This game is more immersive and fun than anything I've played from AAA studios in a long time. It absolutely nails the atmosphere and the menacing look of the Machines, writing is decent to good for the most part, and exploring the city rubble while avoiding (or hunting, depending on your weaponry and confidence) Terminators is enjoyable. It actually reminded me of a scaled down version of modern Fallout games at times, except with less jank and better atmosphere and combat. A few things could've used a bit more work though. On hard difficulty ammo and medkits were abundant enough that I never used the crafting system and never spent skill points on it until there was no other place to put them. That lack of resource scarcity coupled with a rather powerful plasma sniper rifle you find in your very first mission for the Resistance if you explore just a little did take away from the tension, which is a shame because generally speaking the game does a good job of conveying how outmatched a human with conventional fire arms is against even a single basic T-800. The skill system as a whole could definitely be fleshed out, most skills either act as a gatekeeper for which weapons you can use or which level of locks/terminals you can pick/hack and others are minor quality of life improvements that are never truly needed. AI is pretty bad unfortunately. Granted many of Skynet's decisions and designs in the franchise as a whole are quite dubious, but this is probably the one part of the game that felt noticeably underdeveloped. Machines don't seem to alert one another when they have detected you or communicate at all for that matter, and Terminators will happily march single file into the line of fire of a turret you hacked, each of them responding with surprise when it kills them one by one. Apart from the AI nothing about this game is outright bad and most of it is pretty awesome. A must play if you like the first two movies, still highly recommended for everyone else.
This game looks, plays and sounds like a mobile port because that's what it is, with very basic graphics, huge icons, uninteresting character progression (mostly +1% to this or that type deals), and a bunch of cosmetic items that are so exorbitantly priced I guess they cost actual money in the android version. There's really not much to say about this game. There's no shortage of games that do what it does but better, most of which also look better, so you can safely ignore this one and miss absolutely nothing.
In a nutshell: Ion Fury has a nice colourful artstyle, great sound and music, very satisfying weaponry, and awesome level design. If you have any love for old school shooters (particularly Build engine games like Blood, Duke3d, Shadow Warrior), you owe it to yourself to play this. It's a blast from beginning to end.
Possibly the best game on this engine, overhauled to be as close to the original as possible but with modern creature comforts like proper controls with mouselook, crisper graphics etc. Brutally difficult by today's standards but a whole lot of fun. I noticed one review mentioning there's no quicksave feature; there is. Quicksave and load are bound to F2 and F3 respectively. Be aware there's no autosave feature however, so be sure to save when you enter a new level because there's no "pistol start" option meaning that if you die (and you will be doing a lot of that) you will have to load a saved game.
It looks cool but movement is painfully slow and combat is so dull it makes me wonder if it wasn't added as an afterthought late in the game's development.
The gameplay is solid and customising 'mechs with seemingly illogical weapon loadouts is always fun. What isn't fun is sitting around waiting for the game to allow you to do something, and this game absolutely revels in doing exactly that. This sounds like an odd complaint in a turn-based tactics game, but I'm not talking about the combat. Allow me to explain: Usually you'll only do about two contracts in a star system before moving on to the next. Travelling to another system typically takes 20+ in-game days, each of which takes more than a real-time second. You can't do anything during this time; if you want to check the store, your 'mech bay, 'mech pilots or whatever, time will pause until you're done. There's also some short but unskippable cutscenes every time you approach the jump ship taking you to another system, and when you reach orbit of whichever planet you were heading for, further adding to the amount of time the player spends waiting. There's absolutely no reason for inter-system travel to take this long. The game itself is great but I suspect I'll have spent several hours in total staring at my screen twiddling my thumbs by the time I finish it. I like Hare-brained Schemes' TBT games and the Battletech universe, and this game could've easily been 4, possibly 5 stars to me but the amount of time this game is happy to waste is completely unacceptable.
