Terminator: Resistance

[henke]

Well this is an interesting one!



Initially released 2 years ago by the developers of that terrible Rambo rail-shooter. Players seem to love it, since it has a Very Positive rating on Steam, but the critic reviews have been all over the place. I've been playing the new Enhanced Edition on PS5 aaaaaaand I'm hooked! I love this thing. It's by no means perfect, in fact I've got a lot of things to complain about - and I will, in a moment - but it's one of those games that's somehow more than the sum of its parts. It's a very compelling experience and feels like a true successor to Bethesda's Terminator games from the mid-90's.

List of complaints:
-FOV is too tight.
-the mandatory shooty setpiece sections are bad.
-fan service so thick it's occasionally immersion-breaking.
-the lockpicking minigame is like the one in the recent Fallouts but not as good.
-the hacking minigame is Frogger.

The core gameplay where you're skulking through the ruins of Los Angeles, scavenging resources and hiding from the machines is good stuff tho. These machines, even the smallest spiderbots, can be lethal, so you gotta take it nice and slow. Stealth is mainly used to scout ahead and make a plan before you start shooting. Success relies a lot more on being careful than twitch reflexes, making this one of the rare shooters where I'm actually playing on the hardest difficulty and doing well. There are a few set-piece-heavy action bits where you're running with other soldiers and fighting lots of Terminators, and these sections are by far the weakest part of the game. I suppose they look good in trailers tho, since the one above is packed with these bits.

I'm also digging the story and the characters. There's some neat charcter backstories and the main plot deals heavily with the emergence of the Infiltrator units, and everyone in the bunker getting paranoid about who's human and who isn't.

So yeah, it's good, and I think it might've flown under a lot of people's radar. It's the kinda stealth/action/RPG thing that many TTLGers might dig.

[EvaUnit02]

I loved it when I played. Not perfect by any means, but still pretty competent. (PC version has a FOV slider, BTW.) The endoskeleton terminators are a real threat to the player early on. IIRC they can only be killed with laser weapons.

The story told was good, IMO. Certainly better than all of the subsequent films made after T2.

-Did you unlock all of the endings?
-Did you check out the Infiltrator mode? They released it as DLC.

The same developer is now making a Robocop game and I'm certainly looking forward to that.

[henke]

Haven't gotten to the end yet, but I like that I have some agency in the story. The infiltrator mode is indeed included in the Enhanced edition so I'll try it out later.

Cautiously optimistic about Robocop. This developer's other games all all seem quite mediocre, so I wonder if Resistance was a fluke or if they can keep up this quality.

[Jashin]

For fans of T1/T2 this game is the best terminator game ever.

It captures the atmosphere of future war aspect perfectly while providing the familiarity of modern gaming by directly lifting/coping several features. On top of that, the respect paid to the original movies that established the series is unparalleled (easily above the later sequels).

A new DLC campaign should be coming out within the next 1-2 weeks. Can't wait for it!

[henke]

Finished the campaign. The ending was a bit meh. It's all actiony shootout stuff of course, which is the weakest part of the game gameplay-wise. I saw the twist about the identity of the Stranger coming from a good distance. But I guess I'm most bummed that it seemed at one point during the campaign that my choices would have consequences, specifically when I decided to help Mack instead of kill him, but any consequences of those actions never happened in the game, instead it was relegated to a mere "oh btw this also happened" during the epilogue cutscene.

Y'know, at times it seemed almost like this game had immsimmy aspirations. But in the end the moral choices and the systems of the game are a bit too flimsy for that. The game breaks it's own rules too much. For instance you get a "distraction device" and are shown how to use it on a particular enemy, but later on when you use it on other enemies they don't even register it. Why? And the "termination knife" lets you backstab any terminator, except when you're in a bossfight against a terminator who's extra-alert and difficult to sneak up on, nevertheless I managed to sneak up on him and... nothing, no backstabby option, because the game has decided that you gotta fight this particular terminator with bullets, which sucks. Sure you can make up in-story justifications for that stuff "oh those bots are too smart to be fooled by distraction devices and they're stab-proof", but that doesn't make the gameplay better. In the end the same problems that plagued Thief 2014 are very present here, crap bossfights and setpiecey action bits that look good in trailers but kinda suck to play.

Anyway, it's still a solid 7.5/10 game. I still haven't tried the infiltrator mode, but I hear good things.

[EvaUnit02]

I still haven't tried the infiltrator mode, but I hear good things.

It's only okay. Takes about an hour to complete. It was a free update thankfully.

[henke]

Yeah, it took me 44 min to play through. It was ok. I liked the new guns in it.

[catbarf]

Late to the convo, but I played this about a year ago and was pleasantly surprised. For me the most interesting part of the Terminator franchise has always been the future war scenes, and this and Future Shock (and its standalone expansion Skynet) are the only games I've played that really capture that feel.

There was criticism on release that the gameplay was too easy and the HUD overbearing. It seems they had rebalanced it to be harder by the time I played, and not sure if you noticed, Henke, but they added a lot of options to significantly adjust the HUD. I was able to increase the FOV a bit, and then turn off most of the other HUD elements. No detection meter, no audible ping when detected, no crosshair, no compass, no quest markers. It made for a much more immersive experience.

I appreciate that, like Future Shock, it made the actual Terminators appropriately scary. The fact that they alone can't be destroyed with bullets is a bit of a gimmick, but it emphasizes stealth for a while and makes getting an energy weapon feel like an accomplishment. Though being able to hack laser turrets to obliterate them long before you get your hands on a plasma rifle does undermine the tension a bit.

I definitely agree about the scripted action sequences being the weakest parts of the game. Most of those maps have you then go back solo and explore at least once, and it's a much better experience for it. It feels like they wanted to make a slow-paced stealth-exploration-shooter but also wanted to have action setpieces, so reused maps they'd already built. If I were to change just one thing about the game, it would be to set the game primarily at night and focus on the open-world elements. That's when the game's at its strongest, with good lighting effects and shaders doing the heavy lifting for the graphical style, and the gameplay blending exploration and stealth into the combat.

The Infiltrator DLC was disappointing as you never actually do any infiltrating. The inclusion of new weapons in this limited environment gives it a tech demo feel and I wonder if it was meant as a baseline for the new DLC coming out shortly. Which, on that note, the devs still seem radio silent about, despite the two-year anniversary coming and going two days ago.

[Jashin]

[Jashin]

DLC turned out to be rushed and is lacking the details and the quality performance of the main game. The gameplay was also missing the illusion of free-roaming they pulled off in the main game.

It was okay.

[henke]

Ah, that's a shame. I hope Resistance wasn't a one-off fluke for this developer.