In Terminator: Resistance, the player embodies Jacob Reeves, an American army trooper who will have to save the world from the evil robots of Skynet. A prequel to the Terminator and Terminator 2 films, the game offers a rather enticing pitch where the AI, after atomizing the humans it perceived as a threat, decides to annihilate the survivors with an army of T-800s advancing in line. and exterminate all they find. In short, we are right in the Future War scenario teased in the films, and if we will avoid spoiling anything, know that the whole thing is rather a good surprise. The narration holds together and the fans will get their money's worth, even if the writing remains far from what the games of Hideo Kojima, Sam Lake or Ken Levine offer. The adventure allows us to join the resistance, and we spend most of our time wandering around the suburbs of Los Angeles to complete various missions. Those who have already set foot in the City of Angels will not recognize much, since the LA post-apo only offers a rather uninspired and particularly redundant series of rubble. At night, all cats are gray, but unfortunately, this is also the case during the day. It's a miss for tourism, and even famous places like the Griffith Observatory are totally unrecognizable. Designed as a game in a semi-open world (that is to say large maps made up of corridors) and having elements specific to the RPG, Terminator: Resistance wants to give pride of place to exploration, which is ruined by the almost total absence of novelty in the landscapes.
Unfortunately for Terminator: Resistance, the weapons offer absolutely NO feeling. Nothing, zero, absolute nothingness.
Moreover, it is not only the environment which is struggling to renew itself, the mechanical bestiary also being extremely limited. All in all, we will not exceed ten different enemies, which ends up becoming soporific, especially with opponents with such obsolete behavior. Basically, once we get spotted, they just rush at us without any particular tactics. Afterwards, we can't blame it only on the opponents who reason the old way. For example, FPS enthusiasts know that shooting sensations are one of the crucial elements that make the salt of this genre so special, and how important the feeling of weapons is to guarantee the success of a game. Unfortunately for Terminator : Resistance, the weapons offer absolutely NO feeling. Nothing, zero, absolute nothingness. With each shot, the sound effects are minimal and the impact on enemies is limited to lowering their vital bar. No recoil, very few visual effects, completely sanitized sensations: you never really feel like you're wielding incredibly powerful guns, even with a rocket launcher in your hands. All this is underlined by an almost non-existent physics; nothing is destructible, and enemies fall like inanimate puppets once defeated.
THE MACHINES GET LIFTED
It must be said that overall, Terminator: Resistance is damn dated visually, plunging nostalgics back into the era of Xbox 360 and other PS3s. Simplistic textures, rigid animations and crude lighting are on the menu, which is not surprising for a game probably developed with the budget comparable to the sum invested in a single explosion on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. Yet made with the Unreal Engine (whose potential we know), the title makes no effort to spare our retinas, especially during the dialogue phases where the close-ups on our interlocutors show how much Rockstar Games, Quantic Dream and the rest are masters of facial animations. At Treyon, we apparently do not take offense to the jaws that cross the lips, or to have a dentition that deforms according to the movements of the mouth. To stay in a very old school vibe, the developers thought of separating the playable action from the dialogues via ancient fades to black, while each change of zone of the map is accompanied by a loading screen. If we explained that the story was not bad, know that the dynamic dialogues do not bring much to the equation, and that it is not really possible to have an impact on the events even if the answer choice system can make us believe otherwise.
Simplistic textures, rigid animations and crude lighting are on the menu, which is not surprising for a game probably developed with the budget comparable to the sum invested in a single explosion on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare.
In reality, the player simply chooses the order of the answers, and although the game sometimes teases a decision with consequences, it will not. The evolution of the relationships with the characters is also quite suspicious, with the possibility of sex scenes (close up on the face, sorry for the perverts) that don't really make sense, except for attempt to encourage players to bond with other individuals. The problem is that all this comes at the very end of the campaign, and therefore much too late for us to be really involved. The title suffers from other flaws, including the really ridiculous difficulty. As said a little above, the AI being moldy and our weapons super powerful, we never feel in danger, even in the face of the enemies supposed to be the toughest. It's all the more unfortunate that at the very beginning of the game, when the player is equipped with conventional weapons, it is totally impossible to kill the Terminators, which puts us directly in a weak position and installs a particularly effective tension. . Unfortunately, after a few missions, we recover the famous plasma weapons that allow the machines to be desoldered. From there, infiltration becomes meaningless, while Jacob Reeves becomes a more efficient killing machine than the DOOM Slayer. By coupling this overpower to the catastrophic AI, we obtain particularly simple fights; it then becomes faster and easier to rush into the pile than to remain discreet. In the same spirit, the game allows you to earn XP to improve skills, but again, the whole thing has no impact. Experience points are so generously distributed that in the end, all skills are unlocked, which makes the system particularly useless since the player has no choice to make. In short, an incomprehensible mechanic, just like this pumped mini-game of picking from Fallout, or that of hacking which is none other than a shameful copy of Frogger.
