Terminator: Resistance Review

The Terminator series has been in a bit of a rut for years now as each new installment for the movie franchise tries to capture the magic that the first two movies had with no luck. Now, as an attempt to save the franchise, both Terminator: Resistance and the new movie, Terminator: Dark Fate, have decided to ignore everything after the first two Terminator movies and focus on telling stories fans actually care about. Unfortunately, for Terminator: Resistance, that just isn’t enough.

Terminator: Resistance is a first-person shooter that takes place in the Skynet-controlled future, years after Judgement Day but before the events of the first Terminator film. It acts as a prequel to both Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgement Day, but it doesn’t feel like it until halfway through the ten-hour campaign. You play Jacob Rivers, a soldier in John Conner’s army that manages to escape an attack from a new threat they call “the Infiltrator”: half-man, half-machine. After the attack, you find a group of survivors that help you get to the south division to warn everyone of this new threat and hopefully discover a way to stop Skynet.

You meet quite a few characters throughout your journey to stop Skynet and talking to them even gives you dialogue choices that could impact their fate at the end of the game. Some dialogue for certain characters could even lead to some of the most awkward sex scenes you’ll ever see in a videogame (or any media for that matter). The campaign gets interesting towards the end when they begin to reference things from the movies, but overall, it's very forgettable. The characters aren’t interesting in the slightest and the story drags on for quite a while until you actually start to have fun with what you’re doing.

A key reason for that is Terminator: Resistance feels like a last generation game through and through. The controls don’t feel fluid and a lot of the mechanics are so basic that you could probably skip all the tutorials and would be completely fine. Crafting is as simple as it can be as you pick up materials in the world and craft items/ammo at crafting tables. While at the table, it only shows you how many materials needed to craft the item and doesn’t show how many of the materials you have which is irritating. There is a shop where you can buy ammo and materials as well, but the game is so generous with both that it makes the shop – and even crafting towards the end – completely irrelevant. This also makes collecting tradable goods – that immediately turn into money as you pick it up – pointless as well since you won’t need the cash.

Terminator: Resistance’s mission structure is linear to a point. Each mission has its own area you can explore to find materials, items and even skill books that give you skill points. Since it is semi-open, there are also side quests that are given before you embark on each mission that you could either choose to do or not. Doing them will increase your relationship with that person and they are usually on the way to the main mission so they aren’t too intrusive.

The gameplay isn’t enjoyable because most of what you’re shooting at feels like bullet sponges or nothing at all. The guns don’t feel fun to shoot until later in the game when you can use the plasma guns. The plasma guns make Terminator: Resistance feel like a Terminator game, mainly because of the sound design which is exactly like the movies. The plasma guns can be upgraded with Skynet chips you find from looting machines as well and you find quite a few of them before you could even use a plasma gun which was strange. Equipping the chips had a little puzzle element to it as well where you had to make sure the circuit was closed by matching each side of the chip with the matching icon. It’s another simple mechanic that becomes irrelevant as you progress because you get so many chips.

The game also gives you the option to play stealth or run in guns blazing with a decent number of items to support both playstyles. The skills you earn from levelling up can also help you with the playstyle of your choosing as well as letting you use the plasma guns, increasing backpack space or giving you the ability to hack enemies. You also have the ability to see through walls with your ‘ultra-vision goggles’ which helps a lot if you’re planning on doing a stealth approach.

There is one odd thing the game does that makes no sense. When you hold L1 to open the weapon wheel you have to choose the weapon with the left thumbstick, but while doing that, your character is also moving in the background. So, there will probably be a time where you’re in cover trying to switch your weapon, but while doing that, you might walk out of cover and get shot. It makes no sense at all.

Visually, Terminator: Resistance truly looks like a last-gen game in every aspect except the lighting and the actual Terminator’s themselves (T-800s). The world has a cool vibe to it because of the lighting and all the reflections off the metal from the machines, but when you’re not looking at the machines it’s not very pretty. The character models aren’t great to look at either and talking to them with their emotionless faces as they try to make you feel something with their stories always felt like a chore. Even though it looks like a last-gen game it still has problems on current-gen hardware with frame drops and pop-in textures. The one thing they do get right is sound design and music. This game sounds really cool when everyone has plasma guns firing at each other and they have the Terminator theme playing in the background.

Terminator: Resistance feels like a game that’s lost in time. It resembles more of a remaster of a last-generation videogame than a current-gen title. The story can be cool towards the end for Terminator fans as you see how the first two movies began, but it's not worth the boring gameplay, mediocre visuals, and uninteresting characters.