Terminator: Dark Fate – Defiance (still not a review)

As promised, I decided to give Terminator: Dark Fate – Defiance another go, and right from the onset, I felt way more in tune with the gameplay and story. In other words, I was having fun, even on realistic, which is the hardest difficulty setting. On a side note, the reason I play on “realistic” is that I don’t enjoy it when games give me extra protection. In realistic mode, everyone takes the same amount of damage. It’s something of a pet peeve of mine. I even made a mod back in the day for Men of War: Assault Squad 2 since its difficulty slider was broken. In that game, your men are basically super soldiers from a Marvel movie, and if you increase the difficulty, which to be fair fixes the issue, the game starts to spam enemy tanks every ten seconds. Not so much fun. I fixed this in my mod by making equal and fair damage across the board for all units on lower difficulties. No bonuses and no spam! Anyway, back to Terminator.

Problems?
While the first couple of missions were great fun, and a real struggle to make it through alive, it felt fair and manageable with a minimum of save scumming. However, as soon as I reached the cartel mission in Chihuahua everything fell apart. What destroys this mission, and my brigade of robot killers is the extremely tough and part bullshitting expanded objectives that don’t feel reasonable at all. For example. After taking the initial main objective of capturing the “academy”, the game throws another mission your way almost instantly. What is funny here is that you were promised rebels would help you, but they die almost the moment they enter the map. The mission itself is time-based and gives you a measly 15 minutes to capture a couple of giant artillery pieces on a hill protected by the whole cartel army. If you don’t, it’s game over.

In my state, I just couldn’t do it, even if I picked up a couple of vehicles and was driving around in a decked-out M1 Abrams plasma tank. The road to the artillery is littered with RPG units that have perfect laser accuracy. The cartel must train their men really well, since they are all crackshots, while my men can’t hit the side of a barn from ten meters away when it comes to anti-tank weaponry. So, I lowered the difficulty to normal, just to see what would happen. I did manage to make it over there in time since this setting allows your tank to eat ATGM missiles for breakfast. Want to know what happens after that? Another damn impossible mission – even on normal. Suddenly, Legion (Skynet) shows up with high-tech helicopters with orders to evacuate the cartel leaders, and you must kill them before they escape. While dramatic, in the sense of storytelling, gameplay-wise it’s pure frustration.

I honestly don’t know how anyone finishes this mission without extreme save scumming. I don’t talk about this mission specifically only. I mean, how the players must play with this mentality in mind from the start with a lot of META knowledge to know what to do and what to bring to each fight. I can’t play any games like that, it’s the antithesis of fun in my opinion. My campaign has been totally stopped here since I can’t even make it to the cartel leaders on normal with my remaining forces. It’s a real bummer because I enjoyed Terminator: Dark Fate – Defiance up to this point. The losses were actually manageable if you were careful with your purchases on the strategic map, an aspect of the game I very much enjoyed. Save scumming to save every single unit would ruin the fun. 

Here is a short list of issues:

• LOS (line-of-sight) issues. Sometimes when you really want a missile to go off, the men just crawl around like goddamn idiots trying to see the vehicle you want to blow up. There is no way to determine if something is blocking their sight unless it’s a huge building.
•  You can’t merge units. I understand they have different skills and such, which wouldn’t work too well with this system. However, being able to do so would have been a blessing. Those 1 man-driver squads can’t man any weapons, only drive. I don’t get how teaming up to crew all weapons on a vehicle is such a foreign concept to my men.
•  An enemy with a recoilless rifle never misses. They will snipe you from 400 meters out, and often you can’t even see the projectile to determine direction. When my men use this weapon, they miss all the time, but when the enemy uses it – prepare to suffer. It’s worse than the ATGM launcher since you can actually protect yourself against that one with a smoke screen.
• Maps with endless spawning enemies. Sure, I give it to them when it concerns terminators since they will probably just mass-manufacture units to throw into the grinder. But when you fight a random group of bandits, and somehow they have an endless amount of vehicles and men to throw into the mix, it just makes no sense. This kind of attrition warfare does not work that well with the mechanics of the game, as the only one to suffer from this, is you, the player.
• Enemy units seem to have an endless supply of ammo. I hate this kind of stuff. Why? Luring someone to waste all his ammo is a viable tactic, but it can’t be used here.
• The difficulty setting is weird as hell. Why can’t I play with the normal amount of enemies with equal damage for both sides? I find it annoying that I have to pick “realistic” for this. However, this mode also provides the enemy with more units and makes the supply system harder. Please, create a “hurt-me-daddy” setting for the masochists, and let me pick realistic damage without the bonuses for the enemy.

I will probably give it another go soon, as I don’t like the feeling of wasting money, and I do think the core is fun. I just had to vent, because it was a long time since I was this frustrated with a game that I in general enjoy. As it is now, I have a hard time seeing myself finishing the game. But maybe one day. Overall, I find it just too punishing, and draining of my sanity.

Thanks for reading.

/Thomas

Update: A few hours later
Finally cleared the mission with a lucky arty shot that wasted all cartel leadership. Beyond lucky, because usually, my little arty cannon constantly misses, or does zero damage. However, the next map isn’t much better. While it starts rather okay, soon the tank spamming begins. The main problem here is that the enemy has infinite resources through scripting, so they don’t have to care about wasting soldiers and tanks. While yourself has to babysit early single unit of your own. Even one loss can spell doom, especially if it’s an upgraded unit. These are basically irreplaceable due to cost and veterancy. It just becomes a boring slog that feels unfair. It all boils down to save scumming, which is very tedious gameplay.

Update 2: Even later
Shame to the one that gives in. I figured out how to fix the difficulty setting, so you are not forced to play on “realistic” to get the full damage that goes both ways. I extracted the file that determines the rules for the different game modes. In that file, it was easy enough to change the numbers. I made it so every setting has the same kind of damage – 100% for both you and the enemy. This now means that I can play on “medium” to get the damage I want, without the AI getting a ton of bonuses in the form of extra units. It’s still hard as nails, but much more fun and manageable so far. It has fewer bullshit moments, in other words. If you want to try my little mod, you can find it here:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/17bRGULJCv2ngA1S3_5IA7hy6K2nNBAdX/view

It might look a bit weird but just press the download button. Then navigate to:

… Steam \ steamapps \ common \ Terminator Dark Fate – Defiance \ basis \ scripts

Place the file in the scripts catalog (create it, if it does not show). That’s all. Now, your game should have full damage, regardless of what setting you pick.