Terminator: Resistance (Xbox One) Review

For such a milked franchise like Terminator, it would be expected for it to have more quality video game adaptations. For the past 30-something years it has been an enormous junk-heap of entries that failed to impress. With the quality of the films getting worse, it has been easy for a many Terminator fan to give up and move on to greener pastures. Things look even more grim with this latest entry releasing on the cusp of the release of the latest film which has bombed in the box-office, and with the new tie-in being handled by the same team that made 2014's Rambo: The Video Game, which was met with seething hatred by everyone. Somehow, with all of these negatives working against Terminator: Resistance, it has resulted in something positive.

At its core, Terminator: Resistance is a first-person shooter with some minor open ended exploration and survival. There are the main story objectives to complete, and a variety of optional side-missions too. A major selling point of this is of course the Terminator aesthetic and ambiance. It cannot be stressed enough just how much source material elevates what is essentially a stripped down Fallout 4. The overall vibe is ripped straight from the nightmares of Kyle Reese from the original movie - the sound design, music and nuclear wasteland that's festooned with charred skeletal remains and various roaming models of Skynet sentries.

From the classic metallic T-800 monstrosities, to the aerial and ground Hunter-Killers, everything a Terminator fan would hope to see is all here. The developer did an admirable job with what is very obviously a budget title that was made to be an advertisement for the branding. It is very clear that whoever was working on this really cared and knew Terminator well. There are dozens of sly and cute homages to the James Cameron directed films - some are very subtle that only those who are very intimate with the material will catch them.

Terminator: Resistance does a commendable job at representing and illustrating the style of the good movies. It is just too bad the team responsible for this was very obviously held back by some obvious budgetary limitations, and very likely, some time restraints as well. This is not a looker by any means, but it is also not totally offensive to the eyes either. It's an Unreal 4 game that looks like a really good looking Unreal 3 project from 2011. The weakest links are easily the human characters who are as expressive as the assassin robots. The absolute worst case involves the one child character who tragically looks like he is suffering from progeria. Lip synching is laughable, and appears to be done through a program that struggles to match very basic mouth flapping with the recorded audio. The human resistance may have been shafted yet again, but at least Skynet's forces look great and animate the way an evil robot skeleton would.

Aside from moving the plot forward and exploring open-ended mini sand-boxes, expect to scrounge up materials and supplies on site to survive. In the beginning, basic Skynet sentries include various drones and spider droids which can be easily dispatched by a home-made pipe-bomb. The T-800s are obviously the biggest threat since they can take a ton of punishment, and will utterly melt players in a shoot-out. Ironically, Skynet's army has extremely exploitable artificial intelligence.

It is pretty easy to outflank these metal boys, and when the energy weapons are introduced, any tension these guys may have presented gets chucked to the wind due to how effective they are at turning Terminators into junk. As progress is made, the overall difficulty drops, and more features open up. The skill tree the protagonist has overpowers everything even on the second hardest difficulty, which feels like it should have been the standard. The lack of polish and unrefined difficulty is by far the one aspect that holds Terminator: Resistance back from reaching a point where it could be a cult hit. As is, it's a perfectly acceptable first-person action-RPG that borders on being sub-par, and is only saved by The Terminator license.