Terminator: Resistance Review

Review by Darren Cartledge
Published 28th February 2020

Terminator: Resistance

• Developer: Teyon
• Publisher: Reef Entertainment
• Release Date: 15th November 2019

Most of the time when reviewing games, I spend a good few hours playing before I start to get a feel for it, opinions start forming and hey presto we have a review. But, every once in a while, a game will come along and you know, like a feeling deep down in your bones, that it’s different, almost special. Then like an epiphany, boom! Your thoughts are realised, and you were right, it’s utter shit!

Much like the most recent Terminator movies, this latest game offering based on a franchise that many believe the studios should just let die, fails to deliver in many ways. The story sees you take up the role of a sole-surviving member of the Pacific resistance. Finding yourself alone you team-up with a desperate bunch of survivors whilst trying to track down other resistance cells in order to take the fight to Skynet. It sounds ok, but it plods along at such a snail pace that your attention will rapidly drift away, along with any interest in continuing the fight.

Mediocre is too much praise for Terminator: Resistance, a game featuring the supposedly ultimate killing machines is filled with about as much threat as a soggy sandwich. This game features A.I that is so bad you will literally wonder why you’re even bothering. When the most feared and advanced A.I ever created can’t even see you when you’re stood right in front of them, the whole concept quickly starts to fall apart. Terminator: Resistance will get definitely get you thinking, not about the potential threats from A.I, but why, with machines this stupid, is humanity so utterly doomed.

You’ll also have plenty of time to think. Well, that is if you can stand the pace of the game for any prolonged amount of time. No, it doesn’t run at a thousand miles a second quite the opposite, it is possibly, no is undoubtedly, one of the slowest dredges for a first-person shooter I have ever played! Everything about it feels so laboured and uninspiring that it’s almost funny. The game is a very loose survival shooter, similar to Bethesda’s Fallout games. You collect junk that becomes a trade resource, so you can buy items you need to aid your survival in the land dominated by Skynet and the Terminators.

Like the Fallout games, Terminator: Resistance also features crafting as an alternative to purchasing the items and ammo you need. But, that’s not where the similarities with Bethesda’s game ends. Lock picking is handled in exactly the same way as is in the Fallout games, and I mean “exactly”. It looks identical and your success in picking the lock is based on skill just like in Fallout. You can even force the lock with your current skill level determining the outcome of success. In fact, the system is so similar I actually thought the game might be powered by the same game engine, but it appears its just been ripped right of the nuclear wasteland.

Terminator: Resistance features everything you would expect from a survival shooter, but it has all been done on such a basic level, the game just feels dated. The levelling system is as basic and linear as they come. Whilst the game’s stealth element is completely unnecessary due to the exceptionally poor A.I, as the terminators only seem to see you when you are standing at arm’s length from them. Hacking in the game is you guessed it, basic!  You guide a pong-style ball through of series of pong-style bars that move at different speeds. It’s not the most imaginative system but it is strangely satisfying and a little addictive.

The actual shooter action, like everything else in the game, feels slow. Weapons fire, movement and aiming all just feel overly sluggish. But all that pales in comparison to the reload speed of weapons, which to put it bluntly is absolutely ridiculous, and by far the worst I have ever experienced in a game.

The story and gameplay in Terminator: Resistance are simply to tedious to play through. Making my whole experience of the title feel like wasted time. I would go as far to say it’s the worst game I’ve played in recent memory, it’s not just bad, it’s post-apocalyptic bad!

Review Score: 3/10

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