affair. As such it falls from orbit with a solid 2.5 Aeropausonauts.

Thanks to Warner Bros. and Rocket XL for review copy. Check out Terminator: Salvation and other PS3 reviews at Test Freaks.