Terminator: Resistance

PUBLISHER REEF ENTERTAINMENT / DEVELOPER TEYON / RELEASE DATE OUT NOW / COST £49.99/59.99 IS IT A CASE OF HASTA LA VISTA, OR WILL YOU BE BACK FOR MORE?

- CHRIS BURKE

The Terminator franchise keeps on going like a welloiled T-1000, but we’ve had few Xbox titles of any note come from such a richly inventive and iconic sci-fi universe. Terminator: Resistance has a decent premise, in that it’s set in the post Judgement Day dystopia where we first saw Kyle Reese in the original film fighting against the machines.

Earth has been destroyed by nuclear apocalypse and the Terminators have formed an ‘Annihilation Line’ moving across America like a dragnet to pick off survivors and wipe the planet clean of humanity. You play as resistance fighter Jacob Rivers, whose Pacific Division has been wiped out, and he’s woken up in Pasadena not remembering why. For the life of us, we can’t remember either, and we’ve played the game. While it’s not a terrible narrative, the fact that it leads up to the point Reese goes back in time to save Sarah Connor is merely a decent bit of fan service propping up a largely forgettable story.

Back in time

Look, Terminator: Resistance is not awful. It just feels as though it’s an Xbox 360 title that’s been sitting unreleased for a decade, given a lick of Xbox One upscaling and put out in time for the latest Arnie movie to hit the cinemas. Which is a shame in itself, because we reckon that had this game been released ten years ago, it might have got a pretty decent score at the end of this review. So allow OXM to John Connor-like hijack the tech that the machines used to send back the first Terminator, and go back to 2009.