YMMV / Terminator Dark Fate - Defiance

• Ass Pull: They way you receive your first permanent Abrams tank is just plain weird, with this human-made tank (implied to be Mother-1's from Haven) driven by a Rev-6 Terminator squad until it conveniently runs out of fuel in the middle of your op zone, forcing the chromes to abandon it. This is the one and only instance of Legion troops utilizing a human vehicle in the entire game outside of multiplayer or very rare occasions where Rev-6 squads capture abandoned vehicles automatically, it's never quite explained why they did it^note multiple characters suspect a trap, and they're right, but Legion is fully capable of devising other means of ambush without stealing human tech, and it's subsequently ignored like it never happened. It really feels like this was the only way the devs could think of to give the player an Abrams at this early point of the campaign, although this in turn begs the question of why they didn't just stick it in the Field, the old battleground where you can already salvage numerous military vehicles including a new Bradley for Big Bob.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Enemy Plasma Tanks, even on normal difficulty where your units get a large damage reduction, they can chew through your vehicles and infantry quickly while it's near impossible to destroy them quickly enough to prevent them getting a shot off.
  • Rev-6 Terminators are a nightmare, they have a charge melee attack that thankfully has ample warning, carry highly dangerous miniguns (either the bullet or plasma versions with plasma able to easily heavily damage armored units) and can take a ton of damage, they can quickly wipe out your forces if encountered unprepared and require using vehicles or large amounts of infantry to take out quickly and due to their similar appearances can easily be mistaken for the far less threatening Homunculi robots.
  • Legion plasma artillery walkers can F right off. They can fire across at least half the map, depending on where they appear, can fire at targets no Legion unit can currently see, and deal enough damage to wipe out almost anything you can send against them before it gets in range to shoot back. Late-game artillery positions even come with dedicated supply trucks that make it unfeasible to hunker down and wait for the artillery to run out of ammo. Your only practical recourse is counterbattery fire, but this requires either howitzers or HIMARS launchers of your own, neither of which are all that easy to obtain and maintain. Howitzers also need to enter the Legion artillery's firing range to shoot back, which in extreme cases might get them killed before they can get a shot off.
  • Enemy Snipers once they start carrying the Barrett (which can instantly kill infantry and do damage to lightly armored vehicles) or laser sniper rifles (which don't one-shot infantry but are better at damaging vehicles) as they force the player to use smoke and either find an alternative path or rush them down before they can inflict heavy damage on vehicles and pick-off squads.
• Difficulty Spike: The Nueva Tortuga mission is such a brutal jump in difficulty that it effectively acts as a filter for any player who isn't sufficiently in love with the game to push through it. While a fun mission on paper, in practice it's severely hampered by unfair balancing, an abundance of absurdly tanky enemies, and too many RNG-dependent mechanics that can and will screw you over for no fault of your own. It's widely considered That One Level for these reasons and more, and is responsible for a great many negative reviews on Steam due to how early in the campaign it's set (it's the second story mission past the three tutorial levels).
• Enjoy the Story, Skip the Game: With a wildly branching campaign with multiple options in each level that impact the storyline further down the road, hidden objectives and side quests across every map, and plenty of smaller vignettes scattered about realized with a full voice cast, the story of the game is arguably more compelling than the movie it is based on, essentially presenting a more grounded version of Terminator Salvation within the Dark Fate continuity. However, the many issues with the gameplay make it hard to attach onto characters that could die at any moment and remain permanently dead for the rest of the game.
• Giant Space Flea from Nowhere: If you choose to steal the EWS truck from the Integrator Main Camp instead of doing their mission at Midway, the appearance of the Legion Prototype-2 Spider Tank at Galveston comes completely out of the blue. This is somehow made even worse by the "2" in its name, subtly telling you there was/is another (the one at Midway) that you didn't get to see.
• Goddamn Bats:
  • Suicide drones. Easy enough to kill if you spot them in time, but absolutely lethal if you don't, they're one of the main reasons you should never advance, or even just move forces, without at least someone keeping overwatch from a position with good sight lines.
  • Homunculi and Wolves, Legion's basic infantry units, are fairly low on the overall threat scale, but still dangerous enough that they can't be easily ignored, and tanky enough to absorb disproportionate amounts of firepower for how numerous they are. Homunculi squads also carry SMAW rocket launchers that make them a threat to any vehicle, even tanks, and Wolves are fast enough to keep up with any human infantry and even most vehicles, making them virtually impossible to escape from once they've picked up your scent.
• It's Hard, So It Sucks!: Even among some veterans of the Warfare series that this game borrows the engine from, a opinion is that at t times the game's difficulty surpasses Warfare extremely.
