Terminator: Resistance

It's not the prettiest game but it's so much fun to play and good story to boot. A lot of nice nods to the movies as well scattered throughout the game. I found myself getting goosebumps often from things that I found, sound and music I heard and much more. The game also plays very similarly to fallout 3/4. Can't recommend it enough. Hats off to the developers.

Bought this game on sale ($19) and greatly enjoyed it. The people at Teyon clearly love the first 2 Terminator films and have learned from their previous game flops. Animations are a bit stiff (for faces and hands) and the texture fidelity isn't the best, but the plasma guns feel so good to shoot.

First off, to refute another review on here, you CAN shoot Terminators in the game. And you kind of have to, unless you're stockpiling explosives. That reviewer clearly didn't play much of the game.

When I heard that Teyon, developer of the not-so-great Rambo video game, had acquired the license to create a Terminator game, I prepared for a similar experience; an on-the-rails shooter with ugly visuals and chock full of voice clips from the movies. However, this game turned out much better, and honestly, I enjoyed it much more than Terminator: Dark Fate, the franchise's most recent film.

The game's story puts you in the shoes of a Resistance member in the midst of the war against Skynet, the very war seen in a few scenes of the first two Terminator films. And not to mention, this game actually ties directly into the plots of those films and is full of references to them, so one can tell that this game was indeed created by fans of the films. But overall, the plot here was nothing amazing, but enjoyable for Terminator fans. While some would say it's a short game (took me about 8 hours total, including side content), but I felt it was just the right length.

The voice acting is okay, I suppose. There aren't any standout performances, but there also weren't any that made me cringe. The graphics aren't anything to write home about, but they're a major improvement over Rambo's. There aren't any celebrity likenesses used in this game, so the "that looks nothing like Stallone" issue Rambo had was avoided.

As for the gameplay, it's pretty much standard-fare first-person-shooter. It's not a broken buggy mess or anything, but it can get pretty repetitive and monotonous, which I suppose is the main reason I didn't rate it much higher. That, and it's not particularly amazing on any fronts, aside from the fact that it is much, much better than their previous attempt at a film license. Speaking of that, I assume Teyon will do another film license next... I'll hope for RoboCop.

Teyon, a company infamous for a terrible Rambo game has been handed the rights and opportunity to make another licensed game about an 80s movie franchise. However this time, they've managed to keep it from being another disaster like Rambo.

Terminator: Resistance is above all else, is a love letter to the Terminator franchise, with nods to all the movies backed by amazing sound design and model work in game to really sell that "future" war setting the game takes place in and honestly Teyon should be congratulated on the jumping up of quality from previous games.

What this game gets right is the environmental design and look and feel of the war torn "Future" of the Terminator franchise. Models of the titular Terminators also look fantastic, with them looking almost 1:1 with the movies. The music too is very inline with the original movie with heavy synthesisers in your ears as your hiding from a T-800 as its stomps ever closer to where you are. Plus visually during the night sections, this game looks down right amazing when you see tons of laser fire lighting up the environment as you see the glowing red eyes of your metallic foes.

Missions never felt boring or repetitive, say for the amount of outposts one can destroy that are just a way to earn more XP as side missions. Some characters also felt very inline with how the movies told us humanity had become in these dark time, with a cast of characters that give great insights into just how terrible life truly is now. The story is also really simple to follow, if not a little meh, but it's honestly refreshing to have a game that doesn't blow smoke up its windpipe by trying and failing to tell a "Complex" story and gives a very simple to follow one.

Whilst the highs of Resistance are really good, the medium to bad areas of this game are something to be desired. If you put a gun to my head and asked me to describe this game I'd have to say it feels like "A remaster to an early 2000s obscure FPS that never happened." The look and feel of the game screams classic FPS games, where you are plotted into a giant area to complete objectives, but feels very isolated and lonely due to being surrounded by enemies, and allies really only appear in cutscenes or during scripted missions. There's also this weird indescribable feeling of stiffness while playing the game, where it sometimes feels outdated.

Some performances also felt off, the main voice actor for the main character sometimes sounds like he's phoning it in, thankfully most of the other cast put in a decent performance that doesn't distract you.

Weapons are also very hit and miss, where a-lot of them you don't really get a great sense of their weight or true firepower. Like how when holding a standard Assault rifle, it feels more like a P-Shooter with how little presents it has. Comparing those weapons to later laser weapons, at a certain part in the game you'll come across laser weapon ammo so much that you'll abandon conventional weapons at the drop of a hat. Now the problem here isn't that there's too much laser ammo, its the fact that later on you are coming up against different classes of Terminator, which can only be stopped with laser weapons, and the normal guns are meant for the smaller robots that attack you, which creates this sense that one class of weapons is just not worth it anymore.

The game also tries to implement a skill tree system that honestly doesn't feel all too needed. I get its meant to help you believe you are turning into the best soldier in the resistance, but I feel if they focused more on the gunplay instead of a skill tree than the game could of been improved.

Glitches wise I ran into several during my play-through. One being AI either becoming brain dead, standing still allowing me to thrash them, or somehow knowing where I was behind walls or cover they couldn't possibly see through leading to frustration as Terminators wipe the floor with you early game and having 4 pounce on you just from loading a quick save isn't the best feeling.

Overall, this game has flaws, jank and other words the thesaurus spits at me, but I have to take a knee to all of that really and congratulate Teyon for making a decent game. These guys aren't triple A studio's levels of talent, and neither do they have funding like that, so to produce a product like this is amazing to see. I only wish to see this company go bigger and better with their new Robocop game. And hopefully they can learn from their mistakes and become a household name in coming years.

While Rambo: The Video Game, an arcade rail shooter and literal rethread of the first three Rambo films, will always be infamous as one of the most horrifically bad movie-based video games in history (no hyperbole there), its developer, Polish Studio Teyon, may still have a bright future ahead of them since they have now proved with their new Terminator game that they do actually have some talent for making good games as well.

In all honesty, Terminator: Resistance is a decent but average game. However, the fact that Terminator games haven't been good at all since the late 90s makes this okay game such a pleasant surprise that, at least in the eyes of the fans, it may as well be a 'triple A' Terminator game.

What's good about it? The story more or less works, the characters are not too unmemorable, the few choices in the game do have consequences, the action is serviceable, and the level design is not all that bad either.

What's bad about it? The limited budget occasionally shows when it comes to the graphics (most characters' faces look bad as if they come from a game from some previous generation console), the acting is often bad (even the main character is voiced poorly), the Elder Scrolls: Oblivion-like dialogue can get tiresome, and there is no variety when it comes to the gameplay (what you see is what you get). However, the graphics are fine for the most part, the voice actors who are good carry the game successfully, the dialogues do make the otherwise bland-looking characters somewhat interesting, and there is still more variety here than in any other Terminator game in recent memory.

What's neither here nor there? The game contains up to two short-ish sex scenes (full first person sex scenes with strategically covered nudity) if the player (the protagonist is a guy) chooses to take that route with two female side-characters.

Bottom line? All fans of either The Terminator franchise or Sci-Fi action in general should check this game out. If it makes them some money, maybe the game studio's next project will be a real classic considering what a leap forward this game is compared to the justifiably maligned so-incredibly-bad-it's-almost-good Rambo game.