iPhone App Reviews

The Terminator

Michael (Admin) | Jul 27, 2009 Games

User rating: (2 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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If there’s one thing I’ve learned from 30+ years of rotting my brain on video games it’s that killing robots is cool!! The Terminator is full of robots (duh!) and the object is to kill ‘em all while you meet certain objectives, so I’m not surprised that this is a pretty kickass game.

Big Head Games Ltd. partnered up with Dark Horse Comics to produce this app and they’ve done a mostly-great job of creating a game that fits in nicely with The Terminator’s 20-year gaming history. It comes with both a story mode and a “quick game” mode, and if you buy this app I’d recommend starting with the story as it’s a good way to get used to the controls and get a feel for moving around the often cluttered environments.

Story Mode moves your hero through a series of battlefields where your goal is to gain access to certain places and activate this and that, all in the name of eventually sparking the chain of events that will save John Connor’s ass in the 20th century. There are six stages in all, and the last stage actually feels like several stages in itself, so there’s tons of stuff to kill and lots of powerups to grab while you’re doing it.

The powerups usually come in the form of health, which you’ll desperately need when your health meter drops low enough to turn red, and ammo for the various guns you’ll upgrade to. Yeah, believe it or not, ammo is NOT unlimited! What a concept. It may seem hard to appreciate now if you’ve never played the game, but when you’re down to taking potshots with your pistol (which, incidentally, does have unlimited bullets), only then will you know the joy of coming across 100 rounds of ammo for your big bad Gatling Gun.

Powerups are awesome, and another nice touch is that Story Mode doesn’t force you to go back to square one when you croak. You may have multiple objectives to complete and if you eat it before completing them all you’ll get to start over at the last point in the mission where you actually accomplished something.

Quick Game mode is a lot like the early stages of Story Mode but your objective is to save people who are dying on the robot-ridden battlefield. Score enough points and you’ll get ranked globally, but unfortunately the global scoreboard only shows the top 5. Huh? Come on!!!! Losers like me could play for a million years and never make it to the top 5. At least let us page through the rankings!

So I guess that makes gripe #1, and thus we segue into gripe #2: controls. There’s a control option called “drag” which makes it easy to aim & shoot, but it tends to allow your thumbs to wander into some very inconvenient places that cover up the gameplay. The other control scheme, “joystick”, is more or less the same as drag but it keeps your fingers stationary – left thumb controls movement, and the right thumb shoots the gun. The only problem is that the shooting part isn’t all that reliable… even with Auto Target turned on, it can sometimes be tough to aim in the direction you want. Light Wars uses the very same control scheme and it’s awesome, so hopefully Big Head will be able to improve on this.

Outside of that, my only other complaint is that the game won’t defer to the iPod even when music and sound effects are turned off.

What I like is that there are three difficulty levels and overall The Terminator is a quality game with pro-level production values. Sound is great, graphics are great, and you can tell that a lot of nerds gave their all in developing this app. Personally I think Story Mode is the most engaging part of this kill-o-rama, but Quick Game is also a fun time waster. If you’re a fan of The Terminator franchise, and fan of shmupping, or both, you should feel good about plunking down $2 for this one.

iTunes Link
Version 1.2
Reviewed on iPhone 3G OS3.0

Looks like the demo player has the game set to Rookie!

Tags: $1.99, shmup