• Moral Event Horizon: Founders HQ crossed it when they came up with the specifics of their bait tactic to lure out Legion forces from the Oklahoma base. They didn't use soldiers as bait, but these soldiers' civilian families by pulling said soldiers out of their forward camp, leaving it wide open to attack. Legion took the bait, killed everyone in the camp, then wiped out the actual Founders assault forces, meaning the whole thing was not only incredibly callous but also completely pointless. No wonder Major Kelso and his forces, who had been chosen as the bait, deserted right after witnessing this insanity and retreated to Vega.
• Nintendo Hard: This game is absolutely unforgiving even on the lower difficulty settings. Your infantry dies as soon as an enemy looks at them funny unless they're garrisoned in a sturdy building, and your vehicles are only one ambush or miscalculation on your part away from being turned into scrap metal. Missions usually take upwards of an hour and always have evolving parameters that all but force you to save-scum in order to avoid sudden mission failures. The fact that so much of the combat is RNG-based plays a major role as well - nothing like watching a well-planned assault crumble because the RNG decided that this is the perfect moment for your tank to miss six shots in a row while the Legion tank it's shooting at scores one hit after the other.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Although the strategic supply mechanic itself is totally fine in principle, it is almost universally considered broken due to balancing issues. Unit upkeep is absurdly high across the board, to the point it's all too easy to get soft-locked right after the tutorial missions because you're lacking the supplies necessary to reach the next campaign mission. Even if you make it past this point, the system makes it virtually impossible to build up a large army no matter how well you play, basically forcing you to sell off tons of valuable, irreplaceable equipment after every mission just to stay mobile. Most players seem to agree that, although the mechanic does a decent job at simulating the vast logistics requirements for keeping high-tech equipment like main battle tanks operational, the restrictions it imposes severely impact the fun of playing the game.
    • Further compounding this was in the release version of the game, the difficulty settings did not affect this mechanic at all, so there was no way to make it more forgiving. This has since been patched in so that Normal difficulty comes with a generous 40% reduction in upkeep costs.
  • Most enemy infantry units drop their special weapons upon death, allowing you to take them for yourself... if you have a squad that can use them on site. There's no way to just pick up all this gear to distribute or sell off later outside of swapping what your own troops are already carrying, which leaves you no choice but to leave tons of valuable equipment behind when you move on unless you take the risky decision to intentionally have soldiers come into battle under-equipped to trade away the infinite default weapons. Worse, if a unit contains multiple soldiers that can use a given weapon (like sniper teams or RPG squads), only one will pick up the new gear. If there's another one lying around and you send the same team to get it, that same soldier will drop the gun he just got to pick up the identical copy, leaving his buddy high and dry. The weird thing is that you have a Grid Inventory in your army management screen that contains all the gear you purchased at stores or removed from captured vehicles, so there obviously is some sort of storage available, but the game simply doesn't allow you to use it for battlefield salvage.
  • Both the Arena and Duels in Tortuga fall under this:
    • The Arena has very little fights so the player is encouraged to bet as much as they can to afford the most equipment however the actual AI of the player's team can and will screw them over here, especially against the duo of spiders where every second matters, things like your troops occasionally missing an rocket isn't normally too bad but the every second counts nature of the arena battles makes it borderline luck-based as if the AI does the wrong thing at all, it's time to load your save or lose out on alot of money to help prepare for the brutal second half of the mission.
    • The Duels are outright luck-based, doesn't matter what equipment you give your troops, it's down to pure luck as you don't control them at all and the AI doesn't fight smartly here, it was notably so bad that the duels had to be patched several times to be easier.
  • Picking a landing spot for your helicopter tends to be incredibly annoying due to how arbitrary the system is in terms of where you're allowed to touch down. You can have as much level ground and open space as you want; the chances of you being allowed to land in a favorable location are still maybe 10% at best for no apparent reason.
• Self-Imposed Challenge: A Movement-only playthrough most definitely counts. For starters, you have to make do without the extremely powerful Abrams tanks and Bradley IFVs. Then there's the fact that you have to manage at least twice the amount of very fragile units, which massively escalates the micromanagement you'll have to do and also makes it more difficult to acquire elite units because it's so unlikely for any one squad or vehicle to survive long enough to get promoted more than once, maybe twice. This is compounded by Movement units having less powerful veteran abilities overall even if you do manage to keep your troops alive. Game performance getting even worse than it already is due to the number of units on the field is another detrimental factor. Also, most buildings can only hold between 10 and 25 units, meaning you're unable to cram nearly as much firepower into a given defensible position as you would with Founders troops.
• That One Level: Tortuga is a more CRPG-like level with plenty of side tasks which is good on concept, however the execution is wonky. The arena duels require some luck with the enemy AI to be done smoothly and quickly while the duel with a gang is literally just random chance, and when the mission goes loud, your reinforcement waves are dropped directly in front of an enemy outpost with 3 vehicles that can quickly damage them/take out your infantry with very little you can do... and then a Legion Tank possibly shows up, which can on its own wipe out your entire reinforcement group all at once. Almost all parts of this mission have been patched multiple times since release to make it less punishing and random, but it still remains fairly difficult, as well as controversial in its overall execution.