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Terminator 3: Redemption Review: Grand Theft Terminator

MrCheater
Terminator 3 Redemption

Where do I begin with this one? Terminator 3: Redemption is a movie tie-in game to the Terminator 3 film that came out back in 2003 to middling reviews. A year late and a few features light compared to most video game fanfare of the era, and Terminator 3: Redemption fits into a rather odd slot as a game that’s not quite as bad as a typical movie-game, but not quite good enough to warrant much acclaim. Like many movie games of the era, there are some really good ideas underneath the hood, but the execution is rather poor, and that dampens the overall appeal of this particular outing.

Gameplay Overview

There’s no reason to recount the story, because it basically is a retelling of the film just with some tacked on parts to broaden the playtime, which will probably take you anywhere between four and ten hours depending on your skill level. The game has no difficulty setting, but it’s already ratcheted up to hard from the start, mostly due to a lack of information and on-screen cues to guide you through some of the mission parameters.

You’ll likely find yourself frustrated the first few times you approach a level or two (or three, or four) because you’re not sure what you have to do. The game is heavily reliant on trial and error-style tactics, reminiscent of the old-school era of NES, SNES and Sega Genesis games.

Through frustration, curses under you breath, curses out loud, and a few thrown controllers at the wall, you’ll eventually figure out what you have to do in order to progress through the game.

It’s mostly a mix of third-person shooting with a lot of vehicular driving and on-rail arcade-like segments. Majority of the game you’ll spend time either riding on a vehicle or driving in a vehicle. Some of these segments are done quite well, like the chase through the downtown Hollywood, reminiscent of the blockbuster scene from the movie. The sequence is done quite well, and funnily enough Rockstar actually mimicked that segment in GTA: San Andreas when CJ and his buddies were outrunning cops through San Andreas as a callback to Terminator 2 and Terminator 3.

Controls: Worse For Wear

The over-the-shoulder gunplay isn’t especially intuitive here. The movement of Arnold is stiff as molasses, but the targeting is rather free-flowing. There’s a soft auto-lock in place, so simply moving the reticule over to a target will automatically lock onto said target. It makes aiming easy and fluent, save for when you need to target a specific enemy and another enemy is in the way, and the soft lock won’t let you target your intended foe; then it becomes frustrating.

You have a power meter, indicating how much battery power is left in the T-101 before he shuts down. As you take damage the power meter drains. You can refill the meter by either shooting out the legs of T-900 units and then stomping on them with your melee attack when they’re in range, or by running/driving close to an opposed electrical/battery outpost.

You can melee enemies using a variety of different combos, but they’re not very exciting looking and they’re quite stiff and slow, breaking the pace of the gunplay significantly. You’ll likely only rely on the melee attacks if push comes to shove.

Majority of the game, however, will be played riding on a vehicle of some sort, whether it be another Terminator unit, a truck, a cop car, a motorcycle, or some sort of flying device.

The vehicles handle decently enough, turning the game almost into a low-effort Need for Speed knockoff in some segments where you’re either racing against the timer or attempting to protect John and his girlfriend from being hurt/attacked. Some of the vehicular segments are actually quite fun while others are tedious. The truck chase with the T-X was tedious and nerve-wrecking, but also kind of fun because it really did feel like a Need for Speed course… just in a pickup truck. The hearse sequence against the T-X was just tedious and annoying. The downtown chase was actually fun, whereas all the future chase/race/driving/flying segments were beyond obnoxious, annoying, and extremely difficult.

Interestingly enough, the the controls did manage to hold up while attempting to drive/steer, and target/shoot all at the same time. I thought that it was going to be difficult trying to do both, but weirdly it worked out well.

Where I had the biggest issues was with dual-wielding weapons, where the right-trigger fired a weapon in Arnold’s right hand and the left trigger fired a weapon in his left hand. The left-hand weapon didn’t always fire on command and required repeated presses. It was stiff and slow. This made the on-foot gunplay relatively tedious whenever dual-wielding was required. Usually dual-wielding weapons is one of the best parts of a game, but here it was just a lesson in frustration, especially when you had to dual-wield explosive weaponry like the grenade launcher, which had a ridiculous delay in firing.

