Even The Terminator himself is shocked. Look at his face!
Developed by Grin and published by Evolved Games to coincide with the film's theatrical release, Terminator Salvation is basically a third-person cover based shooter, much like Gears of War and Brothers in Arms: Hells' Highway. As John Connor, the player will go through nine chapters battling enemies from Skynet like in the movie, in addition to new enemies that are exclusive to the game. It costed $60 at launch, but it's not even worth that due to how little content there is.
The gameplay as whole is pretty uninspired; it does very little to stand out from other, far better games in the third person shooter genre. The Xbox 360 already had Gears of War 2,while the PlayStation 3 would get Uncharted 2: Among Thieves later that year, so console players had very little reason to play the game. The shooting mechanics are competent, but they're nothing special. The campaign is very short, being anywhere between three to four hours long, depending on skill. In addition no multiplayer exists outside of co-op variant of campaign.
There are also no other features to speak of besides a difficulty select, but rather than actual challenge, the game has a tendency to throw multiple hard to kill enemies at the player at once, sometimes in confined spaces. On the higher difficulty settings, the enemies can kill the player almost instantly at full health. The health regeneration mechanic is awful in that it requires the player to be out of combat to heal, and the higher difficultly levels make the game far more difficult than it should be.
Similar to Uncharted and Gears, you can exploit the camera and geometry to effectively shoot enemies from cover with little fear of taking much damage. This will help you in some places where there are loads of enemies shooting at you at once. Unfortunately, the camera bounces every time the player takes a step, which is very annoying and easily causes motion sickness, and the controls are stiff and unresponsive.
The plot is uninspired and paper-thin, a generic "no man left behind" story typical of action films and games that has been done to death. It has poor voice-acting that sounds flat and uninterested (also, no Christian Bale) and badly rendered cutscenes. The visuals are very ugly like anything by Valve Software and Ubisoft which are also on par with an Xbox 360 launch title. Despite the poor graphics, the game can't even keep a steady framerate.
There's terrible AI that either stands in one spot or at times, get stuck in doorways. Allies do very little to help you, but fortunately, they are harder to kill, just like the enemies. Speaking of, there is severe lack of enemy variety, with only three enemy types: Wasps, T 7-T's, and T-600's (plus a skinned variant). These are also cheap enemies that take hundreds of bullets to kill and some that require players to shoot small weak-points to deal damage.
The awful checkpoint system similar to games such as Mindjack forces you to finish the entire area before the game saves. If the player dies they can lose over 20 minutes of progress. There are even constant game breaking glitches such as enemies getting stuck in walls and the player freezing in place while in cover. These glitches require the player to restart the level, which can cause up to an hour of game progress to be lost. The game also freezes, forcing the console to be restarted.
There are 11 achievements on the Xbox 360, and 12 trophies on PS3 (one for each of the nine chapters, one each for Medium and Hard difficulties, plus a Platinum trophy on PS3). These make for a very quick 1000G and an easy Platinum; however, as previously mentioned in #10, you'll likely play the game once just for the achievements/trophies, then trade it in immediately. The non-Platinum trophies on PS3 are all Gold, and they'll be among the easiest Gold trophies you'll ever find, but other than a Trophy/Achievement (three if you played on Hard), there is next to no replay value. There aren't even any collectables, which better games like Uncharted and Gears tend to have! Speaking of Trophies/Achievements, you can get them all in one playthrough, offering little incentive to play it again.
This game and all its copies must be terminated immediately.
