Video Game / Terminator Dark Fate - Defiance

Terminator Dark Fate - Defiance is a 2024 Real-Time Strategy game, created by Slitherine and released for PC through Steam.

Set in the timeline established by the Terminator: Dark Fate movie, the player controls a detachment of soldiers from the Founders, a faction formed from the remnants of the US military after Judgement Day, and follows their journey as they strive to survive against the forces of Legion in a post-apocalyptic United States of America.

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Tropes present in this game:

• Action Genre Hero Guy: Strangely, given how much emphasis the movie it's based on deliberately made a point of avoiding this cliche, the game plays it straight in the form of protagonist Lt. Church.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Legion fills the role usually done by Skynet in this entry of an AI trying to wipe out humanity.
• Anchored Attack Stance: Movement howitzers need to anchor themselves in the ground before they can open fire. One of the major advantages of the (virtually unavailable to the player) M109 self-propelled howitzer is that it doesn't need to do this, being able to "shoot 'n scoot".
• Anyone Can Die: The game permanently kills off characters whose entire units have been wiped out, though if a unit survives with a single member, it is assumed that the survivor is the important character. The problem arises that, if the deceased character was needed for a side objective, that objective is effectively lost. The only subversion is the command staff of T-Force, which automatically induces a Game Over if they all perish.
• Anti-Frustration Feature:
  • Maps generally denote entry points where enemy units spawn in as big red "Danger" zones on the ground, which should give observant players enough forewarning to plan their movements and defensive positions in advance. It's not foolproof, though - sometimes the game adds new entry points mid-mission or shifts existing ones around.
  • If you sell off a manned vehicle, the crew is automatically put back in your roster instead of being sold alongside it. However, this does not work for any special weapons that vehicle has equipped. These must be removed manually if you want to keep them, although keeping them on the vehicle adds the weapons' value to the vehicle's sales price, saving you a bit of micromanagement at least.
  • Trade transactions have no markup whatsoever - you can buy back any merchandise for the exact same amount of goodwill you sold it for, at any trading post, which is great if you accidentally sold something you didn't mean to.
• Arbitrary Mission Restriction: Most missions start you off with a small recon force tasked with scouting out the area ahead before the main force moves in. All well and good, but once this is done and you can start calling in reinforcements, they appear piecemeal although dialogue repeatedly states the entire army is waiting just outside the mission area. You also have limited say in what to call in when due to how the game divides units into categories; you're usually only allowed to pick lighter units first, with the big guns reserved for the last waves.
• Artificial Brilliance:
  • Units with multiple weapons generally have great target prioritization, picking the most suitable weapon against any given enemy type without player input. It's not perfect, but works very well most of the time.
  • Infantry garrisoned in large buildings will move automatically to get the best possible firing angle on targets outside the building.
• Artificial Stupidity: Unit pathfinding is extremely wonky. Even infantry can easily get stuck on random obstacles, not to mention vehicles. They also often take weird routes to a given destination that might throw a wrench in your plans if that route leads through territory you haven't scouted or cleared yet.
• A Taste of Power: For the defense mission not too long into the game, the player is given access to an Abrams Tank and several APCs including a Bradley with a plasma cannon but the player is forced to abandon them in order to escape as the elevator doesn't fit any non-Humvee vehicles.
• A-Team Firing: Most hostile targets go down in one, maybe two hits from an appropriate weapon, but your troops will dispense a lot of ammo in the target's direction before that happens. While somewhat excusable for infantry, it also applies to your high-tech military vehicles like the Abrams tank, which in Real Life has a 95% hit chance with its main gun thanks to its advanced targeting systems. And to add insult to injury, hostile troops have far better accuracy and will rarely miss your squishy units, especially if they're caught out in the open.
• Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: You'll have to fight at least one giant Prototype robot in the campaign (two if you do the Midway mission for the Integrators). This gigantic six-legged Spider Tank utterly dwarfs everything around it, can tank absurd amounts of damage^note the mandatory one at Galveston Harbor is outright immune to ground units including Abrams tanks and can wipe out entire strike teams in a single salvo of plasma fire.
• Awesome Personnel Carrier: The game offers numerous options, some more professional than others. The more desirable ones are the military M113 and Stryker APCs, as well as the heavily armed and armored Bradley IFV. If those aren't available or too expensive to maintain, you can fall back on technicals and up-armored civilian vans and big rigs.
• Being Evil Sucks: Although the game gives you opportunities to make morally questionable decisions, you're strongly discouraged from being anything but a complete boy scout in the campaign, mostly because aligning yourself with the not-so-good guys or skipping optional missions for the Movement costs you tons of salvage, unique units, and ultimately support for the final battle, making your life a whole lot harder in the long run.
• BFG:
  • The Cartel capital of Chihuahua hosts what looks like a trio of enormous coastal gun batteries^note which doesn't make a lot of sense since the Real Life Chihuahua is nowhere near the ocean, being a landlocked desert oasis city whose name literally translates to "dry and sandy place". Once the Cartel leaders realize they're about to lose control, they prepare to turn these guns on the city, putting you on a timer to disarm them before they can be fired.
  • The Sherman's huge railgun accounts for about a third of the tank's total size.
• Big Badass Rig: Up-armored and armed big rigs serve as your primary tractor unit for heavy trailers and carriages for most of the campaign until you can replace them with military-grade HEMTTs, but even then they can have their uses in your army. If your force consists entirely of Movement units, the big rigs are also your only dedicated APC choice when it comes to picking reinforcements.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • There's always a need for basic infantry no matter how many spiffy tanks you're parading around. It's always a good idea to bring at least one squad of Rangers or Mercenaries on every mission because they can achieve so much thanks to their versatility.
  • Light howitzers, while nowhere near as powerful as the heavy 155mm version, are still quite useful in almost every mission due to how lethal they are against advancing infantry units. They also have the bonus of being classified as light vehicles, allowing them to join early reinforcement waves on missions that use this mechanic, and they can be towed by any Humvee, technical or truck instead of requiring big expensive tractors. Needless to say their ammo is also much cheaper.
