Syed Imran Haider 
In Terminator: Dark Fate – Defiance the future war parts are some of the coolest parts of the Terminator series. Developers have used it to make some of the best video games. Terminator: Dark Fate – Defiance also follows in the same footsteps, as the RTS spins off the most recent movie, putting you in the shoes of a military officer faced with the killer months after the nukes fall.
The plot
A series of story-driven battles make up the main portion of Defiance, with some army management thrown in. It is based in the post-Judgement Day Northern Mexico and United States and you have to fight the Legion, which is the equivalent of Skynet in Dark Fate’s timeline. You will find the characters to be mostly stereotypes, with a few interesting voices thrown in.
There is also the story of your unit of military ‘Founders’ battling alongside a local paramilitary resistance, with some hindrance from robotic collaborationists and local warlords. It does the job and gives you some of the most interesting RTS battles.
The battles
You will find the battles to be deadly, realistic and detailed. Explosions and stray bullets often pick off soldiers, leaving them struggling to survive. Since it is modern warfare, logistics and large numbers are the priority. Specific type of ammunition is required by every unit, along with spare parts for vehicles and fuel. These are depleted during the fight and you have to use supply trucks to rearm yourself. This kind of realism is what makes it a real-time tactics game.
It is also fun battling the machines. They fight like machines i.e. do not worry about their own survival, but they are numerous and tough and this requires you to be smart when deploying your units in order to outmaneuver them. While most of the forces of the Legion are armored vehicles and homunculus soldiers, but when Terminators appear, things get exciting very quickly.
The combat
As far as the infantry combat is concerned, it is undoubtedly neat, but there is one detail that has been badly balanced. When you fight in buildings, it is downright amazing because the units use roofs and windows as firing points when they move within the interior. However, the cover outside the buildings makes things difficult because it is finicky and hard to use.
While you can manually decide where your troops will stop, it is not possible to tell them to take positions behind barricades and walls. All you can do is move them close and hope they will do as you expect. You will not find any visual indicators for the type of cover they are getting and you cannot see their line of sight either, both of which are very important in such a tactics game. Nonetheless, this does not make leading the inventory less amusing.
The Verdict
Terminator: Dark Fate – Defiance does its best to bring out the gritty, dirty and vicious war between machines and humans to life. Some of the mission are obnoxious, but it does deliver the promised action.
