Terminator: Dark Fate - Defiance | Worth Your Time and Money (Review) 

As I saw in another reviews comments, the franchise includes time travel, so you could look at the save scum is the implementing of time travel to fix a mistake to prevent a tragedy.

This is the type of game that will force you to learn and accept how it works, a true evolution in RTS and blows anyone else on the sideways tbf

As a man who has spent nigh on 40+ hours save scumming my way through the campaign, making sure to capture and extract 90% of the non-terminator vehicles I come across..(I left the cartel infiltration mission with 5-6 cartel tanks), while it does make the next couple missions easier, not only does the logistics system come back to bite me in the ass every single mission, but the task of having 4 Abrams tanks and 7 Bradley’s, figuring out where they should be and telling them what to do gets to be daunting. It makes me want to go back and do another run where I have as few units as possible, scrapping by for every mission

If you're trying this game or about to try it, I would recommend you to go through these games, 'GFI Warfare', 'Warfare Reloaded' and then 'Syrian Warfare'. These games are hard af but you will learn the core mechanics of this game from beginning and start to enjoy and appreciate this genre of RTS. This Terminator is a mix between Soldiers of Anarchy, Men of War and the games, I mentioned above. It's fucking hard but I'm loving it. These games on the hardest difficulty, can be recalled as Dark Souls of RTS genre XD

"You loss half your army and now you can't do the next mission" Reminds me of Ultimate Admiral Age of Sail. Thats not a good sign.

This game needs a sandbox campaign mode, like Mechwarriors 5, Mercs.

I have a similar experience as what you stated. I have to save scum in that mission shown in your video because there's no way I can fight with the extreme odds stacked against me without my core force being deleted. I also noticed that it does not allow individual infantry squads to be reinforced while in mission.

I'm a save scummer..I'm not sorry either. 😐 😂

This game has serious adventure elements. Your decisions when interacting with NPCs, will seriously affect how difficult a mission gets. A bad decision can lead you to a situation where it can be very difficult to near impossible to win. Finally, if you want to enjoy the game, go for the normal difficulty.

I'm not sure about ranking the games purely within other games played. Sounds perfect for an end of the year type of video. What about having two scores? one overall, one based on the yearly list? Otherwise you'd have to explain the system every single time, and I feel like it wouldn't age very well. It would be lightly confusing to watch a couple years later.

I got this title through g2a for half off. Totally worth it at $20 USD. There is a custom settings when starting a new campaign. You can adjust supply upkeep from 0-100%. 0 being no supply upkeep, 100% being “realistic” setting, 60% being “normal”. Same for damage to your units, except 10-100, 10 being normal etc. There is also a “enable more enemies” option too. My first playthrough, I went with 30% supply, and normal damage with more enemies. This was a very optimal experience for me. I could play however I wanted, use whatever I wanted, and still have some losses against more numerous opponents. Roadmap has planned a machine focused campaign dlc. There are a lot of people in its community wanting a sandbox “conquest” mode, myself included. Same mechanics as the campaign, but with no story. It is well worth getting from a 3rd party. It took me just over 50 hours with one restart to get through my first play through. I read along a steam guide to not miss anything, which was worth it. A niche setting, with niche mechanics for the genre. You don’t have to play it on the save scum settings for it to be good. Even still, some missions will take over an hour or more to complete. Skirmish mode is standard capture points for reserve generation to bring in more troops. There’s also two maps of attack/defend. Multiplayer is available, Howe the handful of times I’ve gone to play against people, no games were hosted, unfortunately. It’s still a lot of fun, if you want something different, with really cool unit design, and depending on settings, challenging campaign, pick it up through 3rd party like g2a for half off.

The Cartel mission you mentioned had an annoying mechanic around the duel's. It totally removes your ability to control your unit and is very RNG reliant. I've won the fight once with no losses but on another attempt after getting some better gear. The entire squad died and I lost, or the squad was down to just one person in the end.

