They're relaunching the Terminator franchise again. Didn't they learn anything from the last two attempts?
Whatever virtues Terminator Genysis (yuck) turns out to have, this iOS tie-in doesn't suggest anything bold or new.
In fact, in keeping with the film series' general theme, it's all just a case of history repeating.
Haven't I seen you before?Here we have another shallow movie tie-in, high on action, spectacle, and (especially) IAPS, but low on depth and content.
It presents a series of brief action snippets that play out like bite-sized shooting gallery rounds. Your grizzled resistance fighter dips out of cover to take out various gun-toting robots using a variety of weapons.
Those controls are a bit of a mess, with too many separate mechanics for such a simplistic point-and-shoot mechanic.
However, the gunplay itself is actually quite meaty, with a surprisingly distinctive heft to each weapon, whether it's the slow-loading short-range punch of a shotgun or the rapid fire rattle of a machine gun.
Just as you're warming up with this armoury, the levels end with a cheesy close-up of our generic lead.
Hasta la vista, babyThe brevity of the levels isn't the problem though. It's all the crap in between them.
You spend almost as much time scouring convoluted level and weapon select screens as you do reducing Arnie's robotic skeleton to scrap metal.
This drawn-out menu phase is there to extract currency out of you - or rather, currencies. There are three virtual currencies, and you'll soon need to spend money to buy more of the most valuable one.
Every other level, it seems, you need to spend one of these to upgrade one of your guns. The reasoning behind this seems thin, other than to make the game feel like less of a shallow grind. And to get you to pay up of course.
Terminator Genisys: Revolution isn't revolutionary. It doesn't break the cycle of bad movie tie-ins. It merely maintains the status quo, mechanically going through the motions. Same as it ever was.