The most evocative, stirring part of Terminator: Salvation is the loading screen, a burning red eye glaring out at you from the monitor. After that, it just degenerates into a mindless grind through tediously textured levels, fighting dull enemies and listening to dull characters say “Connor, do this” or “Wasps!” for the thousandth time. This is meant to scare you into taking cover, but these flying annoyances do virtually no damage and appear to be ever-present, their only purpose to throw you into a meaningless fire-fight every 10 steps.

The game is a prequel to the film, being set two years previously. You also don’t get to play as Christian Bale playing John Connor, instead having a Shepard-from-Mass Effect lookalike’s back to stare at instead. As for the game itself, you’ve seen it before: third-person action shooting with a cover system that you use to roll between bits of broken walls. The combat is broken too, sometimes. If you’ve run out of grenades and are facing the machines that can only be destroyed from the back, but they’re focused on you, you’re stuck until your useless allies decide to shoot them. Which can take a while.

The game is tedious from start to end. Action sequences hardly ever last more than a minute or two, with cut-scenes interrupting every couple of meters. The graphics are bland, the combat is boring and has far too many static gun sequences in it. Considering the license they have, GRIN could have done so much more. But why do that when you can make lots of money off a mindless bit of crap like this?

Jun 29, 2009