Me: Total save scummer and in love with the game and my 4 Abrams, 4 Bradleys, 2 Himars, 3 M113s, 3 Strykers, 5 Humvees, etc, etc, etc..... 😂😂😂

you nailed it when you said "can a game be bad but you really enjoy it" thats exactly how i feel playing this game, i really hate the campaign mechanics, but the art style, the customization options, really is a nice touch which gets you hooked, a 1 hour campaign can take you literally 6h to finish . you cant recon with your snipers, which is dumb as fk, your snipers cant easily take units out in a building, i remember one time 1 sniper team took them 50 bullets to kill 1 guy ! inside a building. the supplies are extremely rare to find, and in case you run out of supplies, good luck . i remember there was this one mission where they give u an attack hellicopter, or supplies, i tried to take the hellicopter instead of supplies, i couldnt go to the next mission, so i was forced to take the supplies.. which is dump, as you cant purchase that hellicopter ingame

What's funny is a lot of stuff in this reminds me of the machine war scenes from the pre-Dark Fate and Salvation novels. Like in the T1 novelization Machine War scenes there are mentions of Resistance soldiers still armed with pre-Judgment Day Assault Rifles, and the T2 novelization mentions that in the future Reese had experience fighting Humans opposed to the Resistance in addition to fighting machines.

This game is one of the most challenging I ever played. And it is not because of the campaign fights, allthough I had to reload quite a bit at the start as I was learning how it all works. The most difficult part are managing logistics. And I kept searching every corner of the map for vehicles I could sell but I carried my army from mission to mission with hardly any supplies left once arriving there. I dont even get to upgrade my units with good will points, simply because I almost need everything spending for supplies in order to be able to continue 😂 But I really love this game so far, I never considered it a bad game at all. For me it is finally a huge challenge were I really have to think about each vehicle I want to use or better sell it off. I even went so far to buy a few main carrier, in my second run, so that they can get me everything of the map in order to be able to get more good will points 😅

i like this game but super fkn difficult

I really feel the part where you dont like save scumming, however if its your first playthrough and you dont know what will come you are gonna have a terrible awaking at some spots. Lets take the vega mission as exsample. The hostile HQ is a fortress and heavily guarded at each new street. Without knowing that you will need to position heavy artellery in range of that part of map you can try what you want but either loose evrything or most of your best tanks etc. Even your strongest tanks gets easily shredded therer if you just drive catiously forward. So sometimes you need to reload and think of a new approach. =)

This game should be renamed into loading screen simulator with how many times you have to reload save cause RNG said Fu*k You half your army died to single spider. Biggest problem I had was with how inconsistent everything is one reload your RPG squad obliterates enemy tank and second later they miss completly target 5feet in front of them or start running into distance, this is so bad that to even consider playing on realistic you just save before every shoot and reload untill it works cause there is no second chance, you did not destroy that shitty basic platform in one shot? GG your rocket squad is dead and you can't play anymore. And yes I'm talking about tutorial mission where bloody platform wiped my whole squad, in a building, not even aiming at them. For a game that tries to be some kind of army RPG, there is no cause and effect, you don't lose half of your army because you made mistake, you lost it cause FU that's why. For example that tank kando hacks in first mission? In my 5th run(cause I was stupid idiot and tried not to savescum until then so I got wiped in tortuga 3 times) it just decided to refise to die went on a trip to gass station and wiped 5 spiders and at least 3 platforms, no damage taken, normaly holding rebel HQ was madness bun now I was sitting there shooting dogs cause nothing else survived. And a run before that it died to first spider on the road, they overran kando before I even got to control him lol. Another thing are squad controlls, you can't tell them to hold fire, instead you have to disable thier weapons, WTF devs!? Setting up in buildings is a pain, infantry is fine but heavy weapons and rocket squads are infuriating morons, you have to empty whole building load those idiots in tell them to face direction, load all the infantry back in, and when there are 3 tanks in front of them watch as those cretins start running around the stairs instead of firing, and before they redeploy those tanks will blast half of the building to shreads so those morons have to run around the stairs again! And it is not like they could not shoot from where they were standing, half of the time in second mission I was spamming stop command until they decided to shoot the tanks, and this hapens so often that I have autoclicker installed just to stop retards from running around. For how much you have to micromanage everything all the time you have next to no controll what your people are doing, I can't tell them to throw granade or fire a rocket. And talking about micromanaging this is beyond absurd, you lose sight of single dude for one second and everone is dead, this would be moderate fun if there was slow-mo mode so you could see whats happening but again nope, all you have is active pause that you have to turn off anyway to see if your heavy squad decided to follow order or get up and banzai charge dozen of rev-6s. And there is absolute ZERO controll of multiple units at once you cant click and drag to deploy multple cars in a formation, you can't line up your squads, vechicles completly ignore each other both in therms of not shooting allies and adjusting speed to rest of the group, you have to micromanage it all! and best of it you cant even see markers where you sent stuff to go and pathing of how they get there, like how hard it would be to draw a line betwen the point of where tonk is and where it should be so I can see what the hell is going on! Even bloody emprie at war had it, and it was decades ago. It's like they mashed bunch of game genrees together never checked if game is even playable and decided to just relase it anyway. Still the concept of customising your own army and turning civilian junk into war mashines mad max style is a fun concept and it feels amazing in those rare moments it works, ofc then they blow up to random dog cause vechicles in this game are made of cardboard. Only thing this game does right is perfect simulation of how actual military commander feels during military operation, having barely any information what is going on at any time and having to to 100 thigs at once or half of the army dies. Exhausting. This is a game you want to enjoy, it has amazing concept, takes all the best mechanics for multiple games, and it completly fails in making them work making it frustrating. You would need an actual AGI to run the game as your second in command to enjoy this game, with is rather amusing that you need skynet to play skynet.

