Termintor 3: Rise of the Machines review (Xbox)

Traditionally, if you’re making a movie tie-in title you have to make it rubbish. Nobody expects anything much from them and fans of the film are likely to buy it whatever it’s like, so why bother? There have, of course, been a few exceptions to this rule but games based on films are never as good as ones that aren’t - probably because the game has to be finished as quickly as possible, to make sure it coincides with the film or at least the DVD.

Prejudices aside, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines is a tie in with the third Terminator film, placing you in control of Arnie’s character in a first person shooter environment. The game is mission based and some of these missions will also put you in a third person one-on-one fighter scenario.

Back to the Future

Rise of the Machines (not to be confused with the PC’s War of the Machines title, which is actually a completely different game) starts you off in the future battling through an onslaught of robots and robot ships to get to the time machine so you can be transported back to the present, to carry out the mission from the film. The future missions are long drawn out affairs, offering basically the same thing every mission. You carry out a mission that typically involves either protecting the humans or battling a path through to a rendezvous point. The enemies keep coming and you keep shooting or punching them. This seems to go on forever, but is interspersed with pre-rendered cut scenes to try and convey some sense of story.

Basically the story is “get to the time machine”, but to provide some gameplay time you are sent on a variety of poorly explained sub-quests. Once you reach the time machine you go back in time to the present and must follow the story of the film fairly closely as you fight through a series of short missions with plenty of film footage and rendered cut scenes. The future missions are what you’ll spend most of your time playing as they are much longer. Fortunately, these are the missions with the best weaponry: laser guns, hydrogen grenades and so on. In the present day missions you have the usual array of shotguns, mini-guns and pistols. Ammo is slightly scarce leaving you to do battle with your fists from time to time.

Targeting

The view in Rise of the Machines can be switched between a standard view of the world in colour and a red and black view such as the terminator sees in the films. This displays a readout of your ammo count, which weapons you are carrying, your health and also helps you to target. As you look around the display shows anything that can be targeted, be it scenery, enemies or friendly units. On certain missions you can only progress by blasting holes in walls. This can be a very frustrating device as there is nothing in the standard view mode to suggest that this is the case. You must switch to Terminator view to discover that a wall can be destroyed in order to be able to progress.

This view also helps with spotting enemies, as you can target through solid objects allowing you to scope out rooms before you enter. This ability has been rather poorly implemented however, causing collision detection problems. This manifests as shots passing right through enemies on occasion, as well as grenades thrown against walls killing the enemy on the other side but leaving the wall intact.

Dumb Robots

The AI in Rise of the Machines is just about passable. Your computer-controlled allies are pretty stupid but the enemies are less so. You occasionally have to protect your allies but this can be rather tricky as they seem to have something of a death wish: running out from cover to where a robot is shooting and then standing in the way.

The enemy robots are slightly more intelligent, although they seem to have little regard for their own lives and tend to charge right at you rather than strafe around you. Some of the flying robots make more use of evasive techniques when being attacked, which raises the challenge slightly. The enemies seem to be fairly accurate and come in large enough numbers that you have to take enough of your own evasive manoeuvres that you don’t worry about theirs.

Fisticuffs

The first person modes are interspersed with third person sections, which break up the monotony of the FPS sections. It’s no Tekken but it is a brave attempt. The combos are limited to three or four hits with punch, kick, throw and block buttons available. This reduces the fights to rather random button mashing, as there is no finesse required to win the fights. This rather detracts from the fight scenes but, since they are only intermittent and don’t make up much of the game, this is acceptable as a brief distraction from the main game.

Graphically these sections use the same quality textures and models as the first person section. This provides a consistent feel to these sections but, unfortunately, the graphics for the whole title are rather substandard. The textures are low quality and rather blocky. The models themselves are realistic enough though. In first person mode your character’s arm loses its skin and becomes just a robotic arm as you take damage. The graphics aren’t terrible, its just that the Xbox is capable of so much more than this and you feel a bit cheated.

Nicely Familiar

Controlling Rise of the Machines will be fairly intuitive to anyone who has played an Xbox FPS before. The controls for this genre are fairly standard on the Xbox, with a few custom controls such as the switch between the normal viewpoint and the terminator view. Targeting is fairly easy and a tracking button is provided to help keep an enemy locked in your sights if you have trouble with that sort of thing. Switching between the normal and terminator viewpoints is handled seamlessly, although the terminator view is quite disorienting.

It is worth getting used to it though, as it is very useful for certain missions in determining which walls must be destroyed in order to progress.

A wasted opportunity

Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines is a missed opportunity. It feels rushed and indeed probably was to ensure it came out at the same time as the DVD. If a little more time had been spent on the graphics, sound, mission structure and collision detection then this could have been worthwhile. The cut scenes and movie sections will make this worth playing through once for fans of the film and unlockable stills, deleted scenes and behind the scenes footage from the movie will give it additional replay value.

What it comes down to is, if you’re a big fan of the Terminator films, and especially the latest one, then there is enough here to keep you entertained for a couple of days. If you aren’t then there isn’t enough here to keep you entertained for more than a few hours.