Level Diversity

As mentioned, most of the levels consisted of some kind of driving or flying segment, with a few on-foot parts. The levels are also very long. This was before checkpoints became a thing in gaming (or before some developers decided to make use of them). Basically, it means that if you get right near the end of the level and you die, mess up, or fail in any way, you have to start all the way over from the beginning.

Now restarting a level from the start isn’t bad if the game is fun. There are a lot of games with frustrating or difficult level traversal or hard-to-beat AI, but the fun-factors make it worthwhile. Here? Not so much. The tedium is mostly in how many enemies they throw at you or how tight you have to be when it comes to timing.

The levels, sadly, aren’t anywhere near as diverse as they could be, and halfway through the game you’ll find that you’re already two-thirds of the way through the movie’s plot points. So how did Paradigm decide to stretch out the gameplay to get some extra hours out of the experience? Send Arnold back to the future, of course!

Yes, the game starts in the future where Arnold is captured, reprogrammed, and then is sent to infiltrate Skynet in order to go back to the past. You play through the entire future war segments involving Arnold making his way to the time machine. You would think that after several levels spent in the future fighting Skynet robots they would focus mostly on modern day levels? Nope. After several chase sequences the game then throws Arnold back to the future, where you have to play through some of the most tedious and frustrating levels imaginable.

These levels are the kind of levels that make you want to quit the game for good. You essentially have to level up your reflexes and master your timing in order to beat them, as they’re a cross between bullet-hell Macross games and F-Zero. I’m literally not joking. You’ll be doing a mix of shooting enemies out of the sky and racing through tight corridors and mechanical service tunnels in order to get to the time machine and make your way back to the present… again.

The future-level padding really brings the game’s momentum down drastically, as these levels could have been spent doing any number of more interesting things that didn’t involve bullet-hell gameplay and F-Zero service tunnels that look like they were ripped right out of The Matrix.

Graphics/Audio

Visually this game doesn’t look bad to be a licensed-based title. It’s not award-winning by any stretch of the imagination, but I really have to tip my hat off to the developers for making good use of the visual likeness of Arnold Schwarzenegger and giving him a duly proper action-hero depiction throughout the entire game. In fact, it feels less like you’re playing a Terminator and more like you’re playing a typical badass Arnold action-hero character. There are lots of over-the-top jumping, running, explosive cinematic segments that were nowhere to be found in the actual Terminator 3 film, but I did enjoy the cinematic escapades in the game.

The rest of the visuals are a mixed bag of hit and miss artistic quality. Some of the robots look decently designed, and some of the future atmosphere captures the bleak, post-apocalyptic noir that James Cameron depicted in the first two films. However, this game’s graphics are certainly one for the era. The textures are washed out and muddy for the most part, and other than Arnold, the model files aren’t particularly standout.

The audio, however, is decently done. While you’ll sometimes have Arnold repeating some lines over and over depending on the segment/situation, most of the dialogue helps aid the player in what they’re supposed to do or how they’re supposed to do it. Like in the hearse segment, the characters will inform Arnold to grind the T-X unit against the guardrail after knocking her over to the side of the vehicle. Other times they may highlight certain objects to shoot or items to focus on during combat.

The music is par the course for the kind of game it is, neither standout nor memorable, and the sound effects are serviceable at best.

Extras/Replay Value

Where this game really shines is with the extras. You can unlock cheat codes after beating the game, as well as movies/cinematics. The codes add some extra cool factors to the replay value, such as slow-motion, or the instant-kill feature. As you earn more points and rack up higher score you can unlock additional cheats, which gives you more reason to go back and play the game again.

Another really cool highlight is the T2: Arcade Game-style co-op feature tacked on. It was completely unnecessary and didn’t have to be added, but the light-gun style rail-shooter adds some extra incentive to play the game more than it warrants, especially if you have a buddy to play the co-op mode with. It’s not particularly great, but it’s decent enough to warrant a playthrough at most.

This game has a lot of hit and miss features to it, and it’s hard to really rank it. If you can get your hands on an old used copy or an ISO, it’s worth checking out if you want to play a game featuring a righteous badass in Arnold Schwarzenegger. The only downsides are the somewhat stiff character movements, and the wonky soft-lock targeting that may get in the way at times. If you can look past the frustrating bits, it’s not the worst way to spend an afternoon, but if you’re not the biggest fan of Terminator, Arnold, or a lot of on-rail driving/flying/shooting segments, you may want to give this one a pass.

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