  • Movement Technicals are just civilian pickup trucks protected by hillbilly armour bolted onto the frame and the prayers of the driver. Not only are they quite nippy and slightly better off-road than Founders' Humvees, but they can be upgraded to mount some serious punch in their gun turret: grenade launchers, miniguns, recoilless rifles and even plasma weapons. They also can tow a light weapons platform and have room for 3 passengers — enough for technicians, snipers/sharpshooters, heavy weapon squads and even ATGM teams. They also cost you very little upkeep. This is Truth in Television, technicals are beloved among insurrectionist/paramilitary groups and shoestring budget militaries the world over because they require no special driver training or fuel to work, spare parts are plentiful and in terms of pure cost-to-effect ratio they can destroy tanks and armoured vehicles worth more a dozen of them if employed correctly. The perfect post-apocalyptic combat vehicle.
  • Cartel tanks are decently fast and resilient and mount a 90mm cannon that provides acceptable anti-armor capability. Most importantly, they don't require tank driver training to pilot, basically making them the poor man's Abrams. They're still quite expensive to maintain, but can provide significant mobile firepower if more advanced combat vehicles aren't available.
  • Weapon Platforms, they are immobile turrets that need to be towed by vehicles. The best thing is they carry weapons of vehicles of one tier higher than what they count, so the small platform carries an IFV grade firepower while still counts as light vehicles while only lacking the Bradley's coaxial machine gun and ATGM, and the heavy ones has as much firepower as an Abrams while considered as an IFV. The game didn't give them a good introduction as an unarmored heavy platform in Santa Fe will get taken out in one hit by a Legion Tank, but what the game don't tell you directly is their armor class is changed into "tank" if equipped with steel or caged armor, making them as tough as a Bradley or more. Once armored up and given a heavy plasma cannon, one can duel a Legion Tank and win.
  • The minigun certainly isn't the flashiest heavy weapon available, but it's so disgustingly effective against infantry (even units garrisoned in buildings) that it practically has no equal in its category. This also makes it probably the most useful tool for training drivers and technicians - just put a rookie unit in a technical, Humvee or APC with a mounted minigun and watch their XP bar go through the roof.
  • Training Movement Technicians so they're able to drive tanks is expensive and won't pay off for a long time, but neglecting it will leave you unable to salvage all those juicy tank wrecks you start coming across as the campaign progresses. At least two or three tank-certified technicians should always be on standby for this reason, usually driving other vehicles in the meantime. Technicians are also this in general, being dirt-cheap to recruit and maintain but amazingly versatile in the skills they can learn.
• Break Out the Museum Piece: Literally. The mission at Vega allows you to salvage a venerable Sherman, a medium tank from WW II, from a museum... a Sherman that someone upgraded with a ginormous railgun in its turret. This thing is hands-down the most powerful direct-fire weapon in your arsenal, capable of killing almost any vehicle in one shot even if it's hiding behind a building or two. Unfortunately, you have to give it up if you want to make friends with the Integrators.
• The Cavalry:
  • Once a mission's initial recon phase is over, you can start calling in reinforcements that more often than not will have to bail out your scouts from a sticky situation.
  • Whatever friends and allies you've made throughout the campaign will show up in the final mission to support T-Force. Gathering all possible support this way unlocks an achievement.
• The Cartel: The... Cartel, remnants of the Mexican drug cartels that used Legion's Robot War to essentially build their own nation in the southern US. They're still ruthless criminals and slavers who are actually allied with Legion, and T-Force can have their fair share of conflict with them.
• Concealment Equals Cover: Played with. Hiding in a building will definitely improve an infantry unit's chances of survival, but they can still be hit by gunfire. Powerful ballistic weapons can outright penetrate obstacles to deal damage to anyone or anything standing behind it (a trait plasma weapons are specifically noted to not possess). There's also a multitude of explosive anti-personnel weapons that can clear a building of dug-in infantry very quickly.
• Cool, but Inefficient:
  • The Stryker APC is more expensive to maintain than the M113, seats fewer passengers, has lower fuel and ammo reserves, can't mount certain weapons, and provides a significantly bigger target. It does have slightly better speed and armor, and its remotely operated turret makes its crew less susceptible to incoming fire, but if that's enough to make up for its drawbacks comes down to player preference.
  • Building a road between Albuquerque and Abiquiu/Taos cuts travel time from three days down to one but costs a significant chunk of supplies that are better spent elsewhere, especially since you can't even return to these settlements after you leave for Tortuga and Chihuahua one or two missions later.
• Crippling Overspecialization: In keeping with the combined arms doctrine common among modern militaries, most units are tightly geared around one, maybe two specific tasks at the expense of all others. Probably the most extreme example is the HIMARS rocket artillery system - its one and only strength lies in bombarding static positions from really far away, meaning it's great for counterbattery fire against enemy artillery and not much else.
  • ATGM troopers are an example, they carry powerful ATGM missile launchers that far surpass any other infantry anti-tank weapon and can even somewhat track moving targets but their missiles require notably more supply to restock and they don't even get proper rifles to defend themselves with and instead use sub-machine guns/pistols. Once their pitiful supply of missiles runs out, they're basically helpless and useless.
  • Both upgrades for the Abrams' main gun suffer from this. The 30mm Vulcan cannon shreds through infantry and light vehicles with contemptuous ease, but sacrifices the tank's vital anti-armor capabilities in the process. The opposite applies to the Heavy Plasma Cannon, with the added downside of the gun still targeting infantry despite being extremely inefficient against them, which results in a huge waste of expensive ammo.
