It has been a while since a Terminator game has been released on the consoles, but here comes Dawn of Fate to the Xbox. The game's plot serves as a prequel to the first movie; for those of you that want the see the future wars this game is for you. You play as one of three characters that swap at certain points in the game. All three characters control and play the same, they seem to only have different starting loadouts. This game has a high focus on action and it gives you plenty of ways to demolish your enemies. From dual pistols to rifles, shotguns, and grenade launchers. You even have a melee weapon, which seems out of place when fighting androids, but it is effective. This is one of few games that effectively combines melee and ranged combat. Ranged combat is very similar to old PlayStation games in that there is a target button to hold down and a fire button. You can switch to a first person mode to aim, but it is very ineffective. The game also gives you "bullet time" like that found in Max Payne called adrenaline. When adrenalized you move faster, shoot faster, and it goes into slow motion when pulling off melee attacks. At first it seems pointless, but later you will realize its advantages. What really hurts the game is it camera angles. Remember the static camera angles of Resident Evil? Now put them in a fast paced, 3D action game. Constantly when you step one direction you end up going the wrong way due to a camera change. What I don't get is some of the camera angles are ugly and obscure the enemies and objects. If the game had a follow the player camera like in Tomb Raider it would be an excellent action game, but alas. The game's graphics are not Xbox quality due the game also being on PlayStation 2, but they are not terrible. The game is also very short, only ten levels, I beat it in two days, with about a total playing time of no more than ten hours. The game does feature some great music and cinemas. You can unlock a ton of extras in this game, but it is annoying how you do it, each level you are awarded medals for doing things like being accurate and using adrenaline, if you get at least four you unlock something, but it is different on each difficulty. This forces you to play through the game a minium of three times assuming you get four medals on every level to unlock everything. On one level in particular it is hard to get all four. You can unlock concept art, threat data (enemy bios), cheats (what is with the trend of cheats being something you unlock?), movies, and the game's music which includes the last song recorded by Fear Factory. If it weren't for the game's Terminator licence it would probably disappear without anyone noticing, but the game still entertained me more than some recent popular games. One side note, the game's plot does not agree with the third Terminator movie, since it was released before T3.

Score: 6.9

Cabal