Reviewing Terrible Terminator Games

i can still remember the first time that i saw the terminator i was watching it on tv with my dad at an age where i was definitely too young to understand what was happening but old enough that i still got hooked on the premise and was impressed by all the action scenes later on i also saw terminator 2 one of the best sequels of all time and just an awesome film in general come with me if you want to live and it's no surprise that both of these movies were used to try to capitalize on the rising popularity of video games in the 1990s with countless adaptations targeting mostly kids like me i think who didn't know any better i'm not really gonna go on about all those earlier games though i mean there were so many on the 8 and the 16-bit consoles and people have talked about them to death plus none of them are really all that good to begin with bethesda of all people made three games back in the 90s too the terminator terminator 2029 and terminator rampage all of which again aren't all that good and the latter one i think honestly being one of the worst first-person shooters ever made a few years later they worked on terminator future shock and skynet two titles which really helped to popularize mouse aiming for first person shooters and these two aren't all that bad in fact they're actually pretty good it's just i don't think time has been kind to either of them and it can be a bit of a pain to get them running properly so until someone comes along and remasters both of these cough cough i don't really think it's worth the hassle it ain't all that bad though and i think any kid who stepped foot into a cinema in the 90s would probably remember the terminator 2 arcade game i'd wager too that about all anyone remembers is that first level seeing as that's probably the furthest that anyone ever got before dying on the other hand robocop vs terminator was also awesome we had a next rental copy on mega drive that my sister and i played to death but i'd argue that that's more of a robocop game than a terminated one what i really find interesting though is how it seemed that terminator games just skipped an entire generation i mean we went from a bunch of titles on the 8 and 16 bit consoles to the ps1 and the 64 being overlooked entirely no i'm serious it wasn't until the sixth generation rolled around with the playstation 2 and the xbox the developers started making these games again and that brings me onto the main point of the video and the four ones that i mainly want to talk about terminator dawn of fate rise of the machines redemption and salvation and look if all you want to know is if any of these are worth playing well let me stop you right there and say that that's a big fat no it's a trap it's a trip we need your support now get out of here the best terminator game without a doubt is terminator resistance which came out a couple of years back and if all you're looking for is something that lets you shoot t at hundreds with a plasma rifle in a 40 watt range some music that sounds like a well produced fan rendition of the film soundtrack well then look no further ariel is going down i was one of the first people i think to sing this game's praises when it first came out well everyone else at the time was taking a dump on it i like that and it really is a giant love letter to the first two films thankfully overlooking all of the other dreadful crap that came out afterwards it's without a doubt the most fun you're gonna have putting yourself into that universe and they even release some dlc for it a few months back good idea sadly though where we're going things aren't going to be quite so peachy because those other terminator games are out there they can't be bargained with they can't be reasoned with they don't feel pity remorse or fear and they absolutely will not stop until my will to live is dead and look if i had access to a time displacement chamber and my very own t-800 well i'd probably send the guy back to the early 2000s to make sure none of these games ever existed sadly though shedding light on just how crap they are is gonna have to do so let's get into it [Music] right so the first one we're going to be taking a look at is terminator dawn of fate developed by paradigm entertainment and released for the playstation 2 and the xbox in 2002 and this one actually has a pretty cool concept being a prequel story to the first film you even get to play as carl race for a good chunk of the campaign and fight alongside john connor himself for a bunch of missions and the whole thing comes to an end as carl gets sent back in time to the early 1980s to have sex with a confusingly attractive linda hamilton only this thing has one very big problem right from the get-go and that's because for some reason someone thought that they'd make this game use fixed camera angles yeah fixed camera angles you know in a game where you're constantly being shot at now look i don't have anything against fixed camera perspectives and they can actually work pretty well at times i mean take the survival horror genre for instance there's always something off-putting in those games about entering a room and then having the camera facing towards the player done as a means to heighten the tension and to make you unaware of your surroundings and in a lot of cases an immediate threat is often kept purposefully out of view which then goes in hand with the whole horror aspect but in an action game where you're constantly trading shots with other enemies this camera style just flat out doesn't work and you're gonna frequently get hit by attacks that you literally can't even see coming more than that though it just makes basic navigation kind of busted as the direction you need to move the thumb stick changes each time the camera angle switches just making basic navigation a chore and when simply moving around the environment becomes a chore well you know someone's [ __ ] up combat is mostly against various models of terminators that starts with variants looking like they've been made out of old soup tins and license plates through to the tougher more iconic t800s which are absolute sponges combat uses a lock-on system which is kind of useless because this mechanic only targets the torsos of enemies which doesn't do that much damage you can use an adrenaline mode which locks onto the heads instead only this thing runs down faster than dollar bills do at your mother's