Terminator: Dark Fate has received the cold endoskeleton shoulder at the box office, but i💎ts video game counterpart Terminator: Resistance is enjoyꦕing rave reviews among the Steam gaming community.
The question is, "Why?"
Termina𒐪tor: Resistance hasn't scored well with critics, but players seem to love it even as they acknowledge its faults. Time to put a microscope on this game and determine why it's scoring so high among players, and where it could have done better.
3 No Fate But What We Make - The Good 𝓀
#1) The Future War Atmosphere
Developer Teyon knew what they were doing when they built Resistance using Unreal Engine 4 to simulate the war-torn Pasadena landscape, complete with eerie moonlight god-raying through the skeletons of decayed buildings and other rubble. The atmosphere is incredible, working with the sound design to put you right in the thick of the action. Daytime scenes seem to take t꧋heir cues from the Terminator: Salvation film, with rusty browns and sandy hues representing a bombed out California landscape. Resistance is great at expanding on the scant few future war sequences from Terminator 1 and 2.
#2) Excellent Sound Design
Good sound design is 75 percent of what makes a great movie or video game. Resistance makes incredibly effective use of nostalgic musical cues and sound effects, the latter of which are lifted straight from Terminator 2. The punchy signature sound of the pulse rifle is the real star of the show, capable of triggering nostalgia with a single press of♉ the trigger. Teyon could have easily gone with alternate sound effects, but wisely chose not to. The music is equally on par with its movie source material, incorporating some of Brad Fiedel's compositions with entirely new music that befits its nightmare-industrial soundtrack.
#3) Appropriate Weaponry
In addition to the iconic൲ plasma rifle, Resistance serves up a virtual artillery of scene-appropriate weapons from battle rifles and rocket launchers to sniper rifles and Uzis (sadly, no .45 Longslide wiss' lasa' sighting). The shotgun serves a dual purpose - to destroy lesser foes whilst knocking down T-800 endoskeletons exclusively to freak you out when they get back up to continue pursuit. Maꦚny of these weapons get tossed by the wayside once players find the plasma rifle (more on that later), but it's a great system for pressing the narrative forward.
#4) Explore - Don't Just Shoot
You'd be forgiven for thinking that Terminator: Resistance is a straight up, no holds-barred action shooter that takes its cues from Serious Sam. In truth, Resis𒐪tance is an incredibly story-driven title that focuses on sub-plots and side missions in addition to its main quest narratives. While seemingly run of the mill, they're actually quite immersive, involving everything from sabotaging SkyNET defenses to acquiring chalk for a little boy who just wants to doodle on the walls. Teyon realized the importance of balancing tactical side objectives with missions th🍰at center around basic human nature. In that regard, they get what James Cameron was trying to say in the original two Terminator films.
#5) Fan Service Without The Fluff
It's obvious that Resistance was made by Terminator fans for Terminator fans. Easter eggs and franchise nods are littered all over the place for players to find, including one particularly awesome surprise inside a hospital that we hope hasn't yet been spoiled for you. Even John Connor was modeled largely on Michael Edwards' portrayal of the character at the start of Terminator 2, complete with appropriate facial scarring. Teyon bravely attempted to bridge the gap between their game and the movies through the use of a plot which tries to explain humanity's victory over SkyNET just moments before it sent Terminators back through time to attack John and Sarah. It's not perfect, but it adheres to the film's timeline of events while injecting a te♎rtiary side-plot that runs parallel with the opening scene of ♐T2.
2 ♚ Don't Make Me Bust You Up, Man! - The Bad 🌠
#1) Graphical inconsistency
Resistance is pretty to look at...sometimes. For all its atmospheric glory, it's incredibly inconsistent when it comes to texture quality. Rubble, concrete and decrepit vehicles look either good or great, but some textures look downright atrocious. The mission involving an attack on an HK Tank is a perfect example. While the environment around the target is adequately textured, the HK itself is a blurry, low-res disaster reminiscent of a modded Fallout 4 that missed a few key texture packs. Thankfully, Terminat📖or: Resistance offers full mod support out of the box, so it's only a matter of time before talented artists start tossing up some HD textures.
#2) Weapon Imbalance
Those who have played Terminator: Resistance will undoubtedly mention weapon imbalance as one of the core flaws of the game, yet many will also admit they don't care. You're stuck with traditionalꦍ ballistic weaponry for the first few hours before getting your hands on the coveted plasma rifle, which changes the nature of combat. Resistance doesn't toss all the guns out with the bathwater, though. It fuses plasma rifle tech into carbines, machine guns and other weapons in an attem♉pt to upgrade them. This does make sense from a movie-centric standpoint. In the first Terminator film, Kyle Reese expressed doubt that he could destroy the pursuing T-800 with regular weaponry, so it only stands to reason that the human resistance would mass-adopt plasma rifle technology to fight back against a future SkyNET. From a gameplay standpoint however, it whittles away any remaining challenge.
#3) Low Difficulty
Speak𓄧ing of challenge, Terminator: Resistance is remarkably easy to plow through without much trouble, even on the highest difficulty settings. Experienced FPS aficionados will slug their way through the game relatively unchecked, thanks in large part to a rather straightforward enemy AI that isn't the worst we've seen, but is definitely lacking. One particular moment in the game involves going mano a mano against a heavily armored T-800 infiltrator that retreats more often than it hunts you down. Regular enemies wade carelessly into your shots just to squeeze off a few rounds of their own, with little in the way of strategy or purpose. It could be argued that this is simply a matter of machines behaving like machines, but surely SkyNE🥀T would recognize the importance of maintaining resources.
#4) Wooden Characters
A non-AAA game can't be expected to court prolific and experienced voice actors for their characters, but that's little excuse for Resistance's subpar voice cast. It's not all bad, but most of the characters in the game simply can't muster the acting chops or the v🍒ersatility to make interactions believable. For instance, the character of Patrick looks to be 9-12 years old, yet his character was voiced by 17-year old Max Robson. It really isn't good enough. It also doesn't help that character models are devoid of facial articulation and emotion, instead staring at you with blank, chiseled-out expressions. This plays out i𓆉n spectacularly cringe-worthy fashion during the optional first-person sex scenes later in the game, which are nothing short of traumatizing.
#5) No Arnold
Let's face it - Terminator is inextricably bound to Arnold Schwarzenegger, and always will be. For a Terminator game to show this much fan service in the form of hidden easter eggs and obscure movie references, it's odd that Arnold's likeness is nowhere to be found. His Terminator charactꦚers are mentioned in the final act of the game, but that's as far as it goes. This was no doubt a licensing cost-cutting measure, but it's a missed opportunity to make the player's pursuing Terminator an Arnold-based T-800, which would have been spectacular. It's the one missing link in the fan service chain.
1 🔯 You're Terminated, Naysayer💝s! - The Conclusion
None of these negatives seem to have sullied fan appreciation and enthusiasm for the game. The introduction of mods will undoubtedly transform it by building on its core foundation, which may give hesitant players a reason to jump in alongside those who would love to soldier through another play-through. In many ways, Terminator: Resistance fee🐲ls like Aliens: Colonial Marines without the awful parts sewn in. It's dedicated to reproducing the feel of the iconic movies it was based on, but lacks the polish and finesse of AAA titles with large budgets. And ye🍸t, it's still a blast!