Reviews

By browsing through the trailers for this game, you'd be right to think it looks very impressive. After all, Salvation is a third-person shooter by GRIN, the makers of Wanted: Weapons of Fate, and is based on the recent Christian Bale movie.

So can this new game help lay to rest those dodgy memories of T2: The Arcade Game on the Mega Drive? Bizarrely, the answer is a resounding 'no'. In fact, we'd take the aforementioned Mega Drive classic over this pish any day.

Come with me if you want Xbox Live *groan*

Christian Bale is notably absent for one thing. Rose McGowan is mysteriously in, playing a brand new character called Angie. Okay, so at a glance the graphics and level design seem remarkably detailed and rich, but you only have to play for a few minutes to realise that despite the surface sheen and combat similarities to Wanted and Gears of War, Salvation is nowhere near as smooth or exciting to actually play.

The character animation is on a par with Thunderbirds in terms of poor lip-synch. Cut scenes also tend to jump the gun, so as you kill the last Terminator in a section and it explodes into flames, the next cut scene will pop up and then the game flicks back to the second half of the explosion, before moving on to the next stage.

Keep your head down, and your gun ready.

The apocalyptic city streets look great, but actually moving around with any degree of confidence is another kettle of fish. Like Wanted, you - John Conner - can switch cover at the touch of a button, but the gaps between walls/vehicles are often too far away to reach, the white icon is lost in the background glare and when firing from cover your bullets often just go into the wall you're hiding behind (a good way to kill yourself if you're using a rocket launcher!).

Then there's the problem of your team-mates Angie, Blair and later Barnes. If you attempt to take cover in the same place as them, the game can't handle it and sends you into a weird shudder state (during this, you're often not able to take cover and are left open to incoming fire). The same thing happens if they try to move next to you. Since the whole point of the combat missions is to outflank the Terminators and shoot their unprotected batteries from behind, moving past your own people proves unnecessarily troublesome.