Let me start this off by saying that, in my opinion, this is the best
Terminator game to date. It looks awesome and it is fun to play. It's not all peaches and cream, but I'll get into that later. First, let's talk about the good things.
Well, we finally get to see just how these Terminators travel back and forth through time. The game doesn't follow the movie exactly as it starts before the movie. Well, after, but before. You know how the Terminator series loves to jump around the space-time continuum. You begin as The Terminator in the future, having just been reprogrammed by Daniel, an assistant of Kate Connor. They decide to send you back in time to protect a young John Connor from his assassin, the T-X, from the movie.
Soon, you'll start to recognize some of the video clips from the movie, including booty shots of both Arnold and the T-X. In several of the levels, you'll recognize plot points from the movies, however others are completely new. At some points, you'll be running around shooting cyborg enemies, but most of your time will be spent in some sort of vehicle, whether it be a helicopter, truck, motorcycle, tank, hearse or some other vehicle he takes over for his use at the moment. One thing that I really don't remember from any of the movies, however, was his need to ram his fist in the top of whatever vehicle he's taking over to "acquire" it. Anyway, that part got a little annoying, but not a huge deal.
The Terminator has access to a number of different weapons including the Plasma Rifle, Shotgun, M37 Machine-gun and several others. In the level that finds The Terminator on a motorcycle armed with a shotgun, it was cool to see him do his one-armed reload - well it was cool the first hundred times anyway. He also jumps onto stationary weapons from time to time to eliminate hordes of cyborgs and ships. Depending on whether he is on foot or in a vehicle, at times there will be a primary weapon like a machine gun and a bad-assed secondary weapon useful in decimating larger ships and such.
Some of the driving missions tended to get kind of repetitive, since you do a lot of driving in this game. At first, it is fun, but some levels seem to drag on forever. Since you have to complete a mission before you can save, if you die, you could end up having to redo a good bit.
Based on your speed performance in a level, you will earn Terabytes or TB and these are used to upgrade your Terminator. You can increase your Recharge ability (used when you pass by a recharge/health zone in a level), Vision Time, Vision Damage and Vision Charge. The last three improve your scan vision feature, however since this turned everything red, I never used it unless I hit the button by mistake. Supposedly, it makes targeting easier, but it didn't for me. One annoying point related to this is that you upgrade your unit before a mission. If you die without completing the mission, you have to re-upgrade everything again. It would have been easier to do the upgrades after a mission, so that they could be saved instead of having to redo them each time you die. Frustrating.
I also encountered a weird bug on numerous occasions while playing the game. In Chapter 2.2, during the level where you are chasing the T-X in the 18 wheeler, whenever I got too close to the truck while in the cemented area, I would appear to "go into" the truck and the game would basically freeze there. Everything would go black except for my HUD, however, I couldn't break out of this. I was able to reproduce the bug a number of times and it also happened when another staff member, J.R. Nip, played this same area as well. I am not sure, but I believe this only happened when I had acquired a police car, as I don't recall it happening when I was on the motorcycle. Just a word to the wise. Having to reboot the Xbox after you've made it so far in a level can be a real deal-breaker for this game.
On the upside, you can also unlock goodies such as concept art, cheat codes and there's also a really cool movie (in the Cheat section) starring Arnold as Sgt. William Candy. Watch it and roll around laughing. It's terrific.
