Just started playing tonight, stopping at Chapter 3. I'm pleasantly surprised so far.
The voice acting gets better, for one. Gameplay is basic Bethesda Fallout stuff, but you're fully immersed in the Future War. You can pick up a bunch of junk to craft or trade with later, and the more I did so the more it reminded me of Reese making pipe bombs in T1. In Chapter 2 you're looking through a safe location for supplies and making sure the place is safe, all while you're listening to Desert Suite play in the background. Really gets the nostalgia & imagination going; this is the moment where I felt the most immersed in the Terminator world.
Both this location and Pasadena had locked doors you couldn't get past without either a key or a high enough lockpicking skill, so presumably you return to these locations later. So far the only glitches I've seen are pieces of destroyed spider bots spinning in place (one of the downed spider sentries had a perpetually firing minigun animation with no sound). The game looks good at Epic graphic settings, though nothing that would compete with current or recent AAA shooters. Playing at Extreme difficulty is no big deal; the only time I died was when walking too close to a fire. I'm looking forward to more of a challenge or a surprise in the Warehouse District of Chapter 3, but in the meantime I'm content just feeling like I'm in a good Terminator movie. Meaning one that's actually set in the Future War, and that feels like T1/T2.
The one criticism I'll give it besides the really easy difficulty is the scene where you're running with Jennifer and her brother Patrick to meet up with this game's Eli Vance, until you almost run into a pair of Terminators. The way you hid behind the cars made me think that there's no way either of the T-800s wouldn't have seen you. All one of them had to do was turn left and you would've been dead. That being said, the T-800s do look pretty good. I never liked the way the Genisys models looked, but these more-or-less looked like the original Stan Winston design with the Westinghouse plasma rifles (the game refers to them as R95 plasma rifles), although the rifles have that red glow a la the Genisys endos.
Maybe it's not $40 good, but seeing as how the going price for your average AAA 3D game is typically $60, I don't think it's asking too much. Especially for a fan of Terminator. Mr H and/or GmanLives estimated 10 hours of play time assuming you don't deviate from the main game, but if you're like me and you like to explore every nook and take the world in, I'd expect you could push that to maybe 16 or more. Anyways, I'm sure they'll dock it down to $35 at least for the Christmas season, so it's a recommend from me so far.
I think a smarter move would be to make a survival horror game where you have to evade the Terminator instead of fighting it directly. Make it sorta like fighting Nemesis, where all you can do is slow it down but it will still follow you.
I didn't get this impression from the reviews I've watched so far, but at first, you do have to avoid the T-800s. At one point you fight an infiltration model with the human tissue. Then there's that one shot of a T-800 torso crawling towards you in the firs trailer. So while the hospital gameplay looked boring as fuck with the uninteresting commentary, it looks like this game will be delivering on some of that evasion gameplay. Though admittedly, I'd say it's still far from a survival horror.