ping pong show so as a result you're gonna be using the first person aiming mode a fair bit here which makes targeting heads and weak spots a hell of a lot easier the only downside though is that it kind of turns you into a sitting duck or a standing duck i guess as you can't move from this viewpoint and you pretty much lose all of your situational awareness and maybe that would matter except the game gives you so many med kits that you almost have to want to die here i was going to [ __ ] about how the game only gives you a checkpoint like every 10 minutes but then i thought it's kind of redundant considering that you're walking around with a goddamn infirmary in your back pocket half the time i don't think the combat's all bad though there's this little handheld rocket launcher thing which kinda looks like the plasma cutter from the dead space games and this thing is all kinds of awesome plus there's just something about your wielding automatic machine pistols that just tickles me right in the ball sack the funny part is how the melee is actually more effective most of the time than using weapons yeah you can swing this baton around and whack things with it and i think that this thing is easily more effective than guns in certain areas i think the main issue that dawn of fate has though is that it's just not very fun to play through the enemies are just really tedious to fight and they're always in high numbers plus there's not really any way to avoid most of the ataxia so you just feel like you're tanking damage all of the time the other enemy types aren't exactly brimming with creative juices either like these drones that fly around and then send out these concussive blasts i mean yeah that's fun and there's also a bunch of tank enemies that take almost your entire ammo supply just to put down most of these i ended up just trying to run past when the game let me you see if you spam the dodge roll you can pretty much avoid all incoming damage during the animation which is a godsend despite playing as different characters they more or less all play exactly the same and the gameplay is the same regardless too often you'll be trapped in a small area and have to defeat countless waves of the same two or three enemy types it just keeps spawning in and then once you finally destroyed an arbitrary number of these things a nearby force field finally dissipates letting you move onward and it's really just scraping the bottom of that level design barrel with a rusty spoon plus they somehow managed to shoehorn in a section inside a turret and even an escort quest you know what i really hate though is how all the turrets in this game overheat if you fire them too much the game is set at a point in time when machines have become self-aware and taken over the planet where using futuristic weapons and can time travel but yeah firing a machine gun for more than five seconds is some kind of impossible feat of engineering and give me a break later in the game it's explained in a single line of dialogue that skynet can now teleport in cyborgs to your location which is really just a lame way the game trying to justify spawning enemies on top of you also i think it doesn't make any sense how they're spawning inside time displacement bubbles you know i always thought those time displacement bubbles were for you know time displacement plus i thought they said i could only teleport organic matter which is why it only worked with the t800s i think kyle reese even says the same thing at one point something about the field generated by a living organism nothing dead will go yeah he did i was right even laser though is how they just flat out recycle a couple of the missions having you play them backwards from another character's perspective like at one point you're moving through this destroyed hotel with jon and kyle and then right after that you're going back through it again as another character trying to level the building with the bombs expert a bomb's expert whose name is private be last yeah alright i have to admit that that's so stupid it's actually kind of funny they also reused the same boss fight twice throughout the game against a large tank once early on in the same hotel level and then again near the end of the campaign and both times all it does is just kind of park itself in a single spot making itself an easy target and you know all i can think of when i see this kind of stuff in video games is do the developers really think that people don't pick up on this i mean when they just flat out reuse an environment like this room for room do they really think that they're pulling the wool over the player's eyes or something or do they just give so little of a [ __ ] that they've got no shame the story in this is also pretty damn stupid coming across as poorly written fan fiction this game makes the mistake that pretty much every movie after terminator 2 made which is going into way too much detail into the future wars and how everything works never mind hey look you want to know why those scenes in the first two movies were so awesome because they didn't need to explain every little thing you only saw these brief glimpses into this nightmarish future and that's all you really needed to perfectly understand the kind of reality that these guys were coming from and the horrible fate that humanity would suffer if they failed and it's just a perfect example of less being more spending five hours long running around all these futuristic environments as kyle reese is kinda cool you know for the first couple of hours but then it just becomes another shitty third person shooter with bad controls crappy level design and a stupid story he's already dead i mean there's somehow even managed to make a boss fight against an infiltrator scene boring and dull the dumbest thing in the game though has to be these skynet initiates which are humans who are trying to defect over to the machines this to me is just so lame in concept and there's no real reason that skynet would ever want to create these human hybrids especially these dumb looking [ __ ] that look like the borg from star trek the idea of humans wanting to be turned into robots is kind of far-fetched or you know what maybe it's not i mean we live in an age where guys jack off to the side of a woman's feet so who knows man there's a whole backstory here about this faction being led by an ex-techcom soldier but it's really just not very interesting