A few years back, I saw a random forum thread recommending “Terminator: Resistance”, though admittedly “recommending” is probably an optimistic way to put it.  The basic thesis of the starting post was that it was admittedly a pretty mid game but one that you could find fun in if you were a fan of the franchise.

I’m not a HUGE Terminator fan, but I thought I probably fit the criteria.  So I promptly put it on a wishlist or two and forgot about it entirely.

Eventually, it got cheap enough to buy, it wound up in my Steam library, and then it sat there for about 10 months.

For me, this counts as actually playing a new game in a timely fashion.

Now that I’ve played it… yeah.  It’s pretty mid!  But apparently it got some balance patches after launch to polish out some of the rough spots, and got a PS5 remaster/upscale and overall rather more support than you’d expect to see if something was truly shovelware.  So taking seven years to jump on a 2019 game wasn’t an awful plan.

One of the things I always like to do in games is to take a close look at the environment.  Sometimes you find neat details that the artists put there even knowing that most players are just going to rush past them, and I use them as kind of shorthand to figure out how much budget a game had.  Like, the Call of Duty games load up their environments with all kinds of random unique objects, while Terminator Resistance has … a lot of boxes of maraschino cherries.

I can’t confirm that EVERY cardboard box in the game is full of maraschino cherries.  I did pass by a couple of NPCs at one point who were having a little side conversation where they were wondering where all of these cherries come from.

On the other hand, I Love-with-a-capital-L the notion that every random safe house has a Commodore Pet in it.  This makes no sense for a game based on the premise that Judgement Day took place on schedule in 1997, but seeing these is such a wonderful nostalgia hit.

We will ignore the weirdly inappropriate half height 5.25″ disk drive.  Like, why did you model it in there.

It’s also painfully gray.  Like, that kinda makes sense.   It’s set in the “Future War” universe that’s only seen in little flash forwards in the first couple of Terminator movies, and those scenes are really dark and gritty.

It’s so unremarkable that apparently I didn’t take any screenshots of the gray levels.  I did take one of this building, though.  Maybe it’s based on a real building in Los Angeles?  Dunno.  Most of the levels are ostensibly set in Pasadena or Downtown LA but the scenery seemed like pretty generic post apocalyptic city.

The somewhat oppressively-gray nature of most of the levels DOES make the level where you are outside in a forest in the daytime really pop, though.  You hit this point after a lot of slogging through gray and it is a really nice change.

Oh, that reminds me:  If you DO decide to play this game and have any way to play this in HDR I would strongly recommend that.  I happened to notice it was an option after a couple of hours of playtime and the world after turning it on was dramatically better looking than the world before turning it on.

Couple other nice touches that I wanted to mention:

First, the hacking game is NOT a pipe based game or one where you are trying to untangle wires.  Those are, like, the two basic hacking mini games and it was refreshing to see something new.  It’s basically Frogger, actually.  You have a little square that you need to move from left to right across lanes of traffic that are alternating direction and that move at different speeds.

Second, while every game in the last two decades has subscribed to the same “let’s scatter a bunch of random notes and recordings around the environment” system of world building, some of the ones in Terminator: Resistance are actually funny.

Howlongtobeat has Terminator: Resistance clocked at 9.5 hours.  I took more like 14 hours with it.  I shot a lot of chrome heads.  I did some stealth.  I leveled up a skill tree.  I hacked enemy turrets and giggled as they blew up their own dudes.  I upgraded weapons and did crafting.  I enjoyed seeing how it fit into the overall “Terminator” timeline, which is to say that it works really well with the timeline as described in the first and second movies, even if it doesn’t really add anything.

And I have made it through this entire article without mentioning even once that the game’s name is custom designed to give nightmare flashbacks to anyone who has ever tried to debug a SCSI daisy chain.

Well.  I almost did.