  • The Sherman tank's railgun is an almost guaranteed One-Hit Kill against any vehicle it can draw a bead on, but it only holds 12 shots of very expensive ammunition that's complete overkill on anything lighter than other tanks. It's also the Sherman's only weapon, meaning the vehicle is essentially a dedicated tank killer that must be micromanaged to avoid wasting precious resources. Considering that the Sherman is less resilient than an Abrams yet just as expensive to maintain, you're usually better off replacing it with another Abrams first chance you get.
  • The Founders' drivers, tank crews and pilots can do nothing but operate their respective vehicle types, but the skills they can learn make them really good at it.
  • Tank armor upgrades are heavily specialized - carbon armor protects well against kinetic weapons but does nothing against energy weapons, whereas ceramic armor does the opposite. Unfortunately, the way the vehicle upgrade system works makes it nearly impossible to switch armor types on the fly, but at least the game is gracious enough to give you two opportunities to gain ceramic armor sets for the final missions against Legion's Beam Spam troops.
• Cyborg: The Integrators are a faction of cyborgs who like acquiring technology and speak with robotic voices, naturally this leads to them being distrusted by various characters. Their units are MacGyver'd contraptions built from captured Legion armor that pack one hell of a punch, so you better think twice before antagonizing them.
• Disaster Scavengers: With most of your army's supplies coming from salvaging and selling any abandoned vehicles you come across, you should go to any lengths necessary to pick up absolutely everything that isn't nailed down before you leave the mission area. This also crops up frequently in dialogue with other factions, particularly scavengers, marauders and similar outlaws.
• Double Unlock: Units unlock new skill slots by killing enough enemies to get promoted, upon which you need to spend between 100 and 500 goodwill points at a training-capable outpost to actually activate the chosen skill.
• Easy Logistics: Zigzagged.
  • On the tactical level, all units require ammo for their weapons, and vehicles also need fuel and spare parts on top of that. Fortunately, ammo supplies are consolidated into a single unit that incorporates anything from 9mm handgun bullets to caseless plasma cannon rounds for your tanks' main gun, meaning everyone can resupply easily from any supply truck or depot. The only difference is how much supply each weapon requires to replenish.
  • On the world map, every active unit in your army requires upkeep to travel, and lots of it. This severely limits the size of your force, and as of the time of writing can easily soft-lock your campaign if you find yourself unable to travel to the next mission with the supplies available.
• Elite Army: Not only are Founders infantry and light vehicles far more effective in combat than their Movement counterparts, but they also get access to special forces infantry squads as well as heavily-armoured fighting vehicles and Tank Goodness that Movement have no equivalent to. However, this comes at the cost of them being twice as expensive to maintain. A dedicated Founders force will have only about half as many troops as a Movement-focused one.
• Elite Mooks:
  • Founders have the superb US Army Rangers, versatile and skilled special forces squads.
  • Recruitable Mercenaries squads serve in this role if your army consists mostly or entirely of Movement troops.
  • Rev-6 units are this for Legion, being much tougher and more heavily armed than any other humanoid Terminator model.
• Emergency Weapon: There is a default weapon for each weapon category that is the very worst weapon in that slot that will be used if you don't equip the unit in question with something else before the mission. They're usually carried by these units when they join.
  • Submachine Guns are replaced with a 9mm Beretta handgun with the worst range and fire rate of that category. Bear in mind that submachine guns are themselves backup weapons that aren't supposed to see a lot of use; if your missile squads start plinking away at Legion bots with these, something has already gone wrong.
  • Infantry squads who can take rifles start with a civilian-grade, semi-automatic AR-15 rifle that the game suggests you replace with proper automatics the first chance you get.
  • The single-shot LAW for launchers.
  • Zigzagged with the M240B light machine gun, Remington sniper rifle and M2 Browning heavy machine gun as while they still aren't the best in their respective catagories, they can notably pull their weight better than the above default weapons.
  • While not strictly intended as such, giving the assault order on a building is the only way to have your units engage in hand-to-hand fighting and while this is heavily ill-advised against Legion's robotic forces unless they've been disabled with an EMP, against human enemies and especially with high close-combat skill units like the Rangers, you can intentionally make use of this to save ammo or as the only means for an out of ammo squad to attack the enemy.
• Enemy Exchange Program: You can hijack vehicles from human enemies if you manage to disable them without destroying them completely, and it's possible to hack some of Legion's robots after they're hit by an EMP to turn them into allies.
• Escort Mission: The player often has to escort defenseless civilians or military specialists as part of mission objectives. Fortunately you can either control them directly and make them stay put in a safe area while you clear the way, or at least see their intended path on the ground, allowing you to move them forward one step at a time.
• Fast-Roping: Infantry riding in helicopters can do this to enter buildings from above. Can be useful for assaulting occupied structures without having to run through a hail of bullets first, provided the occupants aren't toting Anti-Air weaponry. Now if only the game mentioned this feature in a tutorial somewhere...
• Foreshadowing:
  • The second tutorial mission begins with Stevens telling Church that his main metric for mission success is that as few people as possible died in the process, but he knows that not everyone sees it this way. You find out what exactly he meant by that once you realize that Founders HQ is absolutely lousy with General Rippers that care nothing for the lives of their own soldiers, much less those of any civilians caught in the crossfire.
  • You start hearing rumors that the Integrators lost some coveted technology basically the moment the campaign starts in earnest, but it takes until the Vega mission to find out what exactly they were talking about: an antique Sherman tank carrying a hideously powerful railgun.
• Fragile Speedster:
  • The Iroquois helicopter is by far the fastest unit you can own, but it's made of tissue paper and only really good for quickly ferrying small numbers of personnel around in specific missions. The Blackhawk helo is somewhat more resilient and also much heavier armed, but still can't survive for long against anything more powerful than small arms fire. Legion's helo equivalent, the HK Aerial, is more or less the same unit with a different look.
  • Swarms are this for Legion, being fast moving small drones that can fly over impassable terrain. They appear in both scouting and suicide bomber varieties but can be easily taken down by any infantry squad with basic rifles that isn't distracted by other foes.