one sick twisted bastard stone really gameplay-wise these guys are just the same as a reskin terminator you still deal with them in the exact same way waiting for them to walk into whatever room you're in before shooting them in the face they don't have different tactics or anything i mean you think that maybe they'd be more mobile or something but they pretty much just walk slowly towards you until they're killed but you want to know what the worst thing in this game is though and no it ain't the visuals although they're pretty crappy too it's the music i mean just listen to it [Music] all i can think of here is did the person who composed this stuff ever see the movies i mean look let's listen to a track from the first film which you know this thing is a prequel to and then compare how it sounds to the music in this game [Music] so [Music] well that was [ __ ] dreadful i mean the whole thing just sounds so out of place it'd be like putting trance music into casablanca a running theme you're going to be seeing in these videos is how the games always end in these crappy skynet themed levels and dawn of fate is the first one to get the ball rolling ending in a lengthy series of missions inside these never-ending gauntlets of metallic hallways providing no cover from incoming fire as enemies constantly appear around you for the final encounter you've got to destroy three incredibly spongy mini bosses called guardians before then trying to destroy the sky net main frame before it can mind control kyle and the whole thing is about as fun as plucking out the hairs from your [ __ ] but i guess you know what if nothing else when the whole thing is set done you can at least have some sense of accomplishment successfully sending call back to the past to play the shitty games that suck ass i mean that event after all is the whole catalyst for the movies carl goes back and bangs sarah sarah gives birth to jon jon is protected by the t-800 against the t-1 thousand preventing judgment day then jon goes off the rails and becomes addicted to meth and prescription drugs and that's what it's all about right time time is a valuable thing watch it fly by as the pendulum swings watch your count down to the end of the day the clock ticks life away hard to believe so i mean look man if they're gonna do a game based off any part of the franchise well i'm at least glad they chose to do it off the events to kick the whole thing off i don't know man i don't know i'm just looking for things to be positive about right what's interesting is that this ended up being one of the last games that paradigm entertainment ever made which is another theme you're going to see throughout this video because it just seemed that making a terminator game was like the kiss of death for these studios i guess you could almost say that making a terminator game terminated these developers starting with the next game on the list terminator 3 rise of the machines now ryzen machines was developed by black ops entertainment and released in 2003 to presumably coincide with the release of the third film and i don't think i need to see how that thing turned out let me just say that in 2003 on a personal note i got laid for the first time in my life and also saw terminator 3 and the ladder still somehow managed to be the bigger letdown now i know that when video games are based off movies a lot of the time the developers aren't given full access to the source material to really capitalize on it as much as they possibly could resulting in a game that doesn't feel true to what it's based off only that wasn't the case here and apparently stan winston himself helped out with the team getting their hands on the art and designs from the film plus they even got annie himself to come in and do all the voice work and even film exclusive scenes which makes it even more impressive than considering how bad they [ __ ] the whole thing up john connor it is time it's like giving someone a hammer a nail and a plank of wood and asking them to nail it to the wall then you come back five minutes later and they've instead put the nail through their thumb and snap that plank in half rise of machines continues that long line of video games based off movies being complete and utter dog [ __ ] and funnily enough i think the times it strays away from the movie scenes are when it's the most fun it's when it tries to recreate the movie that it starts to lose its way so the game starts off during the future wars playing as the reprogrammed t850 after it's just assassinated john connor it's now been put to use to help the resistance and right away you're getting shot at and have to be put to work carrying out orders combat again functions a bit like dawn of fate where you've got a handy lock on button to target nearby enemies requiring a little more than just the basic coordination of also pressing the shoot button at the same time lock and load only thing is though i think that auto aim actually makes sense now simply because this time you're playing as a cyborg with highly advanced artificial intelligence so it makes sense that you're able to have this pinpoint accuracy remember that scene in the second movie where the t-800 goes outside with the minigun and just empties the brazilian rounds at all those cops without managing to wound a single one of them [Music] yeah well that's the kind of stone cold machine like efficiency you're working with here and simply holding down that lock on button is going to snap to the nearest enemy and then send all your shots in their direction well most of the time destroyed most of the weapons are just crappy looking energy guns a lot of which share the exact same ammo time plug and blow but most of the sound work is actually faithful to the movie soaps at least got that going for it you've also got like a plasma machine gun which as far as i can tell is just a re-skinned browning machine gun and the rocket launcher in this thing also kicks all kinds of ass it's like something out of a borderlands game with this revolver style chamber that can fire six rockets before needing to reload and look i don't think i need to explain the virtues of being able to shoot six rockets so quickly i think the problem is that again all of this crap just goes on for far too long it's not really all that challenging either so it just kind of feels like you're moving through these levels in autopilot mode until you hit the next loading