Remember movie tie-in games?
See, kids, back before whatever big movie at the moment decided to just cross over with Fortnite and call it a day, poor, unfortunate souls would have to toil away at a full-priced video game rushed out the door to coincide with a movie's release.
Sometimes, this gave us some real gems, like The Chronicles Of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay, Peter Jackson's King Kong, and X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Mostly, though? They were terrible. The "tie-in game" was a mark of shame of the gaming industry for decades, until AAA game development became too expensive to merit making them.
But it looks like one brave studio is willing to step up to the plate and take a crack at it in 2019. Reef Entertainment has debuted their trailer for Terminator: Resistance, a first-person shooter that comes out this year. As in, "in less than three months."
The game puts players in the role of Jacob Rivers, a low-ranked member of John Connor's resistance in post-Judgement Day Los Angeles. Despite being a relatively insignificant member of the war effort, Jacob is nevertheless marked for termination by Skynet, and forced to fight for his life against an onslaught of the franchise's signature death machines. As the plot progresses, it seems like Jacob will have to contend with the fact that he's actually a super important person for some reason.
From the look of it, the game will be a pretty straightforward first-person shooter, although the game's official website promises stealth options as well. There will also apparently be a leveling mechanic of some sort, and a morality system that will factor into what ending you wind up getting. It sounds weirdly ambitious for a tie-in game announced out of left field, two months before released, but definitely intriguing.
It's a bit of surprising news, considering the high profile nature of Terminator's recent video game endeavors, which have included tie-ins with Gears 5, Mortal Kombat 11, and Ghost Recon: Breakpoint. For the game license to be handed over to a relatively mid-tier developer and get a standalone, physical release at such short notice is... odd, to say the very least.
Still, it's been a decade since the franchise's last proper video game outing - 2009's maligned Terminator Salvation. While there are plenty of red flags here, primarily the developer's involvement in the notorious Rambo: The Video Game, Terminator: Resistance sounds really promising on paper and the trailer is definitely compelling. Plus, these sorts of "AA" video game productions are few and far between these days, so it's definitely interesting to see the game in the hands of somebody other than a big-name publisher.
At the very least, this Terminator fangirl will be checking it out when it drops December 3.