In Terminator: Resistance, you play a resistance soldier named Jacob Rivers. When your entire division is wiped out by the advancing terminators, you join Tech-Com and take an active role in fighting SkyNet, and eventually leading the charge against its core. Along the way, you meet and bond with civilians and scavengers--depending on your actions, they could be your friends, family, or you could brush them all off. Inevitably, your story aligns with the events of the movies, building up to the moment when SkyNet and the resistance clash over the Time Displacement Equipment--the very same thing that sends the original terminators from the movies back in time.
The game is FPS first-and-foremost, but with just enough RPG mechanics to make you feel like you can grow a little. Missions and combat will earn you experience points that unlock skills (mostly simple things like weapon usage, more inventory slots, disarming bombs, hacking, lock picking, crafting). You do have the option to sneak around most maps, and you are given a detection meter to show if a machine can spot you (although I feel like sentient machines should be a lot more savvy than how they are in the game). For for every other mission, you are thrust into the fray of futuristic combat--once you have a plasma gun in your hands, many T-800s and other machines will fall at your feet. Even though the machines are often intimidating, they rarely feel like an insurmountable threat--I found it pretty breezy to blast through most levels with the plasma gun blazing the whole way (stealth be damned, lol). It's even easier when you can hack turrets and make them shoot for you. Resources and ammo seem plentiful, and the game offers a bit of breathing room to permit some relaxed exploration and looting. As it is with some of my favorites (Far Cry, Fallout), I am continuously addicted to the combination of open-ended exploration, RPG-style leveling, and blowing machines up.
However, the game is rather linear by nature. It tunnels you through several small maps--because you play through the story both in front of and behind the Annihilation Line, you often revisit the same maps, but one version will be more ruined than the other. That, and the limited variety of enemies and items, betrays the limitations of the developers--I suspect they didn't have the time or budget to mix things up more than they did. Boss fights are underwhelming--you get to fight an Infiltrator, but it's not that much different than shooting at a regular T-800. The T-1000 is mentioned, but never faced (missed opportunity, imo). You do have to take down a Goliath, but it's an easy task when you hide behind some walls and pop rockets at its backside. Combat struck me as being rather easy, to the point where the game offers little challenge. But it is often satisfying to watch SkyNet machines explode in your face--doubly so when you're charging with fellow soldiers while the Terminator theme plays in the background.
The biggest joy I had with this game is in how well it meshes with the first two movies. Its post-Judgment-Day setting mirrors the scenes we see in the films, right down to the way spotlights shine through mist and illuminate the dreary ruins in gray and blue hues. Guns, bombs, enemies, and key characters all match up with the movies. They all make the right sounds. All the rules the movies laid down (such as having dogs identify Infiltrators) are still at play. The Tech-Com shelter looks exactly like the setting Kyle reminisces about in the first film (and I'm pretty sure the game's penultimate level is meant to be that exact moment when the place is wiped out, even though Kyle himself doesn't appear in the game).
As you go through each map, you play through a story where choices determine your relationship with other characters. As it is with Fallout, their fates are shown in the end-game cutscene (which, really, is nothing more than a slideshow of painted stills). Whether they live or die is rather arbitrary compared to the main character's arc, which does play into the time-travel angle in its own way. I found the reveals interesting and I admire that it's tied into the last level (and in turn, tied into events that enable the first two films). I wish this amount of care was put into Salvation and Genisys when they were made.
All that being said, the game could have used more polish with its writing and voice-acting. Dialogue is often weak and cheesy (although I have to admit that the voice actors show no lack of enthusiasm). The writing falls back on some common game tropes that involve more telling and less showing. I do appreciate the attention to detail concerning Terminator storylines and details--however, the game is so short that it feels like the events take a week, despite the first movie explicitly stating that the war waged for decades (and in spite of this, the appearance of the Infiltrators is rushed in the timeline--the game completely glosses over the fact that rubber-skinned models were used before the cybernetic ones were unleashed).
There are many things about the game that I wish could have been better. I was not fond of the leveling being capped, even before being able to unlock all the skills. I would have loved this game a lot more if it was a sprawling open-world map, where liberating outposts could directly impact the gameplay, but outposts in this game amount to little more than giving you bonus xp. If this game was given the Far Cry treatment, with more variance and detail, I would have loved to spend 50 or 70 hours fighting for the resistance. But this game was wrapped up in about 10 hours (with a plat nonetheless), and there's no incentive to play the game again (other than to do the same things over). Although, if this was made into a bigger game, it would have been a hoot to have a New Game+ in the form of having Rivers go back in time and literally replay history.
For Teyon, this short, straightforward shooter is probably the best they can manage, and it's quite admirable for its empowering gameplay and the attention they put into the details behind the story and environments. It's all rendered in pleasing visual and sound quality. I'm also quite smitten by the soundtrack, which meshes the classic synth themes with modern guitar riffs, and I find it exceptionally awesome. It is a fun little game--shame it's this little, but as a franchise fan I was reasonably satisfied with it. It may not say much when there's so few Terminator games out there that are really good, but this is by far the best I've seen.
7/10
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