The past month has been ripe
with licensed games. Another one to enter the fray is Terminator: Dawn of
Fate and I must say that while a few small problems are prevalent, this game
by Atari is quite impressive. Alas, though, it doesn’t have a speck of Arnold.
The storyline serves as a
prequel to the very first Terminator movie. Skynet has nearly completed their
objective of eradicating humans. As a last front, you will play one of three
Tech Comm leaders to take out the killing machines. A new machine has been
developed that looks and moves just like humans. John Conner is spearheading an
assault on Norad, which Skynet is using to finalize the last human
annihilation. You will defend squads, escort other soldiers, and basically
remove the cybernetic assassins from the earth, Arnold style.
The in-graphics are quite nice
and enhanced the mood of the game: dark and morose, with no chance of
survival. Walking from area to area is accomplished like Resident Evil. Even
though the backgrounds are not pre-rendered, as you walked, the camera cut to
the next area, instead of scrolling. This was done rather nicely, but sometimes
it was hard to see which way you needed to go. Rubble was too subtle to
recognize and I found myself bumping in to more stuff than I needed to bump
into. Since everything was being destroyed or had been destroyed, the artists
did a fantastic job of creating these destructions. Buildings had imploded,
streets were littered with 2027 garbage, and any c4 explosions you caused blew
up real nice like. That’s right, you get to use c4. One note: the
introduction movie did a great job of drawing you in. It sets up the story with
nice voice-acting and blatant emotions and uses that cool slow-motion effect to
show you the bad guy has arrived. And don’t we all love it when the bad guy
arrives because something explosive is about to happen.
I’m torn about the controls.
I would say that I disliked them 30% of the time. I absolutely hated having no
control over the camera. As you moved, you had to take the view the game gave
you and hoped that you didn’t get blindsided. The right thumbstick isn’t even
used (except when you clicked it for the map); perhaps they could have assigned
the camera control to that. The biggest issue combines the camera system and
the shoddy control use. As you walk or run from area to area, the camera cuts
to different angles and you have to compensate your movement accordingly. I can
tell that the programmers tried to make it easy by letting you push the
thumbstick in the same direction, but when you’re trying to turn and avoid bad
guys or debris, whatever direction you were going just gets canceled out.
Now for the best part of the
controls, which is the main reason you play a game like this anyway. The combat
system is top-notch, in my opinion. Each characters have their particular gun
they like to use (along with the standard issue pistol), and when it’s time to
decimate, Terminator puts you right in the battle in a heavy way. When
you auto-target (which I recommend) an enemy, control gets much tighter.
Movement is then restricted to strafing/circle strafing and simple walking as
you fire. Switching between weapons is quick, as the game pauses as you call up
your inventory menu and resumes action when you’re ready. You also have the
option of transferring to first person view to attack. You can’t move in this
mode, but it gives you a better view. At different times in the game, you have
the option of manning a turret gun. This puts you in first person, but it is
satisfying to blast away Skynet adversaries. There is still the annoying
problem of the camera, but it is slight. With the auto-target, though, you
won’t be blind to the locations of the groups of enemies.
But if you get tired of using
weapons (but really, who does get tired), you have the option of using
the limited melee combat system. Sorry, I don’t know why I called it a system.
Tapping the ‘B’ button let you unleash up to a 3-hit combo. The only real
diversity lies in the fact that at any time, if you hit down on the thumbstick,
your character will do a leg sweep. But in the end, it’s still a max of 3
hits. There is an Adrenaline option to use. If you hit the ‘white’ button, you
enter adrenaline mode. You fire faster, hit harder, and move quicker. But
quite honestly, I haven’t used it once and did just fine.
Most of the gameplay is pretty
linear, as your main objective is to take down the little terminators. Some of
the missions require you to escort a demolitions expert so he can rigged the
building to explode. Other missions ask you to defend a group of pinned in
soldiers or ask you to blow up parts of the underground to impede the progress
of those guys following you. You start each mission with a main goal and at
different points during the game, it is possible that you will obtain more
objectives. That’s what was fun: I didn’t know what I would be doing at any
one time.
Besides the usual weapons and
ammo that you can pick up, there are also Skynet Texts that you can get. These
net you points that you can use to upgrade weapons, armor, and health. They are
not upgraded right away, but the items you pick up are upgraded additionally. I
really didn’t find too much use for the upgrading because I left the game on
normal setting and blew through the first 3 levels un under an hour. I
upgraded, but didn’t find any additional benefits.
One major issue (or flaw,
depending on how you look at it) I had was when the robots fired at me. They
are slow, but when their laser hits, they hit good. It didn’t matter how I
moved or dodged or rolled, a portion of their lasers always seem to hit. I
think that I did not dodge one gun successfully. That gets annoying very
quickly. One thing that I did like very much was when my health got so low, the
game automatically used a health pack. I found that very, very useful because
how many times did you find yourself in a sticky situation only to die because
you had forgotten to use a healthpack or a potion? Kudos to the game makers on
that.
Overall, I was very impressed
with this licensed game. If the developers would have allowed control over the
camera or possibly even made this a first person shooter totally, I would have
given this game a much higher rating. But the combat system, cinematics, and
storyline easily make up for that downfall.
If only Arnold were in it with
some snappy phrase like, “It is time for the apocalypse”. Imagine my rating
then.
 
TERMINATOR: DAWN OF FATE
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Terminator:
Dawn of Fate
