Reviews
[Review] ‘Terminator Resistance’ Goes Back to the Future With Underwhelming Results
Terminator Resistance feels like a spot-on adaptation of the film. Unfortunately, the film in question is Terminator Salvation.
The surprise announcement of a first-person Terminator game set in the Skynet-controlled future was well…surprising, even with a new film arriving, but all the same, it was sort of welcome, after all, it’s been a while since we got a half-decent Terminator game.
Fittingly, the last game release was, in fact, a tie-in for Terminator Salvation, a game that was somehow clunkier in plot delivery than the film it was peeled off the back of, and twice as nasty. It was clearly made on the cheap, but it still could have had at least a bit of passion towards the franchise.
Terminator Resistance does at least try to capture something about the world it’s inspired by. There’s definitely an atmosphere in close proximity to that of the scuzzy 80s vision of a Skynet apocalypse. Everything is murky and war-torn, with the only illumination coming from the raging fires and the searchlights of patrolling Skynet war machines.
We begin by seeing our pal (who we’ve personally known for all of six seconds) decimated by a T-800, and it looks like we’re next on the list. Luckily for us, a stranger distracts the gleaming death hulk long enough to allow for an escape which will now serve as a dreary excuse for a tutorial.
Tutorials are a necessity, even if it’s a game like this where you could have guessed most of the buttons ahead of time. The trick is to tie the tutorial into a fun, enthralling, and unobtrusive way. Terminator Resistance pieces together each prompt in an alarmingly basic manner, taking far too long to throw you in the deep end and do something exciting with it. On its own, this wouldn’t be a massive issue, but it’s padding, plain and simple here. It also serves as a first warning that you’re going to be taking a trip back to gaming past despite the future setting.
Terminator Resistance positions itself as an action RPG along the lines of Fallout 3, giving you things to loot, stats to upgrade, and choice-based conversations. Yet it’s all done with little ambition or desire for refinement. Everything about the game screams bare minimum or less, which produces a strange chimera that releases at the end of this decade, but could easily have come from the end of the previous one and still been underwhelming in its by-the-numbers approach.
This would have made for a passable rental back then. Nothing spectacular, yet enough to scratch a Terminator itch. Now it just comes across as laughably poor. On a PS4 Pro you’d be forgiven for thinking the game was being streamed on PS Now on a choppy connection. Being murky and muddy-looking works for the brand’s particular flavor of future doom and destruction, it doesn’t mean it should extend to every texture, character model, and effect. If you recall the horror that was Heavy Rain‘s fumbling sex scene, then you’ll be pleased/terrified to hear that Terminator Resistance has two of them that, partially thanks to the ropey character models, are far more awkward and horrific, especially as they occur in first-person and are initiated by wince-inducing dialog choices.
The dialog having choices is about as interesting as it gets as the rest of the story is a paint-by-numbers snorefest. If not for the odd bit of fan service, it’d be fortunate to be remembered at all. Not that the game is particularly engaging elsewhere.
There’s inconsistent and largely useless stealth that hasn’t taken into account any of the refinements made to such mechanics in the last 15 years. It would be more effective if the Terminators and various other death-dealing chrome buckets posed the kind of threat that James Cameron’s movies have suggested they do. Instead, they have reskinned AI goons from 2006, showing no signs of the notorious hunting abilities and smarts found in the films. During the tutorial, one walks within inches of your poorly-chosen cover and doesn’t so much as get an inkling you’re there. You have a tool that lets you see Terminators through walls and other obstructions, but the superior machine race can’t spot a man half-hidden behind a junked car.
Shooting is handled with a light touch, lacking the kind of meaty, thudding impact that would most benefit it most. Binary Domain, a game that came out in 2013 and is criminally forgotten too often, did Terminator-esque combat miles better, allowing limbs to be torn off its metal monstrosities and still have them come at you. There’s nothing quite like that here. Enemies just fall down, possibly out of boredom or gunshots tot he chassis, it’s hard to know for sure. Again, the T-800s and friends are the product of a super-smart robo revolution, but have the gumption and enthusiasm of an office worker 5 years too far into a bottom-rung position. Why send anyone back to prevent the war? If humanity was stupid enough to be overthrown by this lot, then it deserves to be vaporized.
Expectations were never going to be too high for Terminator Resistance. Alarm bells always go off when something like this pops out of the shadow of a movie release with little fanfare, but it’s remarkable how backward this game manages to be. It elicits no real emotional impact of any kind beyond maybe surprise when you find out this isn’t a HD remaster of some forgotten Xbox 360 title, but a brand new 2019 release. The low budget can be forgiven for some shortcomings, but this clearly didn’t get the time it needed to compliment said budget’s restrictions.
With Terminator Resistance, the robot apocalypse is here again, and it comes not with a bang, but a whimper.
Terminator Resistance review code provided by the publisher for PS4.
Terminator Resistance is out now on PS4, PC, and Xbox One.
Reviews
“AHS: Delicate” Review – “Little Gold Man” Mixes Oscar Fever & Baby Fever into the Perfect Product
‘AHS: Delicate’ enters early labor with a fun, frenzied episode that finds the perfect tone and goes for broke as its water breaks.
“I’ll figure it out. Women always do.”
