Terminator Salvation is not a nice game. In fact it’s a downright horrible game. It had tons of potential no doubt but none of that gets realized during the course of the game. It’s like someone literally put a gun to developer Evolved Games' head and said "Make a crappy game for me or I’ll blow your brains out on the table." And guess what, they obliged.





Loosely based on the motion picture of the same name, Terminator Salvation puts you in the boots of John Connor as you strive to liberate what’s left of Los Angeles from Skynet and their nefarious robots. The story unfolds via some horribly compressed cut-scenes, awkward animations, terrible lip synching and voice acting by actors who were terribly bored or just plain talentless. If that wasn’t bad enough, you’re subjected to one of these ghastly cinematics after nearly every enemy encounter so it’s like five minutes of gameplay followed by another minute of terrible cut-scene. Cinematic? No! Annoying? Yes!





Terminator Salvation plays out like your standard third person shooter fare with a cover system inspired by Gears of War. Unlike Gears where you could press the cover key even if you were a few inches away from cover, in this game you have to be close enough to kiss it and only then will Connor slap to the surface. Once you’re latched onto cover you can move in any direction via some pretty slick and fluid sliding animations. From behind your cover you can blind fire or look up, squeeze a few rounds and duck back into cover again. For some incomprehensible reason this is the first game in which blind fire seemed more effective than aiming and shooting at enemies.