Terminator Salvation (Arcade)

In 2009 an effort was made to revive the Terminator film franchise after the third film had left audiences a little cool to the concept back in 2003. In Terminator Salvation, the robot uprising of the future lead by a rampant program known as Skynet was given full focus this time rather than including any element of time travel like the previous films but it didn’t end up paying off for The Halcyon Company and they ended up selling the rights afterwards rather than continuing on with their intended trilogy. While the Terminator brand is best known for its movies, the Terminator 2: Judgment Day light gun game was a big hit in the arcades around that film’s release and in one of the smarter moves of trying to rejuvenate the brand, a new light gun game was made to coincide with Terminator Salvation as well.

 

Terminator Salvation’s first person shooting action is split into two missions the player can choose from when they first put in their credits although they can be played back to back and both of them consist of multiple small chapters with different enemies and environments. Playing as members of a human resistance in a bleak future controlled by the robots made by Skynet, up to two human players can play using the light gun peripherals to aim at the screen and pull the trigger to shoot exactly where they’re pointing, although the narrative saying you’re the resistance’s leader John Connor doesn’t seem to account for the second player if you are doing the story co-op. The events between the two missions are both mostly about a mix of survival and trying to strike meaningful blows to Skynet’s forces, but even when your objective is to try and protect a group of humans the robots will end up killing many of them as well as the other soldiers working alongside you. There are some moments where you can save a few individuals, but the plot does try to not only nail in the inevitable losses of going against such a powerful foe, but the story is mostly about doing what you can to ensure humanity continues on rather than striking the kind of decisive blow that could turn the war. Even when you’re attacking a key Skynet base or taking down a huge war machine, there’s a small reminder after this war isn’t anywhere near over, although since most of this game is about blasting your way through scores of machines with a machine gun it’s not a sobering look at this seemingly endless conflict so much as a way to keep it from going further with the concept than the film of the same name.

The gun prop used to interact with the game is a beefy assault rifle with some feedback to simulate weapon recoil, but while holding the trigger to fire and pressing a button on the side to launch the rarely found grenades works fine, Terminator Salvation handles reloading in an odd way. The ammo clip on the peripheral is a button itself that you tap inward to reload, but the reload is so instantaneous there is literally no disadvantage to it. Reloading is a key part of many shooting games because it can interrupt the otherwise constant automatic weapons fire with a moment of vulnerability, so in order to succeed you need to make sure your reloads aren’t timed poorly. If you can reload in the middle of shooting like you can in Terminator Salvation, the need to be accurate with your weapons fire is diminished since there’s no reload there to punish you for not trying to aim your shots properly. In Terminator Salvation you can pop onto a turret with no need to reload and it hardly feels much different from regular shooting since you can just hammer that reload button even while holding down the fire button without it interrupting a normal weapon’s bullet spray. This doesn’t ruin the shooting gameplay per se, but it does feel like it does feel like it prevents any complications that could ask the player to target foes more intelligently and was poorly implemented to the point the reloading feels more like a pointless bit of routine rather than a meaningful part of play.

 

The robot variety in Terminator Salvation does start off a bit limited, most of what you face throughout the game being the metallic humanoid Terminator skeletons the franchise is famous for. Many bring to bear miniguns so they can lay on damage pretty quickly if you don’t damage the one aiming at you, but they can come in different variations like ones that charge in and try to pummel you with their fists. More interestingly is how these base models react to damage they’ve taken. Depending on where you shoot them you can wear them down in different ways. Shooting their legs out from under them won’t kill them and they’ll still try to fight from the floor, but if you shoot off their arms you can witness the comical sight of them standing in place unsure how to fight you. A few other enemies do feature this in some degree but the more tank-like T-1 and crab-shaped T-7T robots instead make taking out their weapons a viable way of wearing tough foes down whereas the typical skeletal machines are better blasted in the head for a quick kill. Spider mines will attack in huge swarms where you need to try and blast as many as you can while handling the ones that directly jump towards you to prevent being overwhelmed and the snake-like machines strike very quickly and come in small groups so they require much quicker handling than the large robots who often have a clear wind up before they attack. The motorcycle based machines or flying drones also ask you to aim a bit more actively than other robots that often stay in one place and fire. Wearing down the gargantuan bipedal Harvester piece by piece across different segments of multiple stages is a nice way to space out a boss encounter as well, so while it could have spaced some of its variety a little better, the enemy types are interesting and eventually add up into a nice mechanical menagerie for you to take on.