screen there's a one-on-one fight here against another t850 which serves as more of an introduction to the awful melee combat which i'll get into soon enough it's all just really trying to develop the backstory for what happened before the t850 arrived in los angeles and took part in what has to be the most embarrassing scene in any of the terminator films so far notice i said so far because i just know that at some point in the future they're sure to do themselves in whatever crappy new terminator film they cough up next well that was [ __ ] dreadful from the point you show up in la is when it just starts recreating all of these scenes from the movies poorly i might add and some of these just don't really translate all that well into actual gameplay like the scene in a cemetery where all the characters get ambushed by the cops in the game this is an escort mission where you've got to get jon outside to safety but because you're not allowed to kill anyone you instead go around punching everything in the face or hitting them with the butt of your weapon then when you're topside moving through the ground you've got to shoot all these cars to prevent anyone from chasing you and that's just a matter of walking around and shooting at the same looking stationary vehicles for five minutes after this they found another way to recycle a level and try to pass it off as something new during an all-new story mission back in the future playing as the pre-programmed t850 as he's mowing down techcom soldiers to blaze a path through to jon to assassinate him and yeah i guess that sounds kind of cool but it's just one of the environments that you've already played through just again played in reverse order to try to make it seem different [Music] now rise of the machines ain't exactly the longest game ever made in fact i think it's easily the shortest game in this list coming in at around maybe two hours and some of these missions really don't waste their time in getting over with like the mission where you're trying to find jon for the first time you walk through this animal hospital for all of 15 seconds before then finding him in a cage and then bam mission over later in the campaign and by later i mean 10 minutes later when you've made it to norad as sky and it starts to become self-aware you blast through this series of levels inside the building in literally a matter of minutes what may or may not take the most time here is fighting the tx because it seems from this point it's almost kind of like a boss rush and every second level if not every level you're having to fight her in one way or another this whole minigame was apparently made by shiny entertainment and look i don't know if they designed this as some kind of elaborate prank because it sure ain't that good i think the concept is kind of cool pitting the two models against one another and the sound work is kind of decent i suppose sounding exactly like what you'd expect when two walking chunks of metal are beating the crap out of each other i think it's kind of neat too how the lower your health gets the more flesh is chipped off your endoskeleton if it gets to the point where if your health is low enough you start limping around and hobbling but the whole thing just feels so clunky and shoddy man like it's had no polish put into it whatsoever there's all these various combos you can pull off here but it really just seems like rng as to whether or not they'll even register sometimes the tx will just stand there taking blow after blow like a metallic punching bag but then other times she'll just flat out ignore your inputs and attack right through an already existing combo even pulling off some filthy johnny cage star moves where she does the splits and whacks the t850 in the baby maker does he even have a baby maker kind of reminds me of playing mortal kombat 2 on the mega drive where you get to that point where the ai would literally just start cheating and read all your inputs thankfully it's really only that tough the last couple of times you have to fight it and i guess it is kind of dumb complaining about the main antagonist being challenging considering that that's the entire point of her being in the game the first place but i don't know man i guess my point is if you're expecting any kind of fun over-the-top combat between these two titans well you're not gonna get it here you won't get to throw the tx through a concrete wall for instance or through a plate glass window you won't see anything like that here much like you won't see christina loken in movies anymore because her career [ __ ] tanked after being in this awful movie she'll be back i'll always remember black ops entertainment as the developers that made the playstation one port for the world is not enough which was a pretty competent game based off a movie compared to this which is not well played rise of the machines though is far from their best work and they often kind of wonder if arnold ever played this game and got to see just how crappy it is i think the most likely scenario is that he just sat back in his la mansion at the time smoking a stogie and cashed in those royalty checks so i tried it more the rest is history amazingly though this isn't even the worst game in the list that you would be forgiven for thinking so nah man i think the worst game in this list goes to the next one terminator the redemption hasta la vista baby now terminator the redemption was developed again by paradigm entertainment in 2004 and is like an altman version of the events from the third film still follows the same basic plot of a t850 being reprogrammed and eventually sent to la to protect jon and catherine brewster but there's all these new scenarios that they've included like an entirely new plotline where the tx sends the t850 back to the future we're asked to make his way to another time chamber and then get back to the past i don't know if the redemption in the title is supposed to be like a play on words in the way that it's the t850 trying to redeem itself after terminating jon or if it's an ironic take on paradigm trying to redeem themselves after the reference with dawn of fate either way though this has to be one of the most supremely frustrating and unenjoyable gaming experiences that i've had in recent memory and i'm absolutely stunned that this thing has the highest aggregate score here of any game on this list when i really think it's the worst this is too