Some of the coolest bits in the Terminator series, and definitely the source of its best video games, are the future war parts. Terminator: Dark Fate - Defiance is an RTS that tries to follow in those robotic footsteps, spinning off of the most recent movie to put you in the boots of a military officer facing down the killer machines in the months after the nukes fall. Unfortunately, trying to combine that future war fantasy with a gritty real-time tactics formula falls short here, largely because the way your units fight and the campaign built around them feel like they were designed for two entirely different games.
The meat of Defiance is a series of story-driven battles, with army management in between, set in the post-Judgment Day United States and Northern Mexico that has you fighting against Legion, the Dark Fate timeline's equivalent of Skynet. The characters are mostly stereotypes with a few entertainingly hammy voices, while the story of your cut-off unit of military "Founders" attempting to fight alongside a local paramilitary resistance – hindered by local warlords and robotic collaborationists along the way – does the job well enough in that it (mostly) doesn't get in the way of the cool RTS battles you’re really here for.
The battles themselves are realistic, detailed, and deadly. Soldiers can and do get picked off by stray bullets or explosions, or barely survive what should have killed them. It's definitely modern warfare, so large numbers and logistics rule the battlefield. Every unit tracks and requires specific types of ammunition, as well as fuel and spare parts for vehicles, all of which is depleted as you fight and has to be rearmed by supply trucks. It's the kind of realism that a good real-time tactics game is built on.
Battling the machines can be great, too. They fight like you expect: plodding, aggressive enemies that charge into danger with no heed for their own survival. But they're tough, and numerous, so you have to deploy your units wisely and outmaneuver them to win. Most of Legion's forces are low-grade homunculus soldiers or armored vehicles, but when proper Terminators show up it's always pretty exciting as things quickly get hairy.
The infantry combat is neat, but it’s made odd because of one badly-balanced detail: Fighting in buildings is super cool, with units moving through the interiors to use windows and roofs as firing points, but cover outside of buildings is very hard to judge and finicky to use. Though you can manually pick when your troops go prone, you can't tell them to take up positions behind walls or barricades other than by moving them close and hoping they automatically take the hint. There are no visual indicators for what kind of cover they are getting or what their line of sight is like, either, which is vital stuff in this kind of tactics game.
Leading infantry can still be amusing when you’re on up-close assaults of occupied structures at least, but armored combat doesn't fare quite as well, sadly. Vehicles are admittedly fun to use, with chunky movement and minute interactions: They can be disabled in a variety of ways, from crew loss and armor degradation to destroyed weapons or mobility kills from losing tracks and wheels – they can even catch on fire, requiring the crew to bail out and then recover them later. That punishing detail could have been awesome in a game where the enemy is playing by the same rules as you, but Defiance’s battles aren't actually built that way.
Even when I tested the lowest difficulty, the damage reduction it provided my troops wasn't enough to let an RTS veteran like me win with ease. That’s because the battles aren't strategic military exercises as much as they are trial and error puzzles, where everything has to go precisely your way in order to succeed. You rarely have enough troops to get the job done, and mid-mission replacements for your soldiers don't exist: You lose a guy because you were anything less than perfectly attentive with your micromanagement? He's gone, period.
That's an interesting limitation to work around in the abstract, but the mission design just doesn't support it. If that lost guy was the one rocket trooper you needed to destroy an enemy tank at the end of the level, well, I hope you quicksaved some time before he died. You have to hit those important few shots, you have to move in just the right way, and you have to go fast enough or you will run out of ammunition against the waves of bad guys coming at you, because those rules are only for you. The enemy has fresh guys – and therefore bullets – forever.
I think I would feel better about that if Legion were actually the ones deploying absurd amounts of troops and forcing you into grinding, brutal battles against overwhelming numbers – at least that would be on point thematically. Except it's not Legion. The hardest and most frustrating missions are against other human factions, whose infantry are better at taking cover and therefore far harder to kill than the actual Terminators, and whose units come in the same seemingly-infinite stream.
Finishing Defiance on higher difficulties requires either silly luck or constant save scumming as you figure out the precise tricks and order of operations developer Slitherine intended you to do in its levels, which only seem open in their designs. Many of them have several routes through, but there are no strategic tradeoffs to decide between: One of those routes is always the optimal one.
I can understand, even enjoy, when an RTS mission is so hard I have to reload it a few times. But when the mission time is an hour and I've instead spent two or three because I've had to reload a save so many times thanks to pure random numbers? That's no fun. Stuff like whether or not a unit decided to throw a grenade or bothered to get into cover shouldn’t be what the entire mission hinges on, and it's vile to realize you lost 30 minutes ago without knowing because you wasted ammunition in what was apparently an unnecessary skirmish – let alone because you took losses from spawned-in traps that are impossible to see, or preprogrammed fights that teleport your units into an uncontrollable position because you moved one guy a little too close to an invisible trigger.
Defiance wants to be a real-time tactics wargame in the vein of Men of War or Ground Control, and at its best it absolutely did remind me of those series, but remind me is all it did. Remind me that, yes, this genre can be excellent and, no, this isn't it. The moment to moment tactics here can and do feel fun sometimes – this is, for example, the only game I know of where you can obliterate a bunch of Terminators with a HIMARS strike. That’s just ruined when you have to reload and repeat it four or five times.
Between missions you can tweak, upgrade, replenish, and refit your units at the cost of a few different currencies. This would be a cool system if there were much more than the straightforward story missions on offer, such as procedural missions or side missions to let you bulk up and resupply between the main bouts. But there’s nothing like that, making it feel like it was meant for a structure more like XCOM’s, not a nearly-linear campaign that took me around 30 hours to complete.
In this context, army-building and management is a waste of your time full of false choices. I say that because not only are there obvious best units to use, but you also have to meet a certain supply requirement to move from mission to mission, which means that no matter how many cool new guys you recruit or vehicles you steal mid-mission you'll end up disbanding most of them so that you have enough resources to make it to the next one. Not only that, when you do make it to a mission, you have a set number of deployment slots to put your units in. There's no reason not to dump every resource you have into upgrading a smaller force because there's no guarantee you could even bring a bigger one along if you somehow got it where you were going.
That’s not to mention that this campaign has hands-down one of the absolute worst, highly-scripted, extremely boxed-in "story-driven" missions I have ever played in an RTS campaign. Seriously. Screw Nuevo Tortuga: It literally contains a vital fight sequence where you're not allowed to control your units.
Defiance also has multiplayer and single-player skirmishes, which are serviceable enough modes dedicated to point capture and hold. They use a nice little point-based system to call in your units that lets you customize your army as it gradually scales up over time, letting you bring in heavier and heavier units. It also rules that you can play as Legion, deploying plodding Terminators and hunter-killer machines that use very different tactics than the human factions. Unfortunately these skirmishes have a huge flaw: There are only four maps. RTS multiplayer lives or dies on map variety, and four just ain't enough to keep me coming back.