  • Technicals and vans are much faster than Humvees and real APCs, but fall apart at the seams even under small arms fire.
• Frickin' Laser Beams: A very rare technology, this mainly crops up in the form of Legion-developed laser sniper rifles, the most powerful sniper rifle model in the game. Legion also employs laser fences around vital infrastructure, but these are just scenery with no effect on gameplay.
• Gaiden Game: It's got all of the mechanics and same engine as Syrian Warfare and can be essentially considered a Terminator themed spin-off on the same engine. (it was even originally developed by the same developers until they were removed from development.)
• Garrisonable Structures: Absolutely essential for the survival of your infantry units, almost all maps have an abundance of these. They come in four tiers (very weak, weak, medium, strong) that determine how well protected units inside are from incoming fire, and how long the building itself can withstand the bombardment. Some buildings can only accommodate one, maybe two squads, while others can hold your entire strike force with generous room to spare.
• Gatling Good: Comes in three sizes: a 7.62mm version usable by heavy weapon teams and as a pintle-mounted vehicle support weapon, a 20mm gatling cannon that replaces the Bradley's standard 25mm autocannon, and an even bigger 30mm version that replaces the Abrams' 120mm smoothbore cannon. Needless to say they are absolutely brutal against infantry and light vehicles, but lacking in anti-armor capability.
• Glass Cannon:
  • Movement vehicles can carry the same level of firepower as the Founders' actual APCs and tanks, sometimes even more, but they aren't nearly as resilient. To be more specific, all armed Movement vehicles are classified as Light - meaning they're vulnerable even to small arms fire and can spontaneously combust if an enemy's autocannon so much as points in their general direction - and the only "official" Movement APC is the big rig and its armored trailer; no combat vehicles or battle tanks to be found here.
  • The Bradley IFV has a fairly powerful autocannon as stock but can also be upgraded with an ATGM missile launcher, giving it the ability to punch up against tanks. However it's still at heart a thin-skinned troop transport, and just one hit from a Legion tank plasma cannon will blow it to kingdom come.
  • For the Legion, the Spider in its most basic configuration carries 2 autocannons, by comparison a Bradley only has one, and a second weapon can be added, be it ATGM launcher, MLRS pods, or SAM launcher, and yet again they get two of them while the Bradley can only have one ATGM launcher. However, a single RPG is often all it takes to bring down a spider, and when one not available, they can be taken down with just small arms provided they don't kill you first.
  • The HK Platform is another one, the weakest one being the carrier variant which is only armed with a single HMG, but most have a heavy weapon installed on them, be it a 30mm Rotary Cannon, Twin Plasma Autocannons, or even a Heavy Plasma Cannon like those used by Legion Tanks. In other words, these things has as much firepower as an Abrams. However, they are only about as tough as a Humvee. A single hit from ATGM or Plasma Recoilless from the front is enough to destroy them in one hit, or 2 hits from an RPG will most often knock them out.
• Global Currency: All of the settlements the player can trade with use shared "Goodwill points" for transactions, and the supplies you need to keep your army running are also treated exactly the same everywhere in terms of value (1 unit of goodwill = 10 units of supplies). Averted however in Cartel territory as they use gold pesos instead.
• The Goomba: Homunculi are early-model Terminators that exist to give Legion a human-like basic enemy (not unlike the T-400 from Terminator: Dawn of Fate) using only basic plasma weaponry for the most part and occasionally a trophy SMAW so they aren't completely defenseless against heavy armor. They're notably the only non-swarm Legion unit that an infantry squad can easily deal with on their own, but can still mess up the squishy humans pretty badly if they catch them out in the open.
• Guide Dang It!:
  • The campaign has multiple critical decision points with potentially dire consequences down the road, most of which can't be easily predicted without a guide.
  • Most missions start you off with a small recon force that must be able to handle all sorts of threats. Knowing in advance what or who to bring along can make the tasks ahead a whole lot easier, while going in blind often ends in a restart. This is especially true for extremely specialized unit types that may have only one real use, but if this one use is exactly what you need in this mission, they're basically a get-out-of-jail-free card... if you brought them into the battle.
  • The strategic resource management on the world map is built around the assumption of the player not exceeding certain upkeep thresholds, depending on where they are in the campaign, but the intended values for these thresholds are so obscure (and mentioned nowhere in the game itself) that one of the devs had to spell them out in an online discussion where players were raging about how brutal the mechanic is.
  • Speaking of supply management, you're expected to sell any captured vehicles you don't need at the nearest trade post and convert the goodwill gained this way into supplies at a 1:10 ratio. This is mentioned nowhere but can destroy your entire economy if you don't know about it in advance because scrapping a vehicle on site only nets you a measly 10% of its actual value.
  • How armor works is not explained in the game, with the in game description for armor kits only have vague details of what they do. Some armor kits including the cheapest Junk Armor actually adds hit points to the vehicle in addition of just improving the defense value, and the same armor kits sometimes do different things to different vehicles. Adding steel armor, or its improved version the caged armor to dozers and heavy weapon platforms change their armor type to Tank making them as tough as a Bradley in addition of the modifier they have, but not the same can be said to trailer trucks. Unlike the case for lighter vehicles, using Carbon Armor on the Abrams or Bradley is still an improvement over Junk Armor, even if you are facing enemies using plasma cannons as heavy armor have different modifier to light vehicle armor and it adds a lot of thickness to the armor.
  • The Nuevo Tortuga mission is brutally difficult even by this game's standard, to the point that many players find it downright impossible to complete even on Easy difficulty unless one follows a very specific sequence of very specific actions... and even then Random Number God can screw you over big time.
  • The Oklahoma mission allows you to grab two powerful M109 self-propelled howitzers for yourself, but only if you manage to get two tank-certified squads close enough to the vehicles before an associated cutscene triggers, which makes two allied NPC squads in a nearby building run out to board the artillery pieces. You only have a window of a few seconds to pull this off successfully, meaning it's virtually impossible to accomplish without meticulous preparation.