dangerous the funny part is that they really tricked me at the start of the game and had me thinking otherwise the campaign begins with the t850 being reprogrammed by the resistance and during this opening cinematic we're blessed with what might be one of the funniest arnie impressions i've ever heard 62 seconds ago i was activated 14 seconds ago i sat up on this table you know you only really realize how important it is having that guy doing the voice work for this character until you hear it without him and the gravitas he lends to the role even in a game as crappy as rise of the machines just went a hell of a long way this time though throughout almost the entire game you get to bear witness to this absolutely hilarious impersonation what's your mission to travel back to 2003 and ensure the survival of john connor and catherine brewster it is a terminator model tx he signed for extreme combat and honestly i think at this point i could do a better imitation than this guy does get out of here the opening level is also pretty damn awesome you're basically sent right out into no man's land after this idiot gets gunned down by passing hunter killer and i mean who turns their back on a battlefield like that visually for an xbox game it also looks pretty great the detail on that t850 character model is fantastic and the little attention to detail here like the banderly grenades over his shoulder shows a real love for the source material i also love that animation for the slow controlled walk he does when firing weapons because it feels true to the films and just walking around and gunning down all these terminators feels fun shortly after that you hop on a turret and it has this really awesome mechanic where if enemies sneak up behind you you can press the x button and throw them in front of you like a goddamn ragdoll it introduces two of the main game's mechanics which is the scanning system that iconic terminator vision mode which in redemption increases the damage you do to enemies for a period of time there's even this whole upgrade mechanic where you earn points per level to put into upgrading it which is about the only reason to continue playing plus it shows off the only way of regenerating health which is by sapping energy from nearby power sources which is not only a cool looking effect but also kind of badass in concept alone anyway after the turret section you're then on the back of a vehicle chasing after a skynet ship that's trying to escape and from this point on you can even leap from vehicle to vehicle throwing away the discarded one like it's a piece of trash if you run into terminators along the road they'll even attempt to pull themselves up into whatever you're driving so you need to press the x button again to deal with them which again is just such a fun idea this is where you get off then from the final part of this level you're in a chop by using a goddamn mini gun to shoot at ground troops and other vehicles from the air and for an opening level you have to admit that this is all looking pretty damn good the only issue i have is that again the music is kind of awful and it sounds nothing like what a terminator game should sound like but on first impressions alone otherwise it's hard to fault it then you start the second level and you do the exact same thing yeah almost literally yeah you start off on foot for a bit then you're driving vehicles then you're on a chopper again and that's really the issue that you're going to start to pick up on in the way that redemption plays its hand essentially from the first level and then never really manages to advance more than that in fact i think it actually gets worse the further you get get out of here because when you inevitably die for the first of many times you'll also realize that it completely lacks checkpoints expecting you to finish entire levels in a single go now they stand an issue early on when the game is still being somewhat fair but later on in the game this thing becomes [ __ ] crushing and relies a hell of a lot on trial and error which we'll get to soon enough so as a result you're going to be replaying the same levels over and over and over now the future wars component of the game ends expectedly when the t850 manages to send itself back in time to la to find and protect jon and from this point on is where the game truly goes to [ __ ] because for the next couple of hours it basically just becomes a vehicle combat sim you won't be back on foot for a while at this point and it's just lame driving levels one after the other like the first level back in the present time as you're trying to catch up to the tx who's driving through the desert on her way to find jon you know despite the fact the game literally just showed her in the city anyway for this level you're driving a vehicle that's considerably slower than hers is so the only way to catch up with her and not fail is by cutting through all these various shortcuts to make up time only you're not gonna know where these shortcuts are for the first time you're playing and if you miss more than one of them you're basically screwed and you're probably gonna have to restart the entire level it becomes this incredibly annoying process of trial and error making it that little bit further before missing the next correct path you were supposed to take failing restarting and then trying again slowly piecing together this intended route the game wants you to take whoa what the hell i mean the entire chase might only go on for like three or four minutes but you'll spend easily upwards of 30 trying to memorize the correct route and you know what really chafes my willy is that every time you fail you've got to sit through the same cinematic and navigate through the upgrade screen you can't just simply hit the restart button and be back in the vehicle affirmative next level you're on a police bike chasing after the tx again this time she's driving a truck and possessing police vehicles to try to mess with you now you've got to shoot out the four ties of the truck to make it swerve and lose control so she can't catch up to jon and this is again something which is going to take a fair few attempts and yeah guess what after that another vehicle level this time you're on the top of the van being driven by jon as the tx is now chasing you oh wow talk about a role reversal oh yeah but we're still not done up next is the level in the cemetery and this might be