I ordered the full game, and all I got was this... this demo

by Florian Eberhorn

Fun factor: Average

Worth to: Rent

GRIN does a decent job delivering story-driven titles but this time an overabundance of cutscenes and the game’s short length terminates what could have been a fun ride

Well, to keep it short... it’s short. Pre-order came in yesterday, and I finished it on Normal difficulty in under 5 hours (and I did die a lot, too), with about 4 hours of actual game play and the rest with way too many cutscenes and loading screens. In my second playthrough on HARD I was halfway through with 1.5 hours played (but less dying, so...) when I had to put it down.



Terminator Salvation is a 3rd-Person shooter with mild tactical elements and the by-now-familiar cover mechanics, interspersed with several different rail-shooting sequences. You play as John Connor, at this time (Los Angeles, 2016) just a lowly grunt in the human Resistance against the murderous AI Skynet and his robotic army. For those that are not familiar with the “Terminator”-background story, go rent one of the movies.

Loves to terminate the fun parts

Okay, fine. It’s the future. Skynet, a newly developed military AI, went to war against humanity and mostly won. Humans are nearly extinct. There is a Resistance, but as John Connor says: “We lose more than we win.” Things look bleak. But John is here to save the day. In fact, he already has, but that’s where things get complicated. Like I said, watch the movies -- at least the first two.

The game starts with you as John returning from some apparently failed mission, but instead of evacuating with the rest, you and your female partner decide to try and rescue three stranded survivors deep behind enemy lines. In nine chapters you fight your way through the ruins of L.A., the L.A. subway, up into the hills and finally into the heart of Skynet territory.

The game is basically a Gears of War clone -- which seems to be a pretty popular approach to game-design at the moment, albeit not necessarily a bad one -- with some additions and some things left out.

The on-foot combat revolves around cover-based shooter gameplay like GOW (you crouch or stand in cover, then pop-out to shoot), but with the added cover-to-cover move variety as seen in Wanted: Weapons of Fate (which was also developed by GRIN Studios). Unfortunately, the “Popping-out-of-Cover”-mechanic has been simplified, so that you cannot control how you pop out, i.e. you cannot determine if you will shoot above your cover or around the side of it; the game decides that depending on the cover and your position. They also left out sprint and roll capabilities, so your movement does seem a bit slow and is always in the same pace.



Mixed in with that are several rail-shooting sequences that have you driving on trucks with different weaponry, the back of an old subway train and on one occasion a futuristic tank, which all sounds good, if not great, but the game still feels like a demo rather than a complete game. Why? Because whenever you have enough time with something to start to like it, the game takes it away. It’s like a teaser with no main course -- a sip of this, a taste of that, and it’s all pretty good, but just when you think you have it, it’s gone.

Who needs robots, humans can’t die

The game isn’t just short: the individual parts are, too. Gameplay is consistently interrupted by cut scenes, annoyingly so. After every second small fight, there’s a cutscene, after almost every second cutscene there’s a pretty long loading screen (even installing the game to the HDD doesn’t help much), and that completely cuts up the game flow. It’s like 5 minutes play (1 minute running around, 3-4 minutes fighting), 1 minute cutscene, another 5 minutes play time, another 1 minute cutscene, then a 1 minute loading screen. Or at least, that’s how it feels.

The gameplay itself is engaging and fun for the most part, but once you start getting into any kind of rhythm - BAM! Cutscene. Some parts are so short -- offering only seconds of “game play” between cutscenes -- it’s ridiculous, and not in a good way. One of my favorite parts, a rail-gun sequence where you and your partner man the guns on separate trucks protecting a school bus full of survivors on their way through the ruins of LA, partly driving through the destroyed buildings always trying to cover one another, is really well done, but it’s barely two minutes long. If even that. It’s so frustrating.

The on-foot gameplay is mostly running from one combat encounter to the next along predetermined paths. The combat is set up to be pretty much always about flanking the enemy, so most environments give you ample opportunity to do so. The plan: while one or more NPCs keep the enemy occupied, you tackle it from behind. It’s what hyenas do when fighting a bigger predator, like a lion. It works in nature, and here it mostly does, too, with the enemy AI reacting to the different threats well and your AI controlled partner(s) mostly pulling their own weight.