American Horror Story is no stranger to remixing real-life history with ludicrous, heightened Murphy-isms, whether it’s AHS: 1984’s incorporation of Richard Ramirez, AHS: Cult’s use of Valerie Solanas, or AHS: Coven’s prominent role for the Axeman of New Orleans. Accordingly, it’s very much par for the course for AHS: Delicate to riff on other pop culture touchstones and infinitely warp them to its wicked whims. That being said, it takes real guts to do a postmodern feminist version of Rosemary’s Baby and then actually put Mia Farrow – while she’s filming Rosemary’s Baby, no less – into the narrative. This is the type of gonzo bullshit that I want out of American Horror Story! Sharon Tate even shows up for a minute because why the hell not? Make no mistake, this is completely absurd, but the right kind of campy absurdity that’s consistently been in American Horror Story’s wheelhouse since its inception. It’s a wild introduction that sets up an Oscar-centric AHS: Delicate episode for success. “Little Gold Man” is a chaotic episode that’s worth its weight in gold and starts to bring this contentious season home.
It’d be one thing if “Little Gold Man” just featured a brief detour to 1967 so that this season of pregnancy horror could cross off Rosemary’s Baby from its checklist. AHS: Delicate gets more ambitious with its revisionist history and goes so far as to say that Mia Farrow and Anna Victoria Alcott are similarly plagued. “Little Gold Man” intentionally gives Frank Sinatra dialogue that’s basically verbatim from Dex Harding Sr., which indicates that this demonic curse has been ruffling Hollywood’s feathers for the better part of a century. Anna Victoria Alcott’s Oscar-nominated feature film, The Auteur, is evidently no different than Rosemary’s Baby. It’s merely Satanic forces’ latest attempt to cultivate the “perfect product.” “Little Gold Man” even implies that the only reason that Mia Farrow didn’t go on to make waves at the 1969 Academy Awards and ends up with her twisted lot in life is because she couldn’t properly commit to Siobhan’s scheme, unlike Anna.
This is easily one of American Horror Story’s more ridiculous cold opens, but there’s a lot of love for the horror genre and Hollywood that pumps through its veins. If Hollywood needs to be a part of AHS: Delicate’s story then this is actually the perfect connective tissue. On that note, Claire DeJean plays Sharon Tate in “Little Gold Man” and does fine work with the brief scene. However, it would have been a nice, subtle nod of continuity if AHS: Delicate brought back Rachel Roberts who previously portrayed Tate in AHS: Cult. “Little Gold Man” still makes its point and to echo a famous line from Jennifer Lynch’s father’s television masterpiece: “It is happening again.”
“Little Gold Man” is rich in sequences where Anna just rides the waves of success and enjoys her blossoming fame. She feels empowered and begins to finally take control of her life, rather than let it push her around and get under her skin like a gestating fetus. Anna’s success coincides with a colossal exposition dump from Tavi Gevinson’s Cora, a character who’s been absent for so long that we were all seemingly meant to forget that she was ever someone who was supposed to be significant. Cora has apparently been the one pulling many of Anna’s strings all along as she goes Single White Female, rather than Anna having a case of Repulsion. It’s an explanation that oddly works and feeds into the episode’s more general message of dreams becoming nightmares. Cora continuing to stay aligned with Dr. Hill because she has student loans is also somehow, tragically the perfect explanation for her abhorrent behavior. It’s not the most outlandish series of events in an episode that also briefly gives Anna alligator legs and makes Emma Roberts and Kim Kardashian kiss.
“Little Gold Man” often feels like it hits the fast-forward button as it delivers more answers, much in the same vein as last week’s “Ava Hestia.” These episodes are two sides of the same coin and it’s surely no coincidence that they’re both directed by Jennifer Lynch. This season has benefitted from being entirely written by Halley Feiffer – a first for the series – but it’s unfortunate that Lynch couldn’t direct every episode of AHS: Delicate instead of just four out of nine entries. That’s not to say that a version of this season that was unilaterally directed by Lynch would have been without its issues. However, it’s likely that there’d be a better sense of synergy across the season with fewer redundancies. She’s responsible for the best episodes of AHS: Delicate and it’s a disappointment that she won’t be the one who closes the season out in next week’s finale.
To this point, “Little Gold Man” utilizes immaculate pacing that helps this episode breeze by. Anna’s Oscar nomination and the awards ceremony are in the same episode, whereas it feels like “Part 1” of the season would have spaced these events out over four or five episodes. This frenzied tempo works in “Little Gold Man’s” favor as AHS: Delicate speed-runs to its finish instead of getting lost in laborious plotting and unnecessary storytelling. This is how the entire season should have been. Although it’s also worth pointing out that this is by far the shortest episode of American Horror Story to date at only 34 minutes. It’s a shame that the season’s strongest entries have also been the ones with the least amount of content. There could have been a whole other act to “Little Gold Man,” or at the least, a substantially longer cold open that got more out of its Mia Farrow mayhem.
“Little Gold Man” is an American Horror Story episode that does everything right, but is still forced to contend with three-quarters of a subpar season. “Part 2” of AHS: Delicate actually helps the season’s first five episodes shine brighter in retrospect and this will definitely be a season that benefits from one long binge that doesn’t have a six-month break in the middle. Unfortunately, anyone who’s already watched it once will likely not feel compelled to experience these labor pains a second time over. With one episode to go and Anna’s potential demon offspring ready to greet the world, AHS: Delicate is poised to deliver one hell of a finale.
Although, to paraphrase Frank Sinatra, “How do you expect to be a good conclusion if this is what you’re chasing?”
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