the dumbest one yet where you do infinite laps around the cemetery grounds trying to catch up to this artificially faster swat van to ram it we can't keep this up in between stopping the tx from destroying it as she periodically leaps under the top of it and because a giant armored swat van is somehow faster than your hearse you have to use all these various shortcuts along the way to try to head off the van and ram it and look i know it's a video game and it's not real life you know that much is abundantly clear but i just really hate stuff like this in video games you can outright see the van pulling away from you in this really cheap fashion at times and it just makes the whole level so infuriating i guess paradigm really wanted to get their money's worth out of that hurst model because they used it again for the next level this time as you're trying to escape from the tx again and the only way to stop it from destroying your vehicle is by swerving left and right and then grinding her into the guardrails on the side of the road you know a couple of dozen times then for the end of this level she hops into a chopper which just makes her a slightly more mobile target as she possesses a bunch of vehicles to try to ram you off the road what also kind of weirded me out at this point was how the cinematics would frequently go from live action back to cgi which i just found completely jarring along with how the game then also suddenly switched gears and sent me back to the future for these new levels and this right here folks is the worst the game gets if nothing else at least you're finally back on foot for once shooting t800s with a plasma rifle which honestly is all i ever wanted to do to begin with fantastic but it again follows that stupid formula from the opening levels and you're only shooting things for all of 90 seconds before then again sitting through these incredibly repetitive long and drawn out vehicle sequences i mean this level might introduce these new environmental hazards that you need to avoid but it doesn't really add anything all that new you still just hold down the fire button and drive in a single direction until the whole thing comes to an end even the side of the t850 hijacking a goddamn tank and grabbing the cannon with his bare hands to then fire on platoons of t900s just feels lame and boring and at this point if you don't know about the melee combos which restore your energy well i don't think you're even able to get past these levels at all the level that absolutely broke me though was this one set in these tunnels as you're trying to get towards the skynet base and at this point like i don't even know what i'm playing anymore like i felt like i was having an out-of-body experience or something or i'd go on full homer mode and tripped out on some bad chili man this is crazy i hope i didn't bring my damage kinda reminds me of the death star run from the end of return of the jedi you're all clear kid now let's blow this thing and go home oh wait that's episode four [ __ ] for this level you're navigating through the intestinal tract of this giant structure avoiding constant hazards and obstacles and again there's not really any skill to any of it because you're not going to possibly know what lies ahead so it becomes a matter of just replaying the level over and over dying repeatedly to chip away and become familiar with the layout and it makes the turbo tunnel in battle toad seem like playing hopscotch in comparison honestly i got so annoyed at playing this level that i went to punch my couch in anger and i somehow missed the cushion and hit this wooden bit underneath it causing my knuckle to swell up to the size of a goddamn golf ball and it just encapsulates how annoying this game is a game which has no consideration for the players time expecting you to get through these slogfest levels in a single attempt chill out dickwad i was reading too that apparently the devs wanted to include time limits for every single mission but i guess common sense prevailed and they decided to remove it so maybe i shouldn't judge this thing too harshly considering how bad it truly could have been piece of cake now i know i talked a lot of [ __ ] about doing a fate but at least they were decent enough to give you checkpoints here and there somehow with redemption though we've regressed back to the point that even that basic quality of life inclusion is somehow overlooked i don't know if the ensuing levels were actually any easier or just been mind broken at that point but shortly after finding your way to another time machine you arrived back in the present just in time to save jon and catherine from the tx and i just found these sections much easier then the final boss fight isn't even really a final boss fight you've just got to hold the tx off for a bit by destroying a bunch more possessed vehicles which is a mechanic they've now reused what like half a dozen times and then stagger her with missiles before finally being able to see her finished off in a cinematic you have no control over at least in rise of the machines you got to beat that [ __ ] like a cherokee drum with your own hands and even dawn of fate had a proper end boss fight that you had to shoot at so i think for those reasons and the multitude of others are listed here this makes redemption the worst game by far that's great see you're getting it and it's kind of a shame because you can really see the potential that this whole thing had the moments when you're on a plasma turret shooting down hunter killers or leapfrogging onto the back of skynet vehicles to jack in up just awesome even those brief moments where you can unleash combos on the t900s and grab their weapons out of their hands up just fantastic as you can tell the people who worked on this thing are definitely fans of the movies [Music] but the absence of a basic checkpoint feature just makes most of these levels really frustrating to play through and even the inclusion of this brand new take on the rise of the machine storyline just doesn't make this thing worth playing this brings us on to the final game and that's terminator salvation based off the film with the same name in fact actually being released the same week as the movie and at this point you're probably hoping that this one might live up to its namesake and be half decent to play through but i hate to be the bearer of bad news because it ain't and this one's bad for a different