In the final entry of this series (for now), I've got Terminator Salvation in my crosshairs. This game could have been really good, and should have been, given the source material, but we Terminator fanboys got stuck with a clunky mess of a game that isn't even fun to play. There's no 'it's so bad, it's good' going on here. It's all bad.
From the first time you load up the game, you'll see a loading screen that seems to take much more time loading than it should. You'll see this screen a lot during the game; in between chapters, in between different parts of a level, and all in all I'd say there are between 5-10 minutes total you've spend staring at this loading screen by the time you finish the game (assuming you don't die a bunch of times and have to see it even more so). I'm no developer or anything, but it seems to me that most loading should take place behind the scenes and not interrupt gameplay every 15 minutes.
Once the game has actually loaded, you'll be bombarded with blurry graphics, awful writing, and awful, bored-sounding voice acting. In the first level, you as John Connor lead a team into a beaten old building in Los Angeles, and discover a Hunter-Killer hovering around outside.
Blair: John, use that rocket to blow up the HK!
Equip the RPG, find cover, and peek out when you see the HK hover in front of the building. Fire the rocket. The rocket will hit the HK and it'll fly away for a minute.
Blair: Good work John!
Rogers: Nice shooting John.
Do this three or four more times. See what I mean?
There are six types of enemies in the game, three of which will hound you constantly from beginning to end. You have five weapons to choose from, and two different types of grenades. That by itself should turn around 84% of gamers off, especially those who play Halo and Call of Duty, where dozens of weapons await you over the course of the game. Then again, neither of those games are 4 hours long.
Another huge problem with the game is that the graphics and design are awful. Everything is a bit blurry and flat. The environment design, at least in the first couple of levels, is pretty good; LA looks like a broken shell of a city, just what you'd expect after a nuclear attack. After that, though, it's the same thing over and over. You walk into a building where several layers of barricades sit in the middle of the room, and robots walk out and shoot at you, and you hide behind a barricade and shoot at them until they die. Flanking is a huge part of the game; the spider robots won't die unless shot from behind. Your AI teammates, however, like to run for cover in random places and crouch behind it, never popping out to give you covering fire. This makes for some fairly drawn-out battles on the hardest difficulty, because you're the only one actually doing anything, and your health winds down very quickly.
Speaking of the hardest difficulty, I played the game once through on Easy, then went all the way to Hard, and it was only a little more difficult than the first time around. No challenge whatsoever. Well, unless you count 'moving in slow motion even with the sensitivity turned to 100%' and 'popping out of cover and pressing the Fire button but your character just stands there and gets shot to death.' The last two chapters are literally 10 minutes long apiece, if that. If you play in co-op, it would probably take around five minutes apiece.
This game is slow, clunky, badly voiced, and needs to be played on the hardest difficulty to get your rental fee's worth out of it. Yeah, you will get 1000/1000G easily since there are only 12 achievements, and if you liked the movie you'll get filled in on some of the backstory leading up to the events of the film, but if you don't have the patience to put up with shoddy game design, avoid this at all costs.
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