  • There is a hidden railgun (not the Sherman one) that can be obtained. Should the player keep high reputation with the Integrators up to this point, right after Midland, the Integrators will have a weapon platform on sale with a railgun on it.
  • The "There is nowhere to retreat!" achievement is tied to a mission you're unlikely to even know exists if you make the morally sound decision to fight the Legion assault on Abiquiu instead of running away first chance you get.
• Guns For Hire: Some outposts allow you to hire mercenary squads. They're expensive but the closest thing you'll get to actual elite troops if you don't have access to Founders special forces like Rangers, making them great additions in Movement-only playthroughs.
• The Heist: The late-game mission to steal an EWS truck from the Integrator Main Camp has shades of this. You start with your usual small recon force and an inside spy that need to work in tandem to disable security systems, lay traps and do everything else they can to cripple and distract the Integrators until they can sneak in and grab the vehicle right out from under the cyborg freaks' noses, all without raising an alarm. Weirdly, the mission still culminates in a massive battle even though you could've just driven off with the truck before anyone noticed it's gone.
• Hero Unit: T-Force can have four of these in its ranks, most prominently Mother-1 and Big Bob, the tank crews from the Haven prologue mission. The other two, sniper/hacker Kondo and hacker Flinch, can be recruited depending on how you approach certain optional mission targets. These heroes have unique voices and sometimes unique abilities, but are otherwise identical in behavior and resilience to their regular counterparts. Keeping them all alive until the credits roll awards an achievement and unlocks numerous additional mission features throughout the campaign, from sneakily pilfering a powerful Integrator vehicle without the Integrators noticing, to messing up Legion's forces big-time through the magic of Hollywood Hacking.
• Hoist by Their Own Petard: The Oklahoma mission is all about turning Legion's own M.O. and even its units against itself by means of a massive hacking attempt on one of the largest Legion facilities in the area.
• Hold the Line: Numerous missions task you with taking a position and then holding it against counterattacks until your own reinforcements arrive, evacuees have left safely, an NPC unit has finished doing what it needed to do, or whatever else the plot requires.
• Humans Are Divided: Ten years after the apocalypse, mankind still can't keep its act together. Those fighting Legion are divided into various groups (most prominently the Founders and the Movement), others use the anarchy for criminal or other, mysterious purposes, and caught in between are countless small groups of survivalists and homesteaders that just want to be left alone. Navigating these conflicts of interest makes up an important part of the gameplay, and you'll be fighting human enemies almost as much as you'll be tangling with Legion's Mecha-Mooks.
• Infinity +1 Sword: The Railgun which there are only 2 in the game. One is on the modified Integrator Sherman, but the second one is on a heavy weapon platform sold by the Integrator after completing Midland which is very easy to miss. You can remove it from the platform and put it on an Abrams. This weapon will destroy anything up to and including the Legion Tank in one hit from the front and can punch through some buildings unlike the Plasma counterpart, and if there is another tank behind the first one then it will be skewered as well.
• Immune to Bullets: Any vehicle that isn't classified as Light is virtually impervious to small arms fire, and heavy vehicles can also pretty much shrug off machine gun bullets and autocannon shells. Fortunately, lightly armed units are smart enough to not waste ammo on targets they can't damage, and units with multiple weapons only use those that won't just ping off the target's armor.
• Instructive Level Design: Zigzagged like crazy. On one hand, the first tutorial level takes place in a series of identically-spaced city blocks forming a grid, meaning you can get used to maneuvering your units in a relatively confined space without having to worry too much about all possible directions or complex orders. On the other, multiple tutorials are found not only deep inside of lengthy missions, but tend to come up seemingly randomly, with the building breaching tutorial located several missions AFTER you first encounter buildings requiring breaching.
• Jack of All Stats:
  • Rangers can do almost everything except fight heavy vehicles. They carry assault rifles, a sniper rifle and a grenade launcher, can drive vehicles, can call in airstrikes if the mission allows it, can be trained for demolition and mine clearing work, and are highly effective at storming occupied structures. Most of what they can do, another unit can do better, but it's never a bad idea to include a Ranger squad in your strike team thanks to their versatility, especially during the initial recon phase.
  • Founders infantry squads are less skilled than Rangers, but their weapon mix (assault rifles, machine gun and rocket launcher) allows them to engage any enemy type with a reasonable chance of success, making them supremely flexible.
  • The light plasma cannon is arguably the most versatile weapon in the game. It has good range, decent accuracy, lots of ammo, absolutely murders infantry, does a good job against light and medium vehicles, and can even damage heavy armor if the feces have really hit the fan, making it a straight upgrade to the 25mm autocannon that should be installed the moment it becomes available.
• Joke Character: The bulldozer. Yes, it can tow heavy equipment, but it's slow to the point of being comical while being twice as expensive to maintain as a big rig, which is much faster and more versatile. Its only useful purpose is as a trade commodity unless you desperately need something heavy towed. Until you armor them up that is, they become as tough as a Bradley but still very slow.
• Kinetic Weapons Are Just Better: Zig-zagged. Plasma weapons are more powerful than conventional guns and are capable of damaging most vehicles, but they are short ranged to the point that normal guns are better at dealing with human enemies. The accuracy is less an issue with terminators as they are slow and can't take cover. Not so much with the laser sniper rifle as it is at least as powerful as the .50 BMG counterpart and is deadly accurate. Plasma cannons are essentially an even more specialized HEAT shells, and one can take out a Legion Tank wth just 2-3 shots from the front, but it is less accurate and less effective against infantry than the standard 120mm cannon as plasma rounds lack fragmentation, plus you lose the coaxial gun. And then there is the Railgun, the single most powerful cannon in the game.
