Terminator: Resistance Annihilation Line – Review

Terminator Resistance was a strange ol’ product. It came from nowhere and the critics were quite apathetic on the game but the fans welcomed it with cybernetic arms. Now it’s time for a little extra with the Annihilation Line DLC, will you be back?

Nice Night for a Walk, Eh? 

Annihilation Line is set roughly around halfway through the main campaign of Terminator Resistance and puts you in the war-torn boots of Jacob Rivers. Jacob is the main character of the base game too and generally has quite an important role to play throughout the lore of Terminator.

You’re put into a team with a guy who’s beaten a Terminator to death, an explosives expert who once turned a torch into a pipe bomb, and Kyle Reese of Terminator 1 fame. 

While the other members of the team have some standout moments, it all naturally is overshadowed by Reece. The focus on Reece feels to be somewhat of a misstep as he comes off almost like a “simp” for John Connor, who has sent your team on a suicide mission for reasons revealed later.

You get a few more fan service story beats and a little more character to Rivers but all in all, it wouldn’t sell to someone who isn’t a fan of the franchise. I do have to mention that I love Terminator 1 and 2: Judgement Day. Unfortunately, I’ve seen Salvation but that’s my lot. Terminator Resistance and by extension Annihilation Line are love letters to the first two films. As a fan, these are aimed right at me.

A Learning Machine 

The gameplay in Annihilation Line is identical to Terminator Resistance. It doesn’t actually add anything new in terms of abilities or weapons. 

Terminator Resistance was a perfectly fine first-person shooter that incorporated crafting, stealth, side missions, a mix of open areas and linear action sequences, skill trees, and a watered-down relationship/morality system. From the above, all have made it over aside from the relationship system that’s now scrapped.

First off, the skill tree is back and allows you to customize your playstyle. Do you prefer to sneak around or want to be a tank? Fortunately, the DLC throws levels at you thick and fast with you rounding out at around level 25. This is more than enough to make a decent all-rounder. 

I mention that first because much like the base game, this DLC forces you into playing a certain way. From Medium difficulty and higher, the game can cut you down in seconds. When the game launched you had to go to the highest difficulty, but here it’s balanced out to provide the intended experience from the middle ground.

There is basic crafting in the game, so you’ll be routinely picking up everything to build first aid kits and grenades. You’ll also find a basic hacking mini-game and the overused lock picking shtick too to break up the sneaking and shooting.

Gunplay in this title is fine. Everything feels nice and there is a good bit of feedback when you fire. Unfortunately due to where Annihilation Line takes place, you’ll be using Plasma weapons instead of the standard firearms. This makes some of the lineup fairly redundant. 

The weapon lineup starts with your standard firearms such as Pistols, Shotguns, and the like then. Beyond that, you also have the more impressive Plasma Rifles, Sniper Plasma rifles that knock T-800s down on headshots, Plasma Gatling Gun, and a selection of grenades, rocket launchers, and bombs.

The stealth uses a meter to tell you how visible you are, should there be any units around. It comes with the use of a knife that can 1-shot any Terminator model. It’s basic stuff but it all works.

It Doesn’t Feel Pity, or Remorse, or Fear

You’re a resistance fighter so the best ability you’ve got to your name is guerrilla warfare. You’ll find yourself taking potshots, sneaking around, and setting traps to avoid staring at a T-800 model in its cold metallic eyes. It’s a mix of the scavenging and the near-constant feeling of being outnumbered, outgunned, and out of your depth that really helps immerse you into this war against the machines.

The campaign took me over 5 hours, but that’s with a good few deaths and a lot of exploring thrown in. It features about seven locations, two of which are larger areas with side missions. The rest are the more condensed action-focused sections.

Sadly the DLC doesn’t finish on as much of a high note as the base game does. You’re met with a rather average boss fight followed by the ending which lovingly drops enough fan service to tie the game to the films once again.

In the Few Hours we had Together, We Loved a Lifetime’s Worth 

Visuals here are absolutely phenomenal but not for the reasons you may think. Textures are quite low-resolution and the character models would be pushing it on PlayStation 2 most of the time.

Instead, it’s the absolute dedication to nailing the look of the product it’s representing. It 100% looks like the future war scenes from Terminator 1 and instills the same feelings that I get not only from the film but that first time I was dodging HK Tanks on Terminator 1 for the Sega Mega Drive.

The Terminator units all look exactly like the source material and the scenery is a collection of post-Judgement Day wrecks with fires, bones, and rivers of human blood to stomp through. Piercing the grey are giant metallic monoliths as a constant reminder that Skynet has won.

The lighting and smoke/fog effects are also fantastic here and nothing quite matches sneaking by a firing line while god rays pierce through the buildings. Honestly, it just gets the atmosphere spot on.

Performance-wise it was mostly fine. There were a few stuttering issues early on but nothing towards the latter end of the campaign. I did have one restart due to having the inventory menu stuck on my screen with no way to remove it but aside from that no issues at all.

I Came Across Time For You Sarah 

The voice acting is hammy, kind of poor, and doesn’t do much for me at all. Quite early on I was ready to rat out Reece to the machines due to his obsession with shouting ” RIVERS” and having about as much personality as our foes.

The music though, MY GOD THE MUSIC IS SO GOOD! Of course, the Terminator theme is there and plays at just the right moments to get the blood pumping and the bumps goosing but the original tracks also smack of 80s sci-fi in the best ways and just fit in.

Verdict

For me, Annihilation Line did exactly what I would want from a DLC; It gave me more of what I wanted. In this case, it provided me another 5 hours of quality gameplay with a condensed tour de force campaign riddled with Terminator lore.

Fans of the game and franchise should lap this up and even people who haven’t seen Terminator may still enjoy the gameplay and scenario presented. If you have any doubt of how well this story is done, again I’m only a fan of the first two films and this DLC gave me literal goosebumps at the end.

If you weren’t ready to give up the fight in Resistance, Teyon games have given you another sizable chunk of story and gameplay to feed your hunger and apologize for Terminator: Dark Fate.

TERMINATOR: RESISTANCE ANNIHILATION LINE IS HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

If you would like to see more FPS games, you may be interested in our review of HROT.

Many thanks go to Reef Entertainment for a PC review code for this title.