Terminator 3 Review

Take a game like Battlefield 1942. Rip out all the fun, all the brilliant design decisions that made it a great game. Remove the great maps and take away all the constant support offered by the developers. Now set the game in the future. Do this and you have Terminator 3: War of the Machines.

This is essentially a team based multiplayer game. (There is a single player element that lets you play alongside computer-controlled bots but this mode is so bad its best left ignored.) You play either as a terminator on the side of Skynet or as a resistance fighter on the Tech-Com side. Each side has its own character classes, with their own strengths and weaknesses. You can take part in three modes including an objective-based mission mode, Deathmatch and a Capture the Fort type of mode where you earn points by capturing and controlling an area.

The first nail in the coffin is the graphics engine. Even on a high-end PC, the game tends to lag and freeze up for seconds at a time. This is incomprehensible as the graphics and average model animations aren’t good enough to warrant this kind of slow-down. The sounds are similarly pedestrian; not completely horrible but not really good either. In the single-player campaign my suffering was only heightened by the dumb-as-a-lobotomized-donkey Artificial (Un)Intelligence. Enemies run into, past and away from your fire. Even the thrill of playing as Arnie diminishes in about three minutes. This game should be played online which is where it’s biggest drawback comes in. It’s not really all that popular so you’ll be hard-pressed to find many (or any!) servers running the game. The few that do seem to be excruciatingly slow, even by Indian standards. Atari has not yet provided a single dedicated server to host this game. Considering the support that a title like BF 1942 still gets (a year after release!) from its designers, this half-hearted attitude is unforgivable.

What we end up with is a multiplayer game that is anything but, and a single player experience that can only be bettered. This is a game that seems to have been left out in the cold by it’s developers to die a slow, painful death. If you want to experience a real multiplayer action, try Battlefield 1942 instead. I guarantee you won’t regret it.

HIGHS: It’s based on the Terminator series.
LOWS: Poor performance issues; no servers to play on; barebones single-player missions with horrid AI.
NUTSHELL: Stay Away!
Rating: 55 %