sci-fi

Terminator: Dawn of Fate is a pretty fair game- but it tries so hard to be a good game, but hardware and perhaps even legal considerations just kept getting in the way. Dawn of Fate tells the story of the events leading up to Kyle Resse's eventful trip back to the past to save Sarah Connor and destroy the CSM-101 Terminator sent to kill her and prevent John Connor from being born. The game is built around the standard premise of killing terminators, collecting technology for upgrades and of course, the survival of all mankind against the evil and monolithic, Skynet. You get to meet General Connor, Justin Perry and Catherine Luna- friends and comrades of Kyle's and you switch characters between missions.

It's odd that they managed to capture the look of post Judgment Day Earth, the battlefields and ruined cities perfectly. Everything Skynet had- all the vehicles- the H/K tanks and aerial units are all there in gleaming chrome, but that's all they captured. The sounds are all wrong. The brilliant purple plasma guns sound like typical game fair and don't have their deep, resonant stutter from the movies. Even the H/Ks don't sound quite right. It's like whichever studio owns the copyright approved using the appearance of everything, but said they couldn't use the sound effects. Either than or the developers decided to do their own. Bad mistake. Another flaw is that the Tech/Com soldiers and their weapons aren't really representative of the movies, either.

All I can say about the character models is BAD. Kyle Reese looks like Christopher Walken did as the Hessian in Sleepy Hollow, stupid hair and all. Justin Perry looks like he was carved out of stone and I won't go into how unfeminine Luna looks. Connor is probably the best rendered of the lot.

Mission play is broken up into 3rd person play, starting with protecting Connor from an terminator infiltration attack, destroying Tech/Com's computers and blowing up an H/K tank that has rolled into the top floor of the resistance's hideout. In that mission you have to protect a demolitions expert as he plants explosive charges in the massive hotel base, is a royal pain, because he does nothing to defend himself. Instead, he stands there passively getting blasted by terminators while you rush around like a chicken with its head cut off trying to kill them before they grease him. Later missions involve a secondary story that the programmers must have felt was pretty clever. They're wrong. As well you must prevent Skynet from steeling all the platinum from a Federal Reserve bank.

Apparently Skynet has just perfected the CSM-101 series infiltrators, but they have also been capturing normal humans and modifying them cybernetic mind control devices. One of these, Alexander Stone, blames Kyle for the death of his brother Gabriel and so has turned traitor, joining forces with Skynet in order to seek revenge. It is he the player must track down because he has stolen Connor's battle plans for an assault against Skynet's main base at Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado. But while you get the plans back, you can never actually kill Stone. I'm not entirely sure why Skynet would create these hybrids- dressed as they are in black and red leather with cybernetic implants visible on them, it's not like they can blend in like the infiltrator terminators do.

Finally it's the main assault on Cheyenne Mountain and you fight your way into the very core of the enemy's main base- blowing up everything in site. The hardest part being the attack on the central computer AI- the heart of Skynet which is apparently SO powerful that it is capable of mind control, a process that takes a few minutes while you work feverishly to cut off the computer's power source before it melts your guy's brain, thus ending the game.

So it's a pretty standard story line, except for the silliness of the hybrid part. There are plenty of weapons- grenades, rockets, plasma guns, machine guns, EMP weapons that stun robots for a few seconds- pretty basic stuff. The game offers a first person view, but as with any first-person console game, control is terrible and you're better off not using it except to look around at the scenery. One interesting function is Adrenaline- a function that makes you shoot faster and more accurately which enables you to take down baddies quicker than usual. It doesn't last long so it's best used wisely. Another problem is the Dino Crisis effect- opening doors just to get to another small area to open another door in order to get to another small area and, you guessed it, open another door. It gets old very fast.

While there are good concepts here, some nice graphics, the game almost seems crippled in places. Heck, you can't even walk off a ledge and kill yourself because the game won't allow it. But for the most part it seems to be a half-baked attempt to tell the same story that Bethesda Software did a decade ago with 'Terminator: 2029', a somewhat more entertaining game, if graphically inferior. Dawn of Fate manages to tell a fair story with repetitive game play- go there, do that, kill this- if you've played Star Wars: Bounty Hunter, you'll know what to expect. I'd be interested to see the Xbox version just to check if it at least has better graphics.

WOW!!! Terminator: Dawn of Fate is on of the best games for the PS2 console. Time: 2027 A.D. Place: Post-nuclear Los Angeles.Robots from missile defence systems get smart and take over the world. Play as one of three characters, including the star of the movie The Terminator. Use weapons like the AR50 machine pistols, SR70 plasma rifle, canister bombs, C4, plasma batons, etc. I haven't even beaten the first level, but this is a game not to be missed. Fight Endos, plasma frisbees, and the legandary T-800 assasin droid. The game acts as a prequal to the movie, so it helps to have seen it.

Action: *****
Stratigy: ***
Fun: *****
Difficuly: ****

If you don't have Terminator, buy it quick and don't miss out!

Terminator Dawn of fate is the first game I ever played when I first got my PS2. The moment I played it, I loved. Its so much fun. Sure the controlling is a bit hard, when once you get used to it, you'll have a great time playing the game. I do not know why this game has received many bad reviews; after all it's way better then the more recent Terminator 3- rise of the machines game. That game is just too hard, the controls are very complicated, it isn't very intense, and the back round music is horrible. In this one, the controls are simpler; you don't have to be in first person mode so you can see yourself. I find that to be better b/c when you're not in first person mode, you can run and roll on the ground to avoid being hit. When making a combination of running, rolling, and shooting with all the futuristic hi-tech weapons, the game becomes pretty intense. Also I love the rock music starts playing in the back round when you start to battle machines. And another great part of this game is the story line- the story of the game is basically going through all the events that led up to the original Terminator movie (1984). This game creates a back round story behind the terminator movies. All that was said from the terminator movies such as machines sending a terminator back through time, the war against the machines, terminator factories are things you finally get to see when you play this game. Plus this game also has even more things that were never shown or said in the terminator films such as their being a traitor, who sold out the humans, or that the humans knew of skynets plan to send a terminator back thru time, or the never before seen assassin machines that are only featured in this game and not in the movie. Although this game is good, it does have some cons-
- There are only 10 levels so it's a pretty short game.
- This game isn't fully accurate with the terminator films. In the original terminator movie, the character Kyle Reese said he had volunteered to go back through time to stop the terminator from killing Sarah Conner. According to this game, John Conner personally chose him to go through time and only told him about the mission shortly before he was sent through time.
- Some of the characters look nothing like how they did movies. Kyle Reese looks nothing like how he did in the original Terminator and this game also shows the Terminator who was supposed to be "Ah-nuld" going back through. That terminator looked absolutely nothing like Arnold, the makers deliberately made it look completely different. I do not know why they did that either, it could have been a way for "Ah-nuld" to have a cameo in the game.
- The camera angles for this game change almost every ten seconds as you move.
- Remember in the first movie, when the terminator kept going after Sarah even though it lost its surrounding human tissue, its arm, both of it legs? There is only one level where you keep fighting a terminator in the same situation. There should have been more times in the game where you keep battling a terminator like that b/c once just was not enough and it was pretty fun.
Other then that, this game is pretty awesome and I suggest you get whenever you have the chance.