Sometimes in life you must give and not take. And I don't mean giving money to beggars at your doorstep, but giving - nay, sacrificing - a part of your pride and identity to help a friend. This was the case with Terminator Salvation: The movie: The game. A friend of mine had to review it and I played along at gunpoint.
Right from the start you'll notice that this is a cheap Gears of War knock-off and that it is more linear than Pong. The story is non-existent, you just run from one cover spot to another, hoping the AI will do the same. But God help you if you need to rely on the AI in single player, because they have the attention span of a ADHD-kid who just ate a bowl of sugar and mistook XTC for Ritalin.
You will often find yourself stuck with no clue where to go, which is a great achievement seeing how the game is so linear. The levels consist entirely of generic post-apocalyptic environments and always give you exactly one way to flank enemies. Now might be a good time to explore the gameplay. The developers take great pride in repetition ad absurdum. You will be fighting the same battle against the same four enemies using the same tactics every five minutes. They might as well have called the game Terminator: Live Free or Grind Hard. The XBox Live Achievements are apparently programmed by Santa Claus, because you get a mighty fuckload of them by just inhaling and exhaling. When the game is done, you get about 710 points, which I have come to understand is comparable to giving a million dollars to the first bum you see on the streets, instead of the usual 10 cents.
The total game time of this epic production is 4 to 5 hours, of which 2 hours are reserved for cutscenes. Yes, you can expect a cutscene every 2 minutes, so it feels like you are watching an Uwe Boll movie with someone pausing it every 10 seconds and punching you in the face.
The music is an abomination. It is like visiting an underground hardcore party, lead by a deaf DJ with no short term memory playing bass only, looping his ingenious sample every four seconds. After listening to it ad nauseam, I felt like a seasick person in a speedboat after riding a mechanical bull.
All in all, Terminator Salvation feels like a prematurely born child that instead of being put into a neonatal intensive care unit, got a good old fashioned beating and got thrown off a cliff, Old Greek style.
This game gets a 2/10.
If you like my reviews, you can check out The Lying Dutchman's Blog [http://the-lying-dutchman.blogspot.com/].
