July 08, 2004 - Last year brought the world one of the worst videogames based on a movie. That's saying a lot, considering the existence of Superman 64, but Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines created a royal stink that we still cringe upon hearing its name. Based on the gawdawful engine, it was a stunningly miserable experience. But we're not here to look at the awful past. Instead, we're here to talk about the possible salvation in Terminator 3: The Redemption. Never has a name for a game been more appropriate and Atari is set to show that it really can make a movie franchise game after all.

Instead of the first-person shooter experience of Rise of the Machines, Redemption is a third-person action game that combines plenty of shooting and brawling with driving elements. All of it follows the governor of California as he goes back in time to 2003 to save John Connor from robotic assassination. The 14 missions take place across four acts in both the future and modern day California.

The action is pretty evenly split between three different kinds of gameplay. While on foot, the Terminator can shoot down enemy robots by auto-tracking them. As long as the reticle is within a circle surrounding a target, the shooting will automatically hone in on the target. This can be a bit of a problem when targets get stacked up in front of each other as this presents a situation with overlapping target circles.

In these situations, it's a matter of praying for luck and shooting until the targets drop. The automatic feature of the shooting can even drag the reticle along with it sometimes so that if one target moves to the side, the reticle has gone with it and needs to be moved back to the center of the screen manually.

This clearly shows that the action here is going for the casual gamer with arcade-style action. In some scenes, the gamer plays the role of a gunner on the back of a truck or another vehicle. Here, the vehicle goes down a preset path while the player clears the way ahead or shoots down any pursuers. In the co-op mode for two players, both shooters are on the side of the screen and shoot down armies of robots while they get flown around.

While the single-player experience shooting scenes have a set path to go on, the co-op mode will have the vehicle moving in circles through an area until all of the targets have been eliminated. This can become a bit woozy from all the drunken motions, but it provides a few simple kicks of firing unlimited ammunition at all of those pesky Skynet slaves.

The best parts of the game that we've seen so far are the driving/shooting scenes. We played a few missions where the goal was to pursue a target and take it down by shooting at it. Of course, plenty of other enemies get in the way that need to be taken out as well and there is that issue of driving in the right direction and that adds to the fun that makes the game live up more to the feeling of the movies. By driving a beaten up old truck through a futuristic valley of death and gunning down a flying mechanized death machine, we felt like we were truly getting what we deserved.

Still, even though we got our kicks from living out some Terminator moments, the game is still definitely more for the casual gamer with the simplified mechanics. Sure, there are upgrades for the characters and there's an incentive to keep on playing through for extra secrets, but this is not a brutal first-person shooter that was barely hinted at by Rise of the Machines. It's more like the old arcade light-gun shooters that provided one hell of a ruckus and provided the right backdrop.

Check back for the full review next month when this title comes out. Until then, just sit back, relax, and fire up some of the movies to see the Governator in action.