Terminator: Resistance Review

Initial release date: December 10, 2019

Developer: Teyon

Engine: Unreal Engine

Genre: First-person shooter

Publisher: Reef Entertainment

Platforms: PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Microsoft Windows, PS5 (Enhanced Edition)

"Review Copy Provided By Reef Entertainment"

The Terminator franchise is in a weird spot as of late with majority of the movies being hit or miss and a lore and timeline or timelines being hard to keep up with if you’re not keeping up with all the movies, games, comics, the tv series and more. There’s a lot to keep up with to understand what all is going on and the new movie, while being a travesty, doesn’t help either as it starts a new timeline and commits the biggest atrocity by killing off John Connor, the man of which the entire franchise is based around. My discontentment with that aside, we have a new Terminator game from Developer Teyon games and publisher Reef Entertainment called Terminator: Resistance that is a first-person shooter with inspirations from Fallout and The OuterWorlds with it’s looting and crafting systems and level based set in small open-ended areas with mission objectives. So does Terminator: Resistance stand next to the greats of the terminator franchise such as T2: Judgement or does it fall to mediocrity and the budget bin like the recent movie Terminator: Dark Fate? Let’s find out!

Story

The story takes place in 2028 with Private Jacob Rivers who’s the sole survivor of the Resistance that was deployed to Pasadena during a Skynet patrol . He eventually meets up with a small band of scavengers consisting of Jennifer and her brother Patrick and a few others. You run a few scavenging missions to help out the scavengers and then after a few run ins with some Skynet patrols and T800s you end up working with a Tech-Com unit led be Commander Baron and assist with carrying out the reconnaissance missions needed to take down Skynet. That’s about as much story as I’ll touch on as the story is a rollercoaster ride of excitement from start to finish and helps explain the events that were in the backstory of both Terminator and T2: Judgment Day that have never fully been explored in detail before and if you’re a Terminator fan then this is the story you’ve been waiting for.

Gameplay

The game plays out in your standard looter shooter format with your standard Call of Duty controls. You’ve got your standard aim, shoot, crouch, reload, jump, sprint, and weapon wheel buttons and everything works effortlessly without any hitches. Where the game differentiates itself from the standard shooter is the looting and crafting systems: in this game you can pick up various items from bottles to clothes and machine parts that will allow you to craft new items such as med kits and lock picks and even ammo and bombs.

There’s also the RPG aspects of the game where you can upgrade different aspects of Jacob Rivers stats and abilities such as being able to hack various machines, lock picking doors, using higher end weapons, various buffs to include higher damage tolerance, and more. You’re also able to customize your weapons from your standard pistol, Uzi, shotgun, and Assault Rifle to even various plasma rifles to have higher damage outputs, extended clips, higher accuracy, and more.

Fighting the various enemies from machines to terminators is fun albeit formulaic as machines can often times be taken down by the pistol or Uzi however when you encounter the Terminators for the first time let me tell you the game does not screw around at all. When I first encountered the T800 series Terminators in the hospital I nearly shit my pants as the Terminator music hits and its loud and had the hairs on my neck on end and my tension and stress levels went into overload.

The way you are introduced them is so terrifying and nerve wracking especially given the fact that you cannot fight them head on as your current equipment is ineffective at damaging them and you will need to sneak around the T800s to make your way through the hospital and just when you think you have seen the last terminator you run into one after another after another and you will have to adapt and overcome your seemingly helpless predicament and keep going until you reach the end of the level and that brings up how smartly the game introduces its various elements including this stealth aspect as not only do you have to sneak around to avoid the T800’s detecting you but you also have to lock pick doors and given the stress of the situation you will need to be on your P’s and Q’s survive.

Oh and you can sleep with almost all the women and yes I slept with all the women: queue Hodgetwins mating call.

Graphics

Graphically the game is serviceable but not stunning and at times looks as if its from the 360/PS3 era with stiff and awkward animations that can be jarring and can take you out of the experience. Even the environments which can at times look stunning can then look last generation. The lip-synching is well…….interesting but again serviceable. The Terminators look fantastic but otherwise yea the game is serviceable.

The PS5 Enhanced Edition offers 4K visuals at 60FPS offering a substantially smoother overall experience than the Xbox One release of the game. Cutscenes also run at he higher visual benchmarks and it also has higher levels of details in the character models and environments. The PS5 version does have some odd ghosting effects that should be easy for the devs to patch so here's to hoping they can do that.

Audio

The sounds of the weapons all sound on point especially the plasma rifles from the T800 series Terminators. The voice acting for Jacob Rivers is very well done but everyone else is honestly either hit or miss and sometimes you can hear the popping as if the voice actors were too close to the microphone when recording and it can be grating.

Downsides

Aside from the graphics and voice acting being……. Serviceable the only other thing I can say is that once you get plasma rifles and a few upgrades to those rifles then the challenge is no longer there and then the game becomes routine run here, shoot that, hack this, lock pick this, rinse lather and repeat. Still fun but ultimately routine and with how restrive the environments are the illusion of an openworld falls quite quickly but also worth mentioning is how short the game is which at 8 hours roughly is a bit of a let down.

The Verdict

With a strong story, fun albeit formulaic gameplay, and great world building and atmospheric situations you find yourself in, Terminator: Resistance is a damn fine game despite its few flaws and honestly if you can look pass those flaws then you’ll find yourself enjoying a damn fine game that keeps you engaged from start to finish wanting more and even if you aren’t a fan of the series you’ll find plenty here to love and it’ll definitely get you curious about the world of Terminator. I cannot wait to see what this team does with RoboCop!