Terminator: Resistance has been delayed, but strangely only in a single region. Terminator: Resistance has been delayed in North America and the game will now be released a bit later for PC and consoles in that region (via Gematsu). Now before you think this signals the developer taking extra time to develop and polish the game, think again. The North American release has been delayed from its previously planned December 3rd to December 10th.
The developer did release a new gameplay trailer, and it’s pretty much your incredibly generic trailer package. Action scenes and iconic music abound but you can see the glimmers of problems even in this snippet of gameplay. The animations on some of the models look kind of janky, note the falling resistance fighter near the beginning who sort of clips into the floor. The environments don’t look that bad, just don’t expect any complex lighting effects or anything from this game.
The combat looks really repetitive, just use cover and shoot enemies that all look the same. One thing I find particularly insulting is that the trailer ends with a moment which implies that you can just kill a Terminator with a stealth kill using an electrified knife. As a hardcore fan of the first two films, that’s really stupid to me. Stealth sections are fine, but the contradiction of them being able to take them out with a blade completely destroys any tension in the stealth sections. If the developer is playing with our expectations here and that knife kill is instead an instant death for the player, that could be OK though. Although if they build up to getting that weapon and then use it for a one-off gotcha, it’s going to irritate a lot of players.
Terminator: Resistance comes out for PS4, Xbox One, and PC on November 15th in Europe and Australia, and on December 10th in North America. Watch the new trailer below. If you want a more detailed look at the gameplay, the team also published a preview of some of the gameplay. We also previously covered some gameplay footage from EGX 2019 that showed the game in more detail.
As we’ve gone over before the story is pretty bog-standard for a Terminator game. This new game is a single-player first-person shooter set 31 years after the events of Terminator 2: Judgment Day. You play the most generically named hero, Jacob Rivers, and he is on a quest to shut down the Skynet defense grid. And yes, that’s basically a paper-thin ripoff of one element from every Terminator film.
The developer is trying to push the game as a prequel to the first film, and it does tie-in with some of Kyle Reese’s dialogue in that film, “Skynet’s defense grid was smashed; we won.” And though I’m curious if the game will do anything with trying to tell the story of how the resistance defeated the machines, it will be a very hard sell to pay for a bad game to get that story. Wait for the reviews on this one folks.
At least it’s not another movie tie-in. Such a shame that a franchise once lauded for breaking the mold and helping to define a generation of science fiction has fallen so hard.