The enemies in Terminator Salvation are weakened a bit by an unusual approach to warning the player about danger though. If an enemy is preparing to attack you, they’ll be surrounded by a red outline as a form of warning. When the game can have tens of default Terminator skeletons on screen this makes some sense as it could be easy to lose the one attacking you directly in the crowd, especially since others will still be firing at the screen and not doing damage if they aren’t the one highlighted in red. This red highlight draws your attention to them so you can fire on them before you get hurt, but this feature can almost be too helpful at times. If four or so machines are in front of you taking turns shooting, you just need to move your gun to fire at the one surrounded in red and they’ll not have the chance to hurt you, especially since your reload comes with no delays to your bullet output. Luckily, a lot of the non-standard Skynet forces have ways of still applying pressure with this system in place. The spider mines won’t politely take turns attacking in the same way and the red highlight just warns you of which ones are jumping towards you, the player still needing to clear their numbers quickly to avoid too many leaping at them to handle. The snake-like ones strike so quickly that it’s difficult to shift your weapon to the next one attacking before they strike, and some of the tank-like ones will fire lingering projectiles that can be blasted out of the air but draw fire away from whichever enemy is currently wrapped in red. It does weaken some moments of the play, one segment in the dark even sort of invalidating that danger by having the enemies still highlighted, but it appears to mostly be a way of trying to justify impressive huge armies on screen without overwhelming the player with too many targets to keep track of and it only really hurts when the enemies aren’t designed around circumventing the highlighting system in some small way.

 

The big boss battles with robots like the Harvester do use the ring target system comment to Raw Thrills published light gun shooters though, the player needing to shoot a series of indicated spots quickly to avoid taking damage. While this does give you the same indicator of where to shoot as the red highlight, the targets are numerous enough and the time pressure tight enough that the challenge is hitting all the spots quickly enough to progress the fight properly. Grenades can be used to help blast many at once or clear a crowd, but the crowd clearing is often not necessary thanks to that red highlight system limiting who is even dangerous at the moment. The temporary shotgun power-up at least is placed near moments where having a spread shot is quite useful, spider mine swarms or multiple tanks who could use their lingering projectiles to pester you handled better by the broad blasts the weapon provides. The minigun power-up is meant to be a tougher machine gun with no reload worry, although reload was already barely a worry so instead its more of a power boost than a true break from how you use your weapon. Some area variety can help the game avoid becoming too stagnant, infiltrating a fortified Skynet facility, ending up underwater while in the sewer, or fighting off a huge group in a theater breaking away from the often brown and grey city streets you’ll weave through often. Still, it can settle into periods where you’re shooting at Terminators without much thought because of the systems that specifically lessen the need for it, so it can’t be quite as exciting as a game that pushes harder for you to be a crack shot.

THE VERDICT: Terminator Salvation has a healthy amount of enemy variation and some breaks from its bleak ruinous city settings to keep the forward action interesting enough to stick with to the end, but the excitement of fighting back the robot army is weakened by some design choices. Reloading is practically pointless since it doesn’t interrupt the game flow unless you just forget to do it and the red highlight system can make certain enemies too predictable since you’re always told exactly who to shoot to avoid damage, but the game does still have enough situations where it can put up a fight with foes who work around the highlight system to still be dangerous. It may not stand out among light gun shooters because of its systems diminishing some of its difficulty but it’s not without its moments thanks to things like enemies reacting to damage or the way it handles its Harvester boss fight.

 

And so, I give Terminator Salvation for arcade machines…

An OKAY rating. Reloading isn’t a glamorous part of weapon use and it can certainly frustrate some players who don’t account for its impact on the game’s flow, but it does feel an important part of adding some substance to a game about constantly pointing and shooting at waves of enemies. Terminator Salvation has the enemy variety it needs to be a better experience, but it’s often because it finds ways to still challenge you a bit in spite of the safety nets it gives you. The snake-like machines would be more fearsome foes if you had to find a safe moment to reload between their swift strikes, but more importantly the standard Terminators would have a better chance of actually putting up an interesting fight. At the moment, when you see these foes they stand in place, get highlighted in red, and then need a second to lift up their minigun to actually fire at you in a way that deals some damage. All you need to do is spot that red outline and you can keep them at bay with constant machine gun fire, swapping between whichever one is highlighted as needed. The reactive damage system is a nice touch, meaning these basic enemies do ask for some focus on the regions of their body that will kill them rather than just shooting without any thought, but there are a fair few stretches of the game where it feels like too little is being asked of the player. Weaving in the better robot enemies often enough prevents it from being a totally mindless affair, but the variety isn’t quite present enough to help it rise above the two systems that lessen the danger your enemies present.

 

Terminator Salvation probably was bound to not leave as much of a splash as the Terminator 2 light gun arcade game simply because arcade games in general have waned in popularity and light gun games have settled into a fairly reliable mold, but it ended up reducing its potential some by being a bit too generous towards the player. Players don’t want to be killed by things they couldn’t have seen coming when each new life is a bit more money, but they also need enough resistance from the game they’re playing for continuing onward to be compelling. There’s still enough to see to keep the player along for the ride and the low cost some of the systems lead to mean they’ll likely not see too much harm in popping in more credits when something actually dangerous like the snake-like robots get them, but Terminator Salvation’s robot-shooting rampage doesn’t leave much of a lasting impression because its diminished danger level leads to fairly few tense or exhilarating battles.