Before we kick off this review, it would be possibly remiss of me not to mention that GRIN, the bods behind Terminator Salvation, went into bankruptcy last month. At the end of the day it’s not going to stop me tearing into the game like Jools would tear into a rump steak with his bare teeth, but perhaps with that in mind the following might be understandable. For all we know this game could have been produced on a shoestring amidst an atmosphere of job layoffs etc, so yeah… just something to think about.

See, I hadn’t watched the movie of which this game is a prelude, so I had absolutely no idea what was going on at all when it kicked of rather abruptly with your hero John Conner in the midst of some sort of firefight. Some four hours later, having seen the ending credits start rolling, I was left with what I can only describe as a feeling of mild disappointment and slight boredom at the way things had panned out. Reading through my notes, it’s not hard to see why.

Salvation plays reasonably similarly to Gears of War, in that you find yourself having to duck into cover and take pot shots at enemies from a third-person perspective. Sadly, the game’s similarities with Epic’s slick action shooter stop pretty much there, as it completely fails to excite on any level and instead turns into nine relatively short portions of running between identical fire fights in a muddy, blurry game world.

This is no more appropriately indicated than by the second chapter, in which you run to an open area and shoot down a selection of flying robots, run inside to trigger a cut scene, run outside again to fight the same kind of robots, run inside again to trigger another cut scene and then… well, yeah, you pretty much guessed it. Save a couple of on-rails vehicle sections (the last of which, in a huge robot thing, is actually reasonably enjoyable) you’re ploughing through a rinse-and-repeat routine of strolling into battles and then camping out for a while whilst getting flooded with one of the four-or-so enemy varieties.

This would have been more bearable if the game had at least looked nice or told a compelling story, but it does neither. Flat, ugly textures coat the disintegrating cityscape around you, and your characters often move so awkwardly that they look like constipated Thunderbirds. If anything it’s a game the benefits from playing on a standard definition television, as playing it through an HD monitor shows up just how ugly and outdated it looks rather badly indeed.

All the while you are playing through a story packed with clichéd supporting characters and very little in the way of drama. At one point you meet up with a surly young woman who pretty much moans at everything you do (trust me, if I had wanted to do this then I would have snip – probably safer if I don’t finish this sentence*) before she is magically transformed into your best friend for reasons I can’t quite remember noticing as you travel along with your rather anonymous other female sidekick who doesn’t seem to have been given any bit of the plot for herself. Oh, and Christian Bale doesn’t voice his character from the film either, which I presume hurts the sense of authenticity a bit.

You soon stop feeling sorry for her and everyone else in your squad when you realise that your AI ‘chums’ are about as useful as a chocolate kettle when it comes to the most important bit of the game, i.e. the fighting. Rather than circle into intelligent positions they often merely crowd around in cover directly in front of your enemies and spend most of their time firing at some invisible target some two feet above their heads. Having made it plainly clear at the start of the game that flanking is a crucial tactic, it’s maddening that none of your counterparts seem particularly arsed about employing it themselves hence leaving you to perform the heroics on your own if you want to survive. Things aren’t helped by the weaponry on offer, all of which feels distinctly weak and ineffective.

By the time you’ve slogged your way through to the last chapter you’re pretty much aware of the game’s other main flaw; it never throws anything particularly unexpected or challenging at you. The enemy machines you find yourself fighting in the first few chapters remain your only opponents right the way through the entire game with only one instance that could even be considered a boss fight along the way. For the first couple of hours you cling to the hope that at some point the game will start chucking you a few different enemies or situations, but quite quickly you resign yourself to knowing that you are going to be spending all your time doing exactly the same thing over and over, with only a mild change of ugly scenery for variety.

With no multiplayer to speak of save being able to co-op through the campaign with a friend (although they may not remain your friend for long if you force them to play), this only serves to bury Terminator: Salvation deeper into the mire. Even on the hardest difficulty level you can clear the thing in just over five hours, and whilst those five hours are playing out you have very little in the way of memorable gameplay to take away with you at the end. It’s a shooter by numbers in every respect; dull, unimaginative and painfully simple, and one that hits well under the bar in pretty much every aspect. Perhaps Christian Bale had a point when he chose not to provide the voice for John Conner after all.