Too small to justify purchase, but is a decent rent.
Terminator Salvation is another generic third-person action game. It shouldn't take anyone much longer than five hours to finish, and with the lack of value this game offers, Terminator ultimately feels too small for a full-priced retail game. Terminator does offer some cheap thrills, but they are few and far between.
Taking place two years before the movie, you live a day in the life of would-be savior of the human race, John Connor. The plot is next to non-existent, and boils down to John Conner (you always have to refer to him by his full name) and friends, in a rescue mission to save fellow resistance soldiers. The story tries to justify John Conner's rescue mission as a mission of principle, and gets a little preachy that humans have the heart to care about one-another, unlike machines. The narrative is barebones, and has little presentation to boot. The lack of cut-scenes, and exposition causes a lot of weird continuity problems. More often than not, you'll randomly be in a situation that the game failed to explain how you got there. It seems like developer GRIN had to cut portions of the game to release on schedule.
Terminator Salvation is very much a product of the post-Gears of War world we live in. While the mechanics of moving from cover-to-cover is slick, the overall action has some energy but falls flat due to the lack of variety. The game only presents about six different enemies for you to fight, which is weird considering everything GRIN could have done with genocidal robots. The actual combat is fun for a while because the game forces you to change tactics for individual enemies. It's too bad non of your foes seem to post much of a threat, and the fact they never attempt to flush you out of cover. For example, there is a hovering robot that you fight constantly, and it seems to just stop in front of your cover, never attempting to...I don't know, fly over your head and shoot.
The game isn't a bad experience, nor can I even say it was a badly designed game, but merely a game that failed due to the lack of polish and doesn't supply enough content to justify purchase. It might be a good idea to rent Terminator Salvation, especially if you're the kind of person that can appreciate easy achievements/trophies. Besides, John Connor isn't played by growly-voice Christian Bale in the game, which I don't know about you...but that's totally a plus in my book.
