Quick Look: The Terminator for iPhone
So how do you make a second rate iDracula clone and still have hopes of it selling well? You slap a bankable property on top of it, of course! That’s exactly what Big Head Games has done with The Terminator for the iPhone. When someone sets the standard for a certain type of game, such as iDracula did for free roaming two controller shooting games, the general goal should be to try and meet or exceed those standards, not lower the bar several notches.
The Terminator is a simple shooting game. Sure there’s a “story” mode with “objectives”, but the objectives are still along the lines of “destroy everything”, at least for the two levels I played. This wouldn’t have been so bad, execept each level consisted of walking towards the top of the screen, shooting one type of enemy until you finished the level. Even a bigger variety of foes per level might have made somewhat of a difference. In Quick Game you at least have the satisfaction of trying to rescue other freedom fighters, but that even gets old after a while, because you’re still facing off against only one kind of enemy.
Rescue The Resistance
The controls are either two on-screen joysticks (one for moving and one for firing) or a drag method of movement and firing. The drag method didn’t really do much for me at all, since most of the time I couldn’t seem to get my guy to fire instead of move. The virtual joystick mode was much better, but I found myself quite often unable to move because my thumb had slipped off the area where the movement joystick was rendered. In a high energy game such as this one, it’s not good having to worry all the time about not having good control over your movement.
Graphically The Terminator certainly paints a bleak vision of the future. Unfortunately, it appears that bleak also means drab. The graphics are small and detail isn’t that great. The power ups sometimes seem to blend into the ground. Because the weapons are so generic, the weapon effects are generic as well. The sound is actually pretty decent, and the music is good, though the in-game tune often sounds more like a horror soundtrack than something from a future sci-fi scenario.
If you’re a die hard Terminator fan, you might be able to overlook most of the game’s misgivings and be satisfied with the fact that you’re running around blowing up Terminators. For the rest of us, iDracula has much similar mechanics and is a whole lot more fun (you can check out why here).
Final Verdict: Not Recommended
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Tags: Action, Big Head Games, Eric Pankoke, iPhone, Quick Look, review, technobrains, The Terminator
