Introduction
Terminator 2 holds a special place in my memories and an RTS set in the universe definitely piqued my interest. Unfortunately, Terminator: Dark Fate – Defiance is set in arguably the worst timeline of the Terminator movies, which is saying something for a franchise that revolves around an AI blowing up the world and trying to exterminate humanity. The 2019 movie brought back Sarah Connor and T-800 in an attempt to clear the way for the franchise to reboot. This new timeline doesn’t have Skynet or Cyberdyne Systems, but Judgement Day happens all the same. In some ways it makes sense for Defiance to use this timeline as its setting. The story doesn’t have to stick to John Connor or time travel and the players aren’t as well defined so there’s more room to chart a new course with the IP. However, it does make the story and game itself feel less “grounded” and disconnected from the Terminator I grew up with. Despite the shaky ground to build a story on, the question is how good is the game Slitherine built?
Overview
If you are a fan of Warfare or Syrian Warfare by developers Cats Who Play, Defiance will be quite familiar. The game utilizes an updated version of the engine that powered those two games and, save for the post-apocalyptic setting, could almost be mistaken for one of them. It’s a similar model used with Battlestar Galactica: Deadlock where a lesser known game with a solid base is used to drive a game based on a well known IP.
Defiance provides players with a choice of a set of story driven missions, skirmish maps, or multiplayer engagements where you’ll command a small number of units to achieve an ever-evolving set of objectives. The game prides itself on the level of detail of the simulation. Vehicles need crew to function and damage is modeled based on armor and the location of the hit. You’ll see reloading mechanisms degrade, weapons get knocked out, and vehicles become immobilized. Take too much damage and you may see your crew suffer casualties, especially if you don’t button up under fire. By the same token, your crew can hop out and affect field repairs to damaged systems to bring weapons back on line or get you moving again if you can keep them out of the line of fire long enough.
Units have limited ammunition so careful management of your engagements is necessary, as is ensuring you have a means of resupply during the course of a mission. Nothing is worse than running out of anti-armor weapons while a Legion Tank is charging your position! These infantry resupply operations can be a bit fiddly if you don’t have access to a resupply vehicle because you have to load your squad up to top them off from a transport if there’s ammo available there.
You’ll have access to a full range of units to field with each of the three major factions, Founders, Movement, and Legion. Founders focuses on modern US armor like Strykers, HMMWV, and Abrams tanks with a wider variety of weapons and upgrades. Movement has technicals, mobile emplacements, and armored semi trucks while Legion brings walkers, terminators, and HK’s to the field. There’s nothing quite like trying to locate and destroy a Legion artillery piece that’s hammering your position while dodging fire to get to the enemy rear to take it out with a HMMWV.
The battlefields in Defiance tend to have a lot of buildings available for your infantry to utilize as impromptu fortifications. These are divided into light, medium, and heavy cover which determines how hard it is to destroy the building and how well your troops are shielded from enemy fire. It’s cool to watch your squad run into a building, then snake around and up stairs to take up firing positions. While in a building you can order your forces to take positions facing out from different sides of the building to target enemies attacking from different directions. Attacking these structures can be a time consuming process but you do have the option to assault the building and take out any enemies in close quarters combat. On paper, there’s a lot to like but it really comes down to how this plays out in the course of the game.
No Fate But What We Make
There are three game modes available in Defiance, the single player campaign, skirmishes, and multiplayer. I wasn’t able to try multiplayer with the press release I was given. The option was there but it was quite lonely, which might be fitting for the setting! Multiplayer, however, used the same maps available for skirmish but had the added option for 2v2 play. The single player campaign unfolds through a series of semi-scripted missions. Each mission starts with a fairly simple objective, but these often shift and expand over the course of the mission. Which objectives you accomplish, and which units survive, will impact aspects of later missions which is a nice touch. Early missions function as a tutorial and provide you with access to only a few units at a time with no agency over your force composition. As the game progresses, you are given access to a world map which also provides access to the management of your fledgling army.
Army management is a mini-game of its own within Defiance. Every unit in your army consumes a set amount of supplies per day so, the larger your force is, the more quickly it runs out of supplies. This serves to limit how many units you can have, but it also tends to encourage you to grab anything that’s not nailed down on the battlefield because you can disband units and vehicles you don’t want to get back resources.
You’ll have three primary resources at your disposal. Goodwill Points are used to purchase upgrades, vehicles, and equipment at various towns as well hire people to build your manpower pool. Manpower is used to replenish units that have taken casualties in combat. Finally, Supply is used to swap out upgrades and weapons, repair or refuel your vehicles, and replenish ammo stores. Each of your units will gain experience over the course of the game which will allow you to unlock specific upgrade slots for the unit. These upgrades cost Goodwill and I found that units could die quickly and erase expensive upgrades if they were caught in a bad spot. But it was cool to be able to customize your units to your style of play.
I found the campaign missions themselves to be somewhat frustrating because of what I felt were “gotcha” moments. For example, early in the campaign you are allowed to exit the battlefield to avoid a fight. Moving to the exit point dutifully despawned each of my units only for the timer to continue and a new objective appeared to rescue some civilians, except that I had no units left to accomplish this! It would have been much better if my units had despawned only if they were at the exit point when the timer expired so I would have been able to move to help the civilians.
