Will the real T-800 please stand up?
This game is a weird chimera, instead of being part human part machine, it's part first-person shooter and part.... fighting game. Yeah, you read that one right, about 6 of the 22 missions are one on one fights against another Terminator, one fight being against another Arnold and the rest being against the blonde Terminator. The game lasts about... say, three hours tops, some missions can be beaten in less than a minute, but 70-80% of the game is filler, made up of 'what happened' before Arnold was sent back in time, taking place in the future. At first the game uses CG cutscenes, some that do an awful job of linking stages together, but after the game arrives to when the movie begins we get scenes from the movie, which is pretty neat. You can unlock, either via cheats or exploration, the classic Missile Command and Centipede Atari games. Why? The hell should I know! Same reason Chinese bootleg toys have LED lights on their chests, perceived added value I guess. I'll tell you right now, the best thing about the game is the 10-15 minute long playable demo of Terminator: Redemption, it has framerate issues, but the game looks pretty fun and now I definitely want to get it. And I think I used to love this demo too back when I was younger.
I'll start with the fighting element first since it's the one I liked the most back when I was younger. Firstly, this game's budget must've been abysmal because the character models are horrible, but the fighting animations are even worse. Performing some moves have frames in which characters have their hand wide open and it looks so weird, and the jumpy animations don't even feel fit for a robot! The overall feel of these fights is very similar to Spawn for PS1, you have 360 degrees of movement but you are always facing your enemy, even though moving around feels weird. You have a punch and a kick button, awkwardly placed opposite of each other(Triangle and X), you grab with O an d guard with square. I'll give it this, there's a surprising amount of attack strings you can perform by mixing the O, X and Triangle buttons, but the fighting feels super wonky.
Well, here's another gun thing about the game... I don't know what's worse, if the shooting or the fighting. As far as these first-person shooter levels go, I'll give them this... there was some effort put into it, just as there's a surprising amount of combo string variety, the developers went out of their way to give you a different set of weaponry for the past and future levels, although you'll barely get to use the past weaponry since those levels are super short.
The thing about the shooting... is that it's super unsatisfying. The audiovisual feedback from enemies getting shot isn't very good. You are fighting Terminators most of the time, how cool would it have been if you could dismember them and have sparks flying about! But alas, enemies just take your shots and then fall down and sometimes explode. Woohoo. The weaponry isn't all that exciting, and the ammo system makes no sense. Some weapons share ammo, others do not, I don't get it. In the past the shotgun and the minigun share ammo? Why? It makes no sense. The ammo system makes no sense. Oh, and the game has to load when you swap weapons, but it doesn't freeze the game... so you'll be getting shot with no way to defend yourself when you swap weapons! Even better, as you cycle through your weapons, trying to find the one you want, you might swap to another weapon as you cycle through them, so that means going through two mini-loading processes, making the wait to change your weapon even longer.
There's this weird lock-on system with the L1 button, and I know why it exists... because it's hard finding a happy medium with the analog stick sensitivity. It's either too slow or too fast. But the L1 button is weird. Sometimes your gun will aim at the enemy but if you move around you'll lose the lock, other times it the lock on will stick as you move around. It's weird. That said, using L1 to quickly go from target to target gave the game a certain Arcade-like feel, and at times it was actually kind of.... kind of fun. It's not a good game alright, but quickly going from target to target while shooting them down was kinda fun, I won't lie.
What's not much fun is the level design. A lot of levels rely on infinite enemies, making running towards your goal the right strategy, which was weird. Sometimes the game does a poor job at conveying how to do what you have to do. Like telling you to protect someone... but you don't know where this someone is. This one time I had to escape the subway, and every exit was closed, I didn't know what to do. Out of frustration I started shooting and... some giant pieces of debris broke opening up a path. This debris looked like an invisible wall, how was I supposed to know I could break them by shooting them? And the radar is terrible, sometimes the yellow objective marker jumps around so it's impossible to know what or where it's actually targeting. Don't even let me get started on the awful 'Protect John' missions in which you have to act as a human shield while trying to knockout people with your pathetic melee attacks. The first time I played that stage I got too far beyond where I was supposed to be when the cutscene triggered so John died. The second time around I was more wary and took it more slowly and... John got shot down by INVISIBLE guards. It was so frustrating!
I've dedicated more paragraphs to this game than to other more worthy games, but what can I say, it gets so much stuff wrong. I can tell that some effort was put in some areas, but not where it really mattered: The core gameplay. A different set of guns for past and future stages? That's neat, but the shooting isn't much fun and loading times while swapping weapons are unacceptable. Tons of moves for the one on one fighting? Thanks, but make the fighting actually fun first. But hey, look at the bright side, this game comes with a banger demo for a much better game!
3.5
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