• La Résistance: Doesn't yet exist in a cohesive form, with numerous groups both big and small opposing Legion on their own with various strategies, philosophies and degrees of success. Part of T-Force's agenda under Lt. Church's command is to unite them all against the impending extinction of the human race. The narration after the final mission implies that his efforts paid off by paving the way for the Resistance to rise from the ashes of the Galveston Fallback.
• Leave No Witnesses: If you aggro the Integrator strike force at Vega and manage to prevent any of them escaping the area, the rest of their faction won't learn of the incident and your relations with them won't suffer. You also unlock an achievement. Thing is, they're usually right at the map edge when the battle happens, which gives you seconds at best to react to any runners.
• Lost Technology: The Abrams Active Protection System, an advanced anti-missile defense system, is explicitly described as a rare military artifact from the past. Considering that mankind's industrial base no longer exists thanks to Legion, this probably also extends to more or less any other type of complex technology that people today take for granted.
• MacGyvering: All human combat vehicles except for the Founders' actual military gear are improvised from civilian cars. There's pickup trucks and vans with mounted heavy weapons serving as jury-rigged APCs, big rigs and their trailers (also with guns bolted on top) for battlefield supply, and heavy artillery cannons strapped to towed carriages for that extra punch in battle. Even the Founders have shades of this with varying degrees of improvised armor upgrades for their tanks.
• Magnetic Weapons: Although there's only a single example in the entire game, the railgun-toting Sherman tank in Vega sure leaves a lasting impression and has remarkable involvement in the plot for what's ultimately just a really powerful tank hunter unit.
• Master of All: The Abrams MBT is hands-down the best unit in the game. It's lethally effective against all types of ground forces, is extremely resilient but still decently fast, can be specialized for specific battlefield roles if necessary, and carries enough ammo to operate away from your supply lines for quite some time. It's only downside is its immense upkeep, but that's something that should never stand in the way of fielding at least one Abrams at all times.
• Mauve Shirt: The hero units Mother-1, Big Bob, Sintu and Flinch have a decent amount of dialogue between them but can die just as quickly and easily as any other of your units on the field. Probably the reason you get an achievement for keeping all of them alive until the credits roll.
• Mechanical Animals: Among the ground units deployed by Legion are robotic dogs with back-mounted machine guns that roam around in packs to hunt down human survivors and harass resistance infantry.
• Mighty Glacier:
  • Legion tanks have twice the armor and firepower of the Founders' Abrams tanks, making them a terrifying foe to face no matter how many Anti-Armor weapons you have available. They're so tough that recoilless rifles and RPGs - the most ubiquitous anti-tank weapons available - have almost no effect on them. Your only saving grace is that Legion tanks are also twice as slow as the Abrams and have hideously slow turret rotating speed, allowing you to outmaneuver or outrun them, depending on the situation.
  • Steel cage and Cartel armor provide significant damage resistance in exchange for a whopping 40% reduction in acceleration and movement speed, as well as a commensurate increase in fuel consumption. They also all but remove the carrier vehicle's offroad capabilities, severely hampering its versatility on certain maps.
• More Dakka:
  • The Movement tries to compensate its lack of heavy military weaponry by fielding an abundance of lighter guns instead. All their vehicles can be armed with at least one heavy machine gun, and a big rig pulling an armored trailer can mount up to two HMGs and a 25mm autocannon for a pretty impressive display of full-auto goodness; even more of it if you swap out the machine guns for miniguns. Replacing the lead spitters with recoilless rifles, grenade launchers and plasma cannons as needed can easily give the Movement firepower on par with a mechanized Founders force.
  • Founders driver units can be trained to shoot their vehicle's weapon(s) 20% faster.
  • Whereas most Legion infantry units wield assault rifles or comparable equivalents, Rev-6 squads exclusively wield either miniguns or plasma machine guns, making them incredibly lethal against infantry and light vehicles.
  • Speaking of Legion units, most of its vehicles carry twice the amount of guns as their closest human equivalent. The Heavy Spider for instance is similar in its battlefield role to the Bradley IFV but brings two autocannons and two missile launchers to bear instead of just one each.
  • The light plasma cannon has a twin-linked version with mostly the same specs, but twice the rate of fire. Being about twice as heavy as the standard model, it can only be mounted on heavy platforms like the Abrams tank.
• Necessary Drawback: Armor upgrades can significantly increase a vehicle's staying power, but the added weight almost always results in lower speed, decreased agility and much higher fuel consumption. The Heavy Armor skill that certain infantry units can learn similarly reduces movement speed in exchange for a health bonus.
• Not What It Looks Like: One of the few comedic moments in the game happens after Church's and Mason's squads take down the Reverend and his gang in Nueva Tortuga's brothel. As the overjoyed prostitutes are about to express their gratitude with the tools of their trade, Lucia shows up and, with an audible grin, asks if your two "horny assholes" are ready to get going. You can practically hear Church blushing as he hastily tries to assure her that none of his men were about to take advantage of the situation.
• Permanently Missable Content:
  • Some pieces of equipment can only be gained once, maybe twice in the campaign - if you lose or sell them, they're gone for good. Examples include the mortar-toting Humvees in Nueva Tortuga and Chihuahua, the HIMARS launchers and M109 self-propelled howitzers in Oklahoma, and any Integrator gear found in their main camp, should you choose to attack it^note this is an optional mission, making it a double example.
  • If you leave Abiquiu without a fight, you miss out on an entire mission for the Movement. However, this prevents you from acquiring an Abrams tank and a Bradley IFV early in the campaign, plus it'll most likely cost you most of the Founders forces you took with you from Haven, so you really shouldn't do this unless you want to run a Movement-focused campaign.
  • Shops either reset their inventory between missions or become completely unavailable. Either way, if you see something you like, buy it now or regret it later.
• Phallic Weapon: Although all howitzers evoke this impression in some capacity, Legion's version looks particularly suggestive due to the shape of its barrel.
