Goatmoose

Omgggg what a silly game.

This morning I’m in the mood for a quick review of Terminator: Salvation for Xbox 360. It’ll be quick not by choice, but because there’s really not much that can be said. It’s one of the shortest, easiest, most uninteresting games I’ve played in quite some time. Having said that, it’s worth a rent if you’re down for a few hours of gaming that can net you a full 1,000 achievement points.

A screenshot. John Connor is hard.

I haven’t yet seen this movie, but I’m pretty sure playing through the game didn’t ruin anything for me. That is, unless the story is really as thin and generic as the game made it out to be – in which case I know everything. Let’s take a look at all the elements individually…

The story consists of ten levels. A few of those levels take mere minutes to complete, as they span only a few rooms of a building or some other tiny bit of map.

The enemies are really lame. There’s about 3-4 of them, and they’re the same ones you kill throughout the entirety of the game. There’s not even a final boss or anything to spice it up. Just aerial flying “wasps,” ground-based “spiders” and the standard Terminators. Weak.

The guns are basic. There’s a handful of automatics, a shotgun, rocket launcher, grenade launcher and mounted guns. All the automatics feel pretty much the same, and the explosives… explode.

The graphics are okay, but not anything special. Standard modern-day graphic quality.

The voice acting is unenthusiastic, but not Perfect Dark awful or anything. It’s certainly not Christian Bale. He’s way over-intense.

The replay value is almost none. The game isn’t good/interesting enough to play multiple times, and with only 11 achievements, all of which can be obtained by simply playing through the story mode on Hard, there is less motivation for a replay. In fact, all 720 of the achievements can be obtained by playing the game through on Easy – which is mindlessly easy, like shooting lobotomy patients in a tub of marmalade. You’ll get through the entire game in 3 hours or so. Then there’s a trick you can find online that tells you how to unlock the last two achievements (100G and 180G) for beating the game on Medium & Hard difficulties without actually doing it. It requires you to use co-op and involves playing the last level on Hard twice. Fortunately for you, the last level is one of those ones that takes place in two rooms and then it ends. Woohoo.

The skill level is next to none. You’re never alone, and if you wait long enough, your pals will always kill all the enemies. There are a few times where Hard difficulty is just stupid hard because of bad design. Good thing all you have to do is find cover and wait long enough for your buddies to kill everything. They do so with about 10% the efficiency of yourself, but they’ll still do it. Add to that the guns & ammo are EVERYWHERE, the AI is stupid (robotz omg!) and you heal every time you dispatch a wave of beasties, and the game is a breeze.

But hey, all of the above is good for achievement junkies. It’s 1000 points that are easy to net, but since there are brief moments of annoyance, aren’t complete douchebag points like Avatar TLA or King Kong.

Rent it. Absolutely don’t buy it.