Still, most encounters feel static, since your partners usually don’t move that much, and once you get too far ahead of them, their support dwindles and stops. You cannot control their movement, so when they stop, you also have to. While teamwork seems to be necessary against the overwhelming odds and superior firepower (truth be told, it is rarely overwhelming at all until late in the game -- most battles seem far too easy once you get the hang of it), your AI partners don’t seem to have a problem taking unlimited punishment completely exposed in a hail of enemy gunfire. They don’t get wounded. They don’t die, unless it’s scripted, which kind of takes away a whole lot of the urgency in each encounter, since you really only have to watch out for yourself. Your own health is another thing entirely; it only takes a few hits to bring it low, and even though it does replenish, it only does so after a set number of enemies are destroyed.

Now we know why Arnie was reused so often…

The fights themselves are fun, but again they are short, and are always set pieces with a certain number of enemies that have to be killed to get ahead. Oh, and when you do: cutscene. There are some rudimentary sneaking possibilities when the enemy has not detected you, and by using cover you can get into a better attack position before taking them out, but mostly your AI partners will ruin any element of surprise.

Enemy characters lack variety: there are small flying robots called Aerostats or Wasps that hunt in flocks, Spider-Bots that are only really vulnerable from the back (you’ll hear John saying quite frequently, “Let’s flank ‘em!”), and two versions of Endo-Skeletons with mini-guns (the Terminator walking robot dudes) which are the toughest enemies in the game. Three or four times you’ll also fight a Hunter Killer (HK), a pretty big flying hovercraft with plasma and machine guns. And that’s it. No really, that’s it. No other enemies to come, except for some rail shooting missions where you are attacked by shooting robot-motorcycles.

On foot, to fight these few and mostly predictable enemies, you have five different weapons at your disposal: light machine gun, heavy machine gun, shotgun, grenade launcher and rocket launcher, of which the shotgun is definitely the most effective against all enemies. Supplementing your arsenal are hand grenades and pipe bombs. Yes, the same kind of pipe bombs Kyle Reese used to blow up Arnie “T-800” in the first movie, but sadly there is only a small difference in effect between hand grenades, and seemingly no difference at all in the animation of throwing them, while tagging an enemy with the bomb is unfortunately not possible at all.

Compromised cover-system

You can carry two weapons at once, and both types of thrown explosives, and you’ll find ammo and other weapons on the ground throughout the game. Since weapons and grenades are outlined in green and visible even through walls, you’ll rarely run out of violence to spread.



The rail-shooting sequences bring their own weaponry, from machine guns to grenade and rocket launchers to plasma cannons, with unlimited ammo and only an overheat gage to be concerned about, which doesn’t make those sequences easy. In fact, some of the early rail-shooting missions seemed to be the most difficult and frustrating parts of the game, made even worse by poor checkpoint placement and the ubiquitous, often non-skip-able cutscenes.

The fighting on foot is definitely satisfying, at least if the AI is up to it, but the rail-shooting sequences feature some of the game’s most enjoyable moments. One of the most annoying things about on-foot fights, however, is the compromised cover-system. Even though it works well most of the times, when popping out of cover, John Connor sometimes hits his cover object while shooting or even throwing grenades, even though his weapon should be well clear of it. It’s an annoying waste of ammo and getting blasted by your own pipe bomb can be pretty distracting (there’s no friendly fire, not even with grenades, so nobody gets hurt). The “blocking-cover” problem is something that has already been apparent in GRIN’s Wanted: Weapons of Fate game, and it returns here in all its infamy.

Summary

Despite some enjoyable moments and fights, the game is just way too short, with the game flow unnecessarily interrupted by way too many cutscenes, loading times and frustratingly placed save-points. Visually it’s well done, but apart from a sunlit vista of ruined Los Angeles, nothing impressive. The story components are negligible, the voice-acting is fine, but Christian Bale it ain’t. Music and sound effects do their job. The single player campaign features an offline split-screen Co-Op mode, which might help with the sometimes sketchy partner-AI and extend gameplay a few hours, but the lack of a multiplayer (I had so hoped for Machines vs. Humans multiplayer matches or something like the “Horde”-mode in GOW2), makes this game a rental at most.