Teyon and Reef Entertainment announced that there’s going to be a tie-in video game for the upcoming Terminator: Dark Fate. It’s not a direct tie-in, though, it’s one of those adjacent-but-completely-different tie-ins that only loosely has to deal with the plot of the movie and features completely different characters, scenarios, and a story; but in this case that’s actually a really good thing because the game looks like it has a modicum of potential.
The first-person shooter is called Terminator Resistance and it’s made by the same developers who made the Rambo: The Video Game rail-shooter, which came out some years ago for home consoles.
Terminator: Resistance sees players assuming the role of Jacob, a special person marked for termination by Skynet. Jacob is saved by the resistance and joins the war efforts, hence the name of the game. The story centers around the resistance’s fight against the Terminators and Skynet in a war-torn future. You can check out the announcement trailer below.
The special effects, Terminator designs, and some of the environments look okay. It’s nowhere near as bad as I thought it would be, and certainly better than that half-hearted Gears of War clone that came out back in 2009 for the Xbox 360, PS3, and PC called Terminator Salvation.
The visuals in Reef Entertainment’s title are almost as good as the visuals from the fan-made Terminator game that was designed in the Unreal Development Kit based on the UE3 from back in 2011.
If you don’t remember what it was like, you can check out the gameplay footage below.
Yes, that’s the Terminator game we needed!
It’s a shame we never got a fully functional version of that game.
The major problem with the new game is that the lighting isn’t anywhere near as dynamic as the lighting in the old UDK Terminator, and the atmosphere isn’t quite as dark nor anywhere near as terrifying.
That was always one of the things that stood out in the first two films was how terrifying James Cameron portrayed the future. Terminator Resistance does a better job of it than Terminator: Salvation but it’s still a long ways off.
Beyond the graphics, the new Terminator Resistance also seems to seep in heavy amounts of the whole woman-power thing, which doesn’t really jive with my entertainment needs at the moment.
There’s also this element of jankiness about the game. Some of the geometry from the face where the texture for the explosion assets are applied could be seen in a few shots, and the lighting on the player weapons don’t have real-time world reflections or dynamic multi-pass lighting, so it looks more like it’s sporting basic baked in shadows.
There’s just a lot of cut corners in the quality department that seems to detract from the presentation of Terminator Resistance.
I could be wrong, though, and maybe all these little distracting elements are ironed out before the release in November. Hopefully it’s closer to the UDK game than the Terminator: Salvation game.
(Thanks for the news tip Guardian EvaUnit02)
