Terminator Salvation

John Connor. Who is he? In the original Terminator (1984), he was the messiah we never saw — the unborn son of a time traveler and a waitress. In the next two films, he was a boy in his teens and twenties, rebelling against his terrifying destiny as the savior of humanity.

It’s weird to see a franchise in two places at once; it’s happened with Superman and Smallville, and now another blockbuster brand is doing it. Even as TV’s The Sarah Connor Chronicles depicts an angry John struggling through his high-school years, the upcoming Terminator Salvation will show theatergoers the hero we’ve always known he’d become — the thirtysomething badass who rises to leadership in the war against the machines. It’s the huge, futuristic battles we’ve been waiting for, with actor extraordinaire Christian Bale playing John. Can we get a videogame already?

Regrettably, Bale isn’t signed for the Salvation game, but you will play as John, in a campaign that doesn’t just re-enact the film. Instead, it’s set two years earlier, in 2016, showing you the backstory of how Connor met two of the movie’s key characters: Blair Williams and Barnes (who will be voiced by cinematic counterparts Moon Bloodgood and Common, respectively). As the intro quickly establishes, you’re in a post-apocalyptic Los Angeles that’s been devastated by Skynet’s global assault. You and fellow resistance member Williams are ordered to an evac point in downtown L.A., but when you learn of allies stuck behind enemy lines, you make the dangerous choice to go help them.

In this opening scenario and a few others, our demo showed Connor and Williams fighting various foes from the movie, including flying Hunter-Killers, hovering Aerostats, machinegun-loaded Spiders, and T-600s — the freakishly large, humanoid-shaped predecessors of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s T-800. Another enemy — the minigun-toting T-70 — is exclusive to the game. You’ll have plenty of weapons, but it’s the near future, so expect conventional munitions: shotguns, machineguns, rocket launchers, and grenades are how you’ll rage against the machines.

You’re outgunned, but luckily, you have strategy on your side. As in Gears of War, cover is a key game mechanic, and you’ll use the D-pad to dive behind cover in any direction. Much of it will be destructible, so you’ll need to keep moving — something that your A.I. companions will motivate you to do. You don’t control them, but they’ll actively prompt you to flank enemies, attack certain targets, and so on. Williams is with you the whole game, and she’s the character that a buddy controls in co-op play; you’ll meet Barnes a third of the way into the game, and before long, he’s part of your growing resistance group.

Normally, we’re a bit wary of railed sequences, but we watched several that evoked the big-battle feeling of the series’ war-torn future. In one, John’s manning a mounted gun in a jeep chased by Hunter-Killers. Screaming past charred palm trees and burning down empty streets, you reach the safety of a tunnel full of wrecked cars — at which point a hulking T-600 commandeers a van and races after you. Another segment puts you in a train pursued by “Moto-Terminators” — rolling, gun-wielding robots that you’ll see in the movie — and you fend them off with rocket launchers. Terminate this!

Much of what we saw appealed to our Terminator lust, but as gamers, we couldn’t help wondering: Where’s the hook? Like the universe it captures, Salvation seems stark, gritty, muted, almost minimalist — yet pretty conventional, too, without many unique features to really distinguish the game in a crowded shooter market. Hopefully, the all-new story will flesh out the film in an interesting way, and we’ll get the blistering action sequences we’ve come to expect from the movies.