kind of reason i think simply because of just how ugly boring it is to play through looks like terminator salvation is the most generic third-person shooter i think i've ever played and had it not had that terminator brand slapped on to it being milled for all it's worth at this point i doubt anyone would have even touched this thing that looks like it did some damage i don't know what the general consensus is with the movie at this point i know people on the internet have this habit of suddenly acting like something that's always been bad is now simply good because enough time has passed but all i know is is that i thought the movie sucked i saw in the cinemas with my mate at the time and we both hated it having to bury our sorrows right afterwards with a heavy ingestion of alcohol so before i even violated my xbox 360 by loading this thing up my expectations were already at rock bottom and yet i was still disappointed don't sweat it darling my boys are on it this one was developed by a company called grin the keyboard here being was because this is yet again another terminator game that ironically terminated an entire dev team in the same way the recent films terminate the credibility of anyone who says they like them the only other thing these guys made that was ever really all that noteworthy was the pc port for ghost recon advanced warfighter which is without a doubt the worst version of that game that ever got released and that's kind of what salvation feels like at times it's almost like a tactical shooter only missing the tactical aspect or anything really remotely interesting so the game much like the film has you playing as john connor only this time it's in an alternate future where john didn't go on to lead the resistance against skynet instead being not much more than just a lowly grunt blair i want you and conor to focus on shooting it down got any extra rpg lying around after a brief prologue which really goes nowhere jon suddenly decides to veer days off course to find and rescue a squad of three that stuck out in no man's land under heavy attack and let's just analyze this right off the bat right the so-called brilliant military leader who would go on to lead the final push against skynet decides to just head off by himself into a wasteland filled with cyborgs to rescue a small group of soldiers who may not even be alive by the time he gets there if he even finds them what are you doing john taking some responsibility seems a bunch of voice actors also lent their voice talents here aside from christian bale though who i guess had the good sense to stay as far away from this thing as possible why are you talking like this the guy playing conor though kind of sounds like he's doing a bad bail impression only it's not nearly as fun to listen to as the arnold one from redemption wars now i do think visually the world does look kind of interesting even if it is the most unreal engine 3 looking game i've ever seen which is kind of odd for me to say considering it doesn't even run on the unreal 3 engine the way the world has been presented is also kind of appealing you're moving through these decayed cities that humanity's left behind abandoned environments where the grass and bush have now grown over buildings and across highways and it's almost kind of like the last of us before the last of us was even a thing but don't let that fool you because this is still one of the most boring third-person shooters ever made with regenerating health a weapon limit cover mechanics and shoulder aiming which is kind of what then too how they just also completely overlooked all the other basic quality of life inclusions you'd kind of expect to see in a game like this i mean despite the game being almost entirely cover based there's no option to vault over cover i mean you can't even jump there's no kind of sprint button you can't dodge role to avoid attacks and you can't even swap shoulders when aiming with weapons despite this thing coming out during the peak of the sixth generation of consoles and at a time when games like gears of war were well established for something like this to just lack so many basic features is a pretty big [ __ ] up add in things like aiming acceleration and that regenerating health that takes a dog's age and you've got the strawberries and cream on this giant [ __ ] pie but the worst thing is the enemy variety or the absolute lack thereof because throughout the entire game you're really only going to be fighting the same two or three enemies you're either fighting these flying drone things which zip all over the place making the shotgun essential to take them out then there's these spider robots which are heavily armored from the front but have a huge design flaw in the way that their power core is completely exposed from the back and can be shot at i mean that's like putting a doggy door on the back of a sherman tank these enemies piss me off the most though because it seems like you're always fighting a bunch of them during almost every single encounter and they've very clearly been designed around co-op play if you've somehow managed to get a second person to play through this with you either by holding their family hostage or holding the gun to their genitals well then i'd imagine it'd be a piece of piss with one player distracting them while the other player goes for the kill however if you're a pathetic loser like i am and you're playing solo you've instead got to rely on the ai to do that for you and the game doesn't always take that into consideration and this might be fine if they only ever showed up every now and then but like i said you fight these stupid things almost every single time you're in combat so it becomes this very boring combat loop of using a shotgun to take out the drones as it's by far the most effective means and then playing peekaboo with an assault rifle to take out these spiders yeah not leaving much room for the other weapons you know the remaining three of them yeah that's right this game has five weapons in total five count em a shotgun assault rifle the machine gun a grenade launcher and an rpg that's it you can also throw grenades and eventually pipe bombs but can only ever hold a couple of these at any one time and then the third enemy you're up against the t600s armed with miniguns who again fight you in absolute droves and you're all about forced into using the grenade launcher or an rpg against them for