The open-world survival game Terminator finally has a proper title and an early access release date: It's called Terminator: Survivors and it's coming to Steam on October 24th.
Terminator: Survivors may not be the most original title ever, but it gets the point across: the new game is set in 2009, after the events of Judgment Day, August 29, 1997, when the machines decided they'd just had enough our crap and unleashed Armageddon on us. Fair play, really – we wanted to go with them first, they were just quicker at the draw.
It also takes place in the time before John Connor launched the human resistance movement, which means it's all a bit of a jack-of-all-trades: players have to deal with threats posed by both other humans and machines – in fact, you won't even be aware of Skynet's existence at first, although “it's something you'll quickly discover,” said Marco Ponte, CEO and creative director of Nacon Studio Milan, during today's Nacon Connect showcase . Eventually, you'll team up with other survivors and “discover the truth about the ongoing conflict as you prepare to fight back.”
The game will be playable in solo or co-op mode, with “base management elements” and FPS combat, but it sounds like the famous T-800 Terminators seen in the trailer will be fairly rare : Nacon rather mentioned “Skynet’s machines”. more than once in the announcement and during today's presentation, but the Terminator itself is always described individually. What would make sense: A Terminator roaming around somewhere can bring real tension to the moment-to-moment survival action, but you have to deal with a whole squad of them while you're still at the point of looking for dirty gas and other things looking for rat meat doesn't sound like much fun at all. It's not good to exaggerate these things.
I'm not a huge fan of licensed games, but this isn't the worst idea for a survival game I've ever heard. Whether Nacon will pull this off remains to be seen, but I recently got around to playing the 2019 shooter Terminator: Resistance, and it was much better than I expected. While my expectations were low, it was still a really good shooter, and if Terminator: Survivors can work the same magic, it could prove to be a real contender in the crowded survival genre.
We'll find out soon enough. Terminator: Survivors starts in Early Access on steam on October 24th and will follow “at a later date” on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S. You can watch Nacon Connection's full presentation below.
