Terminator: Resistance

Set in the year 2029, Terminator: Resistance promises a first-person look at humanity’s last stand against Skynet. Unfortunately, from the moment you begin, it becomes clear that the game struggles to understand both its own mechanics and the lore it is built on. Even on normal difficulty, the experience is punishing in ways that feel unfair rather than challenging, exposing fundamental flaws in stealth, combat, and progression. Stealth is effectively non-existent. Enemy AI is erratic, sometimes seeing and shooting through walls, likely due to bugs, but frequent enough to break immersion. Patrolling behavior is random, making sneaking less about planning and more about waiting and hoping enemies move the “right” way. Combat fares no better: enemies function primarily as bullet sponges, while the player’s health evaporates quickly, creating difficulty through imbalance rather than intelligent design. Ammo scarcity is constant, and early on there is no crafting system, meaning players can easily become stuck unless they simply sprint past enemies. The save system is unreliable, with inconsistent save points that cannot be trusted. This is compounded by poorly designed side quests where being slightly too slow can force a checkpoint reload and erase all loot gained since. Hitboxes are equally broken, allowing shots to connect from impossible angles while missing clear targets. The hacking minigame—an embarrassingly bad Frogger clone—appears constantly and quickly becomes tedious. Its frequent use only highlights how little variety the gameplay offers. Narratively, the game makes little sense. Playing as a young, clueless version of John Connor contradicts established Terminator lore, where his importance and destiny are well known. Worldbuilding raises more questions than answers: prisoners inexplicably wear long-range communication gear, Skynet uses body bags, and the war against machines seems confined entirely to Los Angeles. This clashes directly with the films’ depiction of a global extermination of humanity. The result is a future war that feels small, confused, and poorly thought out. Presentation does little to help. The game looks and feels like it was made around 2011, with stiff animations, weak cutscenes, and terrible acting. The design evokes a tiny indie title rather than a licensed franchise. Sound design is especially bad: weapons are deafening, dialogue is hard to hear due to poor audio mixing, and the music repeats the same few Terminator theme variations endlessly. There is even a bafflingly awkward sex scene that feels unintentionally comedic. Terminator: Resistance occasionally hints at the atmosphere fans want from a Terminator game, but those moments are buried beneath technical issues, weak writing, and outdated gameplay. Poor stealth, broken saves, incoherent lore, and repetitive design make the experience more frustrating than fun. For all its ambition, it ultimately feels like a low-budget, half-finished interpretation of a universe that deserved far better. Disclaimer: Fitting the concept of Skynet, this review was written with the help of AI. I lumped all my notes into the engine and this is what it spewed out. My "own review" has been posted in the shape of a YouTube video