Terminator: Dark Fate - Defiance Review

29.02.2024 - 06:01 / ign.com

Some of the coolest bits in the Terminator series, and definitely the source of its best video games, are the future war parts. Terminator: Dark Fate - Defiance is an RTS that tries to follow in those robotic footsteps, spinning off of the most recent movie to put you in the boots of a military officer facing down the killer machines in the months after the nukes fall. Unfortunately, trying to combine that future war fantasy with a gritty real-time tactics formula falls short here, largely because the way your units fight and the campaign built around them feel like they were designed for two entirely different games.

The meat of Defiance is a series of story-driven battles, with army management in between, set in the post-Judgment Day United States and Northern Mexico that has you fighting against Legion, the Dark Fate timeline's equivalent of Skynet. The characters are mostly stereotypes with a few entertainingly hammy voices, while the story of your cut-off unit of military "Founders" attempting to fight alongside a local paramilitary resistance – hindered by local warlords and robotic collaborationists along the way – does the job well enough in that it (mostly) doesn't get in the way of the cool RTS battles you’re really here for.

The battles themselves are realistic, detailed, and deadly. Soldiers can and do get picked off by stray bullets or explosions, or barely survive what should have killed them. It's definitely modern warfare, so large numbers and logistics rule the battlefield. Every unit tracks and requires specific types of ammunition, as well as fuel and spare parts for vehicles, all of which is depleted as you fight and has to be rearmed by supply trucks. It's the kind of realism that a good real-time tactics game is built on.

Battling the machines can be great, too. They fight like you expect: plodding, aggressive enemies that charge into danger with no heed for their own survival. But they're tough, and numerous, so you have to deploy your units wisely and outmaneuver them to win. Most of Legion's forces are low-grade homunculus soldiers or armored vehicles, but when proper Terminators show up it's always pretty exciting as things quickly get hairy.

The infantry combat is neat, but it’s made odd because of one badly-balanced detail: Fighting in buildings is super cool, with units moving through the interiors to use windows and roofs as firing points, but cover outside of buildings is very hard to judge and finicky to use. Though you can manually pick when your troops go prone, you can't tell them to take up positions behind walls or barricades other than by moving them close and hoping they automatically take the hint. There are no visual indicators for what kind of cover they are