• Plasma Cannon: Used extensively by Legion forces, and available as mid-to-late game upgrades for your army as well. Most vehicles can replace their ballistic weaponry with plasma cannons of various sizes, and your infantry can make good use of Legion's plasma rifles, shotguns and machine guns. Plasma guns are less effective against certain types of armor, but since no NPC units seem to actually mount these, it's basically a non-issue.
• Power-Up Letdown: ATGM squads can be trained to target their missiles at enemy aircraft, but not only is this virtually useless in the campaign due to the rarity of enemy fliers, it also cuts their already low ammo pool in half, severely limiting their much more important anti-armor capabilities.
• Prequel: The game is set 10 years after Judgment Day and thus 17 years before the events of Terminator: Dark Fate. None of the characters or plot points of the film play a role in the game's narrative, but it expands the lore of the timeline and also explains some of Dark Fate's more important divergences from the Skynet timeline, first among them how the Resistance acquired the sort of cyborg conversion technology used on Grace.
• Production Throwback:
  • The character of "Big Bob" first appeared in Syrian Warfare's DLC and his continued appearance in this game is possibly a reference to "Thick Bob" from Paradise Cracked as both look visually similar. (Cats Who Play has some former GFI Russia/Mist Land South developers who worked on Paradise Cracked.)
  • Kondo is one for "Sintu" from COPS 2170: The Power of Law (Same Cats Who Play developer situation.) as both are Asian civilians who have similar facial hair and are great marksmen who also happen to have a romantic partner called Charlie and his squad name is even Sintu-2!
• Quantity vs. Quality: The choice between Movement units and Founders units in a nutshell. The Founders are The Remnant of the United States Army — they're pros, and they have access to superior military-grade gear like the Bradley IFV and the Abrams MBT. The Movement are civilian fighters, making do with less-advanced and often improvised weapons and technical pickups, up-armoured vans and Big Badass Rigs. There's no question that Founders units have superior performance (better equipped, tougher, etc.), but you can often take and field two Movement units for the cost of one Founders equivalent.
• Race Against the Clock: Most missions force some degree of hustle on the player, sometimes with visible timers, sometimes without. These time-limited tasks often appear without warning in the middle of a mission, which in turn tends to result in a lot of Save Scumming when players find themselves unable to divert enough forces in time to react to the new development.
• Ragnarök Proofing: The game world is full of rusted vehicle wrecks that presumably have been lying there for up to decade, but most can be returned to service with only some basic battlefield repairs. Many even still carry fuel and ammo. Needless to say this wouldn't work that easily in Real Life, if at all.
• Red and Black and Evil All Over: Unlike Skynet's chrome-and-red palette, Legion's troops are colored black with glowing red highlights (usually the eyes).
• Redshirt Army: The Movement in general. Being a ragtag militia of civilians instead of trained soldiers, almost all of their units are worse performers than their Founders equivalents. This is compensated by their troops having half the upkeep costs, allowing you to maintain twice as many of them.
• Redshirts: Movement militia squads. Cheap on the upkeep, easily replaced, badly equipped, badly trained and with a limited selection of skills even if they do survive long enough to get promoted, they really don't have much going for them. Ironically, they actually have quite a bit of red on their uniforms.
• Regenerating Health: Infantry squads can slowly recover health overtime if they're out of combat. This only applies to surviving squad members, though; it can't replace losses in the field.
• The Remnant:
  • The Founders are made of ex-US military forces that were able to survive the events of Judgement Day post-Terminator: Dark Fate.
  • The Cartel actually survived the apocalypse and you find they are building a new nation in the southern US/northern Mexico.
• Resources Management Gameplay: The player is required to obtain supplies and new troops in order to both restock units and replace fatalities in a squad in addition to having to keep troops stocked up on ammo during actual battles.
• Rocket-Tag Gameplay: Units die incredibly quickly in this game, but nowhere more so than on Realistic difficulty. This mode basically runs on "whoever shoots and hits first wins".
• Save Scumming: The game seems to all but expect players to do this on a constant basis, as the slightest error or miscalculation can end in disaster, and missions regularly throw curveballs at you that you might well be unable to counter without knowing what's coming.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: A month after Judgement Day in the prologue, Atlanta PD Officer Chris Stevens wants to move back to the ruins of Atlanta to rescue survivors trapped in the fight against Terminators and surviving US Military forces, but some of the surviving APD officers want nothing to do with it and bug out since they don't have a surviving chain of command and the Terminators wiped out the police in the city.
• Shotguns Are Just Better: Although somewhat shorter-ranged than assault rifles, shotguns deal absurd amounts of damage. Plasma shotguns can even take down heavy tanks if you can target the side or rear armor, and a squad of engineers or guerillas can lock down an enemy spawn point on its own if garrisoned in a building next to it.
• Slavery Is a Special Kind of Evil: One of the main reasons the Movement has such a beef with The Cartel is the latter's widespread use of slavery. It's also what makes them uncomfortable to deal with the Integrators. The Nueva Tortuga mission allows T-Force to either enable or obstruct the slave trade between both factions. Needless to say the latter option turns out to be more rewarding, not to mention the morally sound one.
• Smoke Out: Smoke grenades are available and reduce the accuracy/speed of units firing through them.
• Socketed Equipment: Founders and Movement vehicles have slots for engine and armor upgrades, and most Movement vehicles can mount additional guns as well. The Bradley IFV can be outfitted with a powerful ATGM launcher as a secondary weapon.
• Spider Tank: Many of Legion's vehicles move on four or six legs, most notably its artillery unit and its ubiquitous light ground unit, the aptly named Spider.
• Subsystem Damage: Inherited from the Warfare games, notably it applies to larger robots in addition to vehicles meaning it's possible to damage the movement speed/reload capability of them in addition to proper vehicles.
• Suicide Attack: Suicide bomber drones first appear in the second tutorial mission, where they are even marked and pointed out in dialogue so the player is aware of them because they're just that dangerous. Later missions no longer afford this luxury, so keep an eye out for this nasty One-Hit Kill surprise.