A second example relates to another early mission where you are warned not to enter a specific area of the map owned by a sect called the Integrators. In the course of the mission, one of my units accidentally entered the forbidden region on its way to another location resulting in a set of fairly powerful units suddenly becoming hostile. In several other missions, the game required me to manually move all units to a determined exit point even after the mission was “won” and no enemy units remained. This felt like it added an unnecessary step to finishing the mission and an option to just end immediately would have been appreciated. Overall I didn’t find the campaign missions to be fun and the AI seemed a bit dense as it sent units into prepared defensive positions over and over again. The story begs some questions about how effective Legion is in this timeline, with large scale Founder bases hiding for extended periods of time without any obvious camouflage, a relatively small number of units destroyed shifting the course of major battles, or Founders fielding sizable numbers of advanced weapons and modern US armor just ten years after Legion “won”.
Despite my frustrations with the campaign, I found skirmishes to be quite exhilarating. It’s unfortunate that the version I reviewed only had four maps to play against a single adversary. I would have loved to see more maps, especially given the variety of maps in the campaign, and a more robust system to allow 2v2 skirmishes as well. Each map has a predefined victory condition of Domination or Assault and a time limit for the map. Domination maps have a number of control points that you must capture and defend, the winning side controlling the most points when the mission timer reaches the set limit. At the start of the mission you are given slots for a small number of light vehicles and infantry and a certain number of command points to purchase your initial force. Unfortunately there’s no real customization or veternancy here, but many of the units will have certain upgrades pre-selected to add variety. From here, each side spawns and attempts to capture points and fortify them against enemy incursions.
Periodically, a certain number of command points are added to your pool allowing you to call in reserves to replace losses or increase the size of your force. As the match progresses, the unit slots begin to allow higher tier units, each time command points are added, culminating in artillery and heavy armor slots. It’s a fun system and one that lets the tempo build up, keeping the match interesting up until the end as you balance defense and offense between each command point refresh. It also prevents you from hoarding points since the limited slots can keep you from deploying as many units as you might like, especially since crew needed for vehicles takes one of your infantry slots.
The single Assault mission was a rehash of the defense of the founder base Haven from the campaign and limits you to Founders versus Legion, with Legion assaulting. It would have been nice to have options for other factions as well. As the defender, your only primary objective is that you hold the reactor. You also start with a default set of units scattered through the base to hold each of the objective points. Over time, additional reserves can be brought in to reinforce your defense from two separate points. Of the two mission types, I found this to be less interesting but still a welcome change from Domination.
Legion Must Be Sleeping
I would be remiss if I didn’t talk a little about how the AI performs. While the particulars of the map and prepositioned forces would create a challenge for me and my rag-tag band of troops in the campaign, the actual function of the AI felt very basic. AI units tended to move straight for the player positions from their entry points or along paths that were predetermined. In skirmish missions, it also felt like the AI mostly just came at your positions with little regard for how to breach defenses. I never saw flanking attacks or units withdrawing to repair or even scouting to see if a control point was undefended. The AI would simply spawn their units and march them toward the closest control point hoping to overwhelm your defenses. It’s unfortunate, given the detail available to human players to select defensive facing and maneuver armor in some of the dense urban maps. It’s a level of fine control the AI never comes close to imitating in a convincing way.
Judgement Day
So where does this leave Terminator: Dark Fate – Defiance? On its own, the campaign tries too hard to make itself meaningful. It is chock full of interesting ideas but was ultimately more fiddly than I felt it was worth. I think the game lost sight of what is fun, in an effort to add depth to the story, by offering relatively simple tactical scenarios with ever increasing story objectives. Unfortunately, this is exacerbated by the lackluster AI and results in poor mission pacing. On the other hand, the skirmish mode is excellent but the lack of ability to customize your units feels like a significant omission in the game’s best mode. I’d have loved the ability to create a customized army to use in skirmish, spending points to add veterancy, include upgrades, and so on.
Further, the limited number of maps is likely to reduce replay value because missions tend to play out with heavily fortified points becoming almost impossible for the uninspiring AI to crack. Facing off against a human will significantly amp up the difficulty and excitement of the Domination style maps, hopefully increasing the longevity with multiplayer matches. Finally, despite the level of detail present in the damage modeling, particularly of vehicles, it felt like it had little impact because of how quickly most vehicles could be destroyed even with basic weapons.
In my time with the game I swung between frustrated, exhilarated, and disappointed. It’s hard to recommend Defiance in the current state but, if updates include additional maps, improvements to the AI, and better balance, it could become a worthy addition to the Terminator universe in spite of the Dark Fate timeline. In the meantime, at least I can hear echoes of T2’s iconic music promising what could be as I contemplate starting another skirmish.
Aaron is also known as Vaaish on our Discord and in other 4X game and strategy communities. He enjoys strategy games, table top wargames like BFG and Epic, and debating UI patterns.