The open-world Terminator survival game finally has a proper title, and an early access release date: It’s called Terminator: Survivors, and it’s headed to Steam on October 24.
Terminator: Survivors may not be the most original title of all time, but it certainly cuts to the point: The new game is set in the year 2009, after the events of Judgment Day, which occurred on August 29, 1997 when the machines decided they’d had just about enough of our crapola and unleashed Armageddon upon us. Fair play, really—we were going to do it to them first, they were just quicker on the draw.
It also takes place in the days before John Connor has established the human resistance movement, which means everything is a bit of a free-for-all: Players will be forced to deal with threats posed by other humans as well as machines—in fact, you won’t even be aware of the existence of Skynet at first, although “it’s something you’ll quickly discover,” Nacon Studio Milan CEO and creative director Marco Ponte said during today’s Nacon Connect showcase. Eventually, you’ll join forces 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 quite rare: Nacon referred to “Skynet’s machines” more than once in the announcement and during today’s presentation, but the terminator itself is always described singularly. Which would make sense: One terminator roaming around somewhere can inject real tension into moment-by-moment survival action, but having to deal with a whole squad of them while you’re still at the point where you’re scrounging for dirty gas and rat meat doesn’t sound like much fun at all. It’s no good to overdo 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 be able to pull it off remains to be seen, but I recently got around to playing the 2019 shooter Terminator: Resistance, and it turned out to be a lot better than I expected. My expectations were low, yes, but it was still a genuinely good shooter, and if Terminator: Survivors can work the same magic it could prove to be a genuine contender in the crowded survival genre.
We’ll find out soon enough. Terminator: Survivors will launch into early access on Steam on October 24, and will follow on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S “at a later date.” You can catch the full Nacon Connection presentation below.