• Tank Goodness:
  • You're given an Abrams tank more or less for free in the first real mission, and although it is expensive as hell to maintain, you'll do everything you can to keep it alive because it's just that good in combat. Late-game missions allow you to salvage several additional Abrams, but their immense upkeep usually makes it unfeasible to keep more than two, maybe three in your army.
  • One of the coolest tanks you can get your hands on is a WWII-era Sherman that has been fitted with a colossal Integrator railgun. It is hands down the most powerful direct-fire weapons available, capable of even one-shotting the otherwise borderline-unstoppable Legion tanks. Give it to your Blood Knight tanker Sgt. Calderon to make her Christmas and birthday all in one. Unfortunately the Integrators will not like you having their baby and refusing to turn it over prevents you from being friends with them.
• Time Skip: Ten years pass between the first tutorial mission (set one month after Judgment Day) and the one right after it. There're also numerous cutscenes that involve skipping ahead by 30 minutes (characters explaining stuff to each other that the player already knows) or a couple of days (road construction to enable faster travel between two settlements).
• Too Awesome to Use:
  • Integrator vehicles are highly effective, but the game really doesn't want you to use them. Every single one of them^note except for the basic technical, for some reason, from the tank down to the lowly tractor, costs a whopping 10,000 supplies per day. For reference, your most expensive normal units like the Abrams tank are a "mere" 5,500 per day. Integrator gear also has below-average sale prices, making it even more useless to lug it back to base and pretty much forcing you to disassemble it on site to get any use at all out of it.
  • The HIMARS rocket launcher only has enough ammo for a single barrage, and a full reload costs a whopping 2,400 units of ammo supply. The number of opportunities where its deployment is actually worth the cost can be counted on one hand with fingers to spare. A HIMARS barrage is extremely powerful, able to devastate a huge area and kill anything in it that's lighter than a tank, but considering its ammo costs and the unit's high upkeep of 2,700 supplies per day, it can be really hard to convince oneself to keep this thing around.
• Transhuman Treachery: The Integrators are a faction of militant Cyborgs who believe that pure humanity is unworthy of survival and that if it is to survive the onslaught of Legion then it must accept replacement by machine hardware. Though the Integrators (mostly) do not support Legion directly and T-Force can even scratch up an alliance with them with the right overtures, this is strongly disliked by your soldiers.
• Ungrateful Bastard: No matter how much you suck up to the Integrators during the campaign, they won't come to your support in the final mission, unlike every other non-evil faction you interact with. The only difference between an Integrator-friendly and an anti-Integrator playthrough is therefore whether or not they'll trade with you.
• Universal Ammunition:
  • Averted on a per-unit level, as most weapons tend to have a unique caliber that can't be used to feed different weapons carried by the same unit, but played straight by the ammo reserves carried by most vehicles including supply trucks. These can replenish any weapon, from handguns to tank cannons, with the only difference being how many units of supply each projectile costs. For instance, most rifle bullets cost 0.5 units while 155mm howitzer shells cost 120 units apiece.
  • Also played straight in terms of fuel. Doesn't matter if a vehicle runs on gasoline, diesel, kerosene or rocket fuel, they can all refill from the same tanker trucks.
• Universal Driver's License: Averted, vehicles require dedicated driving or flying skills to drive and unlike Warfare, it's possible for units to be qualified to drive an APC but incapable of driving a tank. In fact, all units except the basic infantry/militia squads can drive vehicles, but driving tanks or piloting helicopters requires specialist training.
• Unstable Equilibrium: Every active unit in your army needs upkeep in the form of supplies, incentivizing you to limit the size of your strike force. On the other hand, this game is hard and combat is unforgiving, so you'll want as many units as possible to lower Legion's numerical superiority and replace the inevitable losses you'll incur. Balancing these two factors will give you headaches on more than one occasion.
• Unusable Enemy Equipment: More or less inverted to "Unusable Ally Equipment". Although you can't permanently recruit Legion units for your army, you do get multiple opportunities to hack them and turn them into temporary, non-controllable allies. It's your actual human allies who have neat toys you can't (officially) get your hands on, like the Founders' M109 howitzers in Oklahoma. Integrator vehicles can be driven by your troops, but are so prohibitively expensive to maintain that they're all but unusable anyway.
• Unwinnable by Design: If the player is too careless with their supplies, they can get stuck at the world map unable to move or trade with settlements for supplies.
• Veteran Unit: Units gain experience from killing enemies and are promoted at certain thresholds, gaining improved combat effectiveness and ability slots in the process that can be used to either specialize or improve the unit further. Reaching Elite status can take almost the entire campaign, though, giving further incentive to keep your troops alive.
• We ARE Struggling Together: The game takes place at a time when the various anti-Legion resistance movements aren't yet on the same page. The Founders often won't give the Movement the time of day, much less share useful intel with them, which in turn makes the Movement wary of the Founders (and rightfully so). Smaller resistance groups have even less contact with the large ones. Uniting them all against their common enemies is one of the campaign's overarching goals.
• We Have Reserves: Legion will constantly send Homunculi and robot attack dogs to harass your forces on some maps, even if you have succeeded in your objectives there. The message is simple: Don't stick around, do what you're there for and move on.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: Pretty much everyone indulges in this at some point in the campaign.
  • After The Cartel's defeat in Chihuahua, Legion's forces attack and destroy the entire city, now that it no longer has a use for it.
  • You can elect to attack the Integrators at their main camp in the campaign's penultimate mission. Seeing how they won't come to your aid no matter how nice you were to them, this can be interpreted as Church considering the 'borg freaks no longer useful to the Resistance's cause.
  • Founders HQ Actual pulls this on the entirety of T-Force during the final mission at Galveston, leaving them stranded without an evac route in the face of a massive incoming Legion army the moment he has what he wanted. Thankfully, The Cavalry rides in just in time to save T-Force's collective butts.