the last couple of levels in the game here you're pretty much just killing like an assembly line's worth of these guys and there's so many rpgs and grenade launchers scattered around the area that they may as well put a neon sign over each of them because it makes no sense to use anything else and how they can make a terminator game again and not include some kind of plasma rifle that's just beyond me still want to join the resistance bars oh hell yeah i understand that this takes place early in the war and maybe the resistance hadn't gotten their hands on skynet tech and like reverse engineered it or whatever but man this is a boring ass lineup i can actually pinpoint the moment in the campaign when i realized i wasn't going to get my hands on any better weapons because after this bit where you had to like defend a subway station from an onslaught of enemies and i knew that if they were gonna add in some more guns this was gonna be the most logical time to do it and of course they didn't and my worst fears were realized as i spent the last 25 minutes of the game just putting countless t600s out of commission with an rpg you know this really is one of those games that looks like the kind of thing you'd see someone playing in a tv show or a movie you know in like tv shows and movies when there's like a character playing a video game and because they can't afford to license an actual game they have the person playing something made up just for that scene and it always looks like a mish-mash of every video game trope at the time that right there is terminator salvation alright let's roll it's just so uninspired and it doesn't do anything you haven't seen before come on connor like having to take out a hunter killer with an rpg twice and i mean how many shooters have you played that require you to shoot down an aircraft with a rocket launcher or just countless instances when you're on the back of like a jeep or something firing a turret and an endless swarm of enemies in constant pursuit and of course the turret has to have that stupid-ass mechanic where it overheats if you fire too much and again can i just go on the record saying here how much i [ __ ] hate this mechanic the cinematics are sloppy and boring to watch with really crappy animations and even worse voice acting and yeah i love this one too how john sticks his hand to his head when he's supposed to be using his earpiece you know it's like they didn't even bother to double check any of this stuff finally there's no collectibles there's no unlockables and outside of the cobot mode there's no reason to ever want to replay this thing outside of just showing it to your therapist to explain what you went through or using it for some kind of elaborate torture routine at a cia black site i'll give them credit in one regard though and that's that the music is actually pretty good one point i think i even heard that t-1000 motive from the second film impressive very nice i mean hey look it took four games but someone finally got the idea of what these games are supposed to sound like you seriously think this is gonna work i guess i like the main menu too i don't know that's like a nice simple aesthetic and the background image is kind of atmospheric but yeah you know a game is really bad if i have to reach as far as praising the main menu i mean look salvation isn't anywhere near as painful to play through as some of these other games were and it is like a respite after suffering through redemption but it really is just another lackluster movie video game tying in one of the dozens that have come and gone without much of a fuss and at least it is kind enough to not waste too much of my time able to be beaten in a couple of hours it's about all you can expect for a game based off a crappy movie and it really wasn't ever going to go any other way but it still deserves to join the others at the bottom of a lead smelting pit that's for damn sure much like the films the video games are bad more often than they are good after the release of genesis it seems developers pretty much had no faith in the franchise at all anymore and most of everything that came out afterwards were mobile games released for the android or the ios i wouldn't count on seeing a remaster or remake for any of these in the future but you know what maybe that's probably for the best i still say that if you're after the most authentic feeling true to the source material experience you can get well terminator resistance is your best bet resistance has got a dope soundtrack a fun campaign and it's incredibly faithful to the law from the films plus it won't leave you with a swollen knuckle from punching your couch in anger i just hope if any ever comes back to lend his voice talents to any more terminator games before he goes off to that gold's gym in the sky that it's for something as honed as terminator resistances and not any of these other abominations i talked about in the video because i just don't know at this point if i'd have the energy to cover another one so [Music] you

Channel: GmanLives

Views: 1,135,312

Keywords: terminator games, terminator dark fate, terminator resistance review, terminator resistance gameplay, terminator game, first person shooter, terminator rise of the machines, terminator redemption, terminator dawn of fate, arnold schwarzenegger, xbox one, full game, video game, xbox one x, james cameron, terminator full game, terminator 2, john connor, the terminator, terminator gameplay, terminator ending, terminator resistance dlc, terminator games review, gmanlives

Id: VAdvhbuSNOA

Length: 46min 50sec (2810 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 10 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/Catco97]

None of those games are “terrible”

[u/BackInTime69]

I really like dawn of fate to me

[u/pnarvaja]

I agree a skynet remake would be awesome

Salvation was a good fun game to play, it was short and little but the guy is comparing it to games with millions of dollars in budget like gears of war. A complete jackass.

[u/Sergiomach5]

All I remember about Salvation was the easy achievements. I know its not the focus but the Genesis and NES T1 and T2 games were fun, if basic.

[u/BackInTime69]

It's a great prequel story for dawn of fate

[u/enewwave]

Weren’t Redemption and Salvation pretty good? I remember liking Redemption a lot when I replayed it a few years ago and hearing that Salvation was pretty fun, but short