Terminator: Dark Fate – Defiance

There is no fate but what we make. Terminator: Dark Fate timeline should be absolute garbage. And yet........ Its clear this game was made by people who have a lot of love for this franchise. The fact that they have created such a compelling story out the ashes of nothing makes me want to yell at Hollywood "SLITHERINE MADE THIS IN A CAVE...... WITH A BOