Terminator: Resistance - Part 2

We're back live, as it turns out that HKs aren't too bright. Their design is iconic and all, but I wonder about its efficiency. Seems like it consists of a lot of metal and resources to lug around just to snipe people from above. How do they not run out of fuel after one day?

Jennifer is fine AF...and stands like an android. She isn't a T-800, but the game designers accidentally made her this huge red herring.

Our next stop: Meet with Field Commander Baron, who replaced Captain Justin Perry as John Connor's right hand. Perry is of course Kyle Reese's commanding officer (or was). Don't expect to see Kyle in this game though.

Baron is...a lady, and she hates everything. Her and Jennifer immediately start sassing each other.

They talk about the new threat posed by T-800s with infiltrator skin. I just want to know how they got the skin in question. Actually, I probably don't want to know.

Wait a minute...those rifles look familiar. Kyle had one of those in the flash-forward to the bunker, I think. Those are plasma rifles!

I was really hoping to get one...and did. It only fires the less-potent red lasers, but it's still got the cool sound effect, and it still hurts T-800s. Takes a bunch of shots to take one down, even if you aim at the head, but it's something.

At this point I got the "kill your first T-800" trophy, because the game didn't count my earlier work manuevering them into traps and letting turrets dispatch them.

The second half of the game begins, and it's much more of a real war from this point out. You're reunited with the Resistance and ready for full-scale combat against squads of HK-Centurions. There'll be no more stealth sections, for better or worse...with one sort-of exception that I'll get to later.

One scary moment has you black out and wake up to a T-800 torso dragging itself directly towards you. Jesus.

Baron has John Connor on speed-dial, but we don't get to meet him yet.

Phased plasma in a 40-watt range? Sign me up.

I managed to pillage a plasma rifle from the Terminators earlier, and their rifles look a bit different from ours. I kinda prefer this one myself. These guns don't run out of ammo for a long time, at the cost of overheating if fired for too long. You can customize them with chips that enemies drop (which I have a ton of, as you can see). I focused on damage. The customization makes a huge difference in the capabilities of the weapon. You can have a weapon that does 50% more damage, or fires 50% faster, or can go 50% longer without overheating...or some combination of the above.

This bunker looks super-familiar. Not sure if it's the one from the flash-forward in the original movie.

T-808s wield heavy weapons and aren't very tough. They can be knocked over with a shotgun, or defeated by targeting their exploding backpack, and have very little HP compared to other terminators. They really should have just called these T-600s, because they look like them already. One nitpick I have about this game is that all of the enemy terminators are T-8XX even though it'd make a lot more sense to have some of them be T-600 or T-700.

Would have also been cool to see a few of the earlier models, like maybe a few T-400s or T-500s roaming around somewhere. Especially during the early point when you're using standard guns. Maybe the budget just wasn't there to create more enemies.

Even though Ryan is too old for this shit, he isn't too old for making anti-terminator knives. This thing has an electrical charge in it, and will completely shut down a T-800 if jammed into the base of their neck. It's a one-use insta-kill item, though you can craft more of them. It makes stealth gameplay a little more doable at this stage, though still unnecessary.

The next part has us taking pictures of Skynet rocket emplacements in Pasadena. There are a lot of optional objectives and things to do in this area, which is nice. I'm fine with slowing things down now that I've got lasers.

The T-47 is new to this game. It's basically a walking HK with chain guns. The first one you fight is an optional boss.

I managed to get a turret on it. This is on Extreme difficulty, where the enemies can easily chew you up if they get more than a couple good hits.

T-47 defeated. It'd be kinda cool if it were called something else, because it's hard to take it seriously when it sounds so archaic. It could have probably been a T-500, or an HK-Reaper, or something like that. The one interesting thing about it being a super-old model like T-47 is that it's possible it was created by humans in the lore, AKA a pre-Judgment Day machine. Which, looking at it, actually makes some sense. They never explicitly state as much in the game, though.

X-ray vision continues to be practically cheating, as I hear footsteps and notice that a T-800 followed me into a building I was exploring. Moments like this are why this game is a really fun time for Terminator fans.

Patrick (Jennifer's eerie little brother) has a house here with crayon art everywhere.

Here's New York City, with a zeppelin overhead ala Bioshock Infinite. These crayon drawings are unexpected poignant images among all the rubble.

Here's a note from a guy wondering why terminators need teeth. It's interesting how the game lore really fleshes out that people are fighting an inscrutable enemy. Only John Connor really knows what's going on. Machines are roaming the landscape, kidnapping people for unknown experiments, with no apparent purpose to any of it. Of course, it's all geared towards the construction of infiltrators.

Another interesting side-quest of sorts: This note was left by someone who went crazy, and couldn't find any way to open a door they found. The door that confounded them...

...leads to nothing. Here it is. It's a locked door that somehow hasn't been destroyed over the years.

Picking the lock on the door successfully and walking through the archway gets you a trophy. This game is easy to 100%. You get about 70% of the trophies just from playing through the game, and the rest are from side-activities like this that actually add something to the world. Going for 100% is recommended, especially to get a little more time out of a relatively short game. Also the reason I played on extreme difficulty.

The masked stranger reappears to let our heroes know that the infiltrator is back.

Here it is. They made these segments menacing, with the infiltrator stalking around. Bullets only slow it down and red lasers don't do much damage either.

After escaping from it for the second time...

More lore with Ryan, fleshing out (…) how people often didn't even know what they were looking at when they saw an early terminator. Then bam, it'd get them.

Baron hates humanity, so Rivers gets to be a therapist here and try to get her to see that they aren't all bad.

HE'S A MAN NOT A GOD

This is most likely a reference to Angry Joe's review of the Rambo game made by the same developers. Considering what a massive Terminator fan he is, I hope he got this far in the game.

You only get to man a turret a couple times in the entire game, but it's awesome when it happens. Almost feels like T2: The Arcade Game.

HK Aerials continue to not be much of a threat in this game. They take time to spot you and once they do their lasers seem pretty inaccurate. Without any weapons that can damage them at this point, I just have to lay low when they fly by.

After trudging through some ruined streets, we finally get a gander at...

...an HK tank. There it is. It's almost invisible in the distance here, and doesn't move. There are actually three of them in this shot, which means the Annihilation Line is here.

Soon after that I see this radio tower. Funny story about these. When I was a kid and saw these in real life, I thought they looked like HK tanks. So it was pretty zany to see one here.

Next up is what could be considered the big boss fight of the game. There isn't really a final boss, and the infiltrator is the closest thing to a real drawn-out war with a single foe.

Here's the actual battle. This thing is tough, and has a plasma gatling. Basically the strongest variety of T-800. You fight it in a number of stages as it gets progressively more battle-damaged. Might be the coolest part of the game. Incidentally, the fight with the T-800 infiltrator in Dawn of Fate might have been the best part of that game too.

That battle...was intense. Unfortunately things don't really get that intense again. You fight a couple more "T-850" infiltrators towards the end of the game, and by then you have purple lasers so they aren't anywhere near the beast that this one was.

After that we get a scene lifted directly from John Carpenter's The Thing, as the camera slowly pans past everyone looking at the charred corpse of the terminator. Did James Cameron write this game? Harlan Ellison knows a good lawyer, John.

They're bewildered by the fact that this terminator seems to have completely normal human hair/skin/blood despite being metal underneath. If the terminators can disguise themselves like this...they could be anybody. This means it's time for the Resistance to end the war as soon as possible.

TO BE CONCLUDED

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