The story is weird. After judgement day in the year 2020 The Government, NGO, Military, and Corporation Survive. And also The Rebels, The Terrorist, The Criminals, Dictators, Warlords, and Evil Companies.

Great thoughts, enjoyed this one a lot

3:48 nah is that bob sample tank II💀💀💀 3:52 ah yes reasonable man

just use wemod.... Or, the way I do it, have bunch of the low level expandible recruits (mainly technicians) run in front (with one of the defensive formation) to spot off enemies. always have the preferred tank (bradly Ifv) runs a little behind them and hide in between buildings. when the war ends, get as many vehicles as possible (again, need to use technicians) to sell them. and get those long range plasma guns/cannons. You should be fine.

I'm loving it as it's like warzone 2100, which is a strategy game from the 90s that had the same "carry on your troops" and ability to edit individual units. It's definitely janky and the story goes in downright bad directions so far, if there was more choice on the campaign map and less worry about supply I'd be having an even better time

For games like this, Men of War included, the skirmish mode is really where i play. And this games skirmish mode just... Sucks. It has 5 maps... This game could benifit from a "Battlefron 2 (2005)" Galactic Conquest style mode. Like, show a map of earth with key areas highlighted and you have to go there and fight battles and complete objectices. Battles won award upgrades and so on. No story, just a map and you.

Is this available for PS5/Xbox 1X? 🤔

Scouting saves lives.

That game is THE best rts of the last 10 years without contest 🔥 Even since CoH1’s revolution to be honest! You missed the whole point of the game (or anyone finding it frustrating): RISK. You lose people, you can’t do nothing about it. This is the terminator universe. The worst would be to have such a baby-walk that it feels like playing star craft or whatever else 😂 The Railing guides argument is fair, but saving is what it is. The story is beautifully written, they designed the best universe bridging the OG trilogy to dark fate’s timeline, which makes for the best video game experience & depth! Saving is the backbone of the experience. The story can go sideways reals fast and that will always be open to players choice. This is fine.

Iv played the game really fun I hate save scumming as well and I only revert a save of I loose big bob and his tank other then that if I fuck up I fuck up. Also what style of game is this even called I love them home world does it Syrian warfare does it and I want more rts games where u travel and your army stays the same from mission to mission

Looks epic!

Appreciate this.

Looks interesting.

Yeah... they have it, but not for long as per this game.

Bricking a game 20hrs in due to rng sucks. I feel like a 20hr roguelike has very little appeal.

how did you get the legion tank.?

😮❤🎉

🤔 Promo`SM

Yea the rng is a really big problem I love the game but its frustrating. I think the way you could solve this so it isnt a save scum fest is a couple things. First get rid of rng accuracy, it would make things more consistent and predictable some is find but this is like 9/10 on rng scale and its needs to he a 2/10. Next is cover, having a game go this huper lethal men of war rtt route and not have a cover system is criminal and would make the rng oh your guy is now dead feel less shitty. Like of course hes dead hes standing out in the open and doesn't now how to get behind that concrete rubble when heing shot by a 25mm! Next RECON, this last one is so important I cant fucken scout anything in this game and the stealth is really werid on top of that its so hard to know if its working or not and its impossible to use anything to scout to find stealthed units. Half the time you have to save scum cause shit came out of nowhere and thats cause your forced to play like a noob in warno who doesnt buy enough recon units.