Terminator Salvation

Why did Bionic Commando dev Grin close? Because of a "betrayal" by Square Enix, Grin founders Bo and Ulf Andersson claim.

The creators of Bionic Commando Rearmed, Wanted and Terminator: Salvation have opened a new studio and started work on a game it reckons will blow gamers' socks off.

UFC 2009: Undisputed remains champion of the UK chart for the week ending 30th May, despite plenty of big-name new entries.

I was in Canada last week, so unlike a lot of people in Europe faced with the possibility of buying the multi-format Terminator Salvation game this weekend, I've had the opportunity to see the film it's based on. I quite like it! John Connor listening to his mum's tapes is a bit Norman Bates, and the only quotable dialogue is the dialogue quoted from Terminators 1 and 2, but director McG appears to have mastered glossy, FX-heavy set-pieces, if not deed polls. Sadly the same cannot be said for GRIN with the videogame adaptation.

Thrown into the raggedy boots of John Connor (but not Christian Bale), you're tasked with leading a group of resistance fighters across post-nuclear Los Angeles two years before the events of the film, and for the most part it's a cover-and-flank third-person shooter with its probing red eyes fixed on Gears of War's coat-tails. You clip yourself to cover, go into iron sights with the left trigger and let rip with the right, occasionally tossing the odd grenade or pipe-bomb at spider bots, flying aerostats "wasps" and more elaborate Terminators with miniguns and worse.

Unfortunately Salvation is horribly shoddy from the very beginning. For the game of a film ostensibly concerned with making the difference between humans and machines count, it's ironic that your NPC allies are noticeably artificial and robotic in their movements, while environments - though detailed - are scabby on account of the scarcity of proper lighting, not to mention book-ended by load screens that sometimes feel as though they last longer than the battles in-between. In-engine cut-scenes launch themselves in a judder that occasionally has you wondering whether the game has crashed. On one occasion, I took out a flying Hunter-Killer, which started to blow up only to be interrupted by the subsequent cut-scene, which then deposited me back on the rooftop for another couple of frames of the HK explosion before it went to the load-screen for the next level.

Read more

Evolved Games has issued a total recall of Terminator: Salvation on PC across the US, as there was a "defect that occurred during replication" of the software.

Warner Bros. plans to make a game tie-in for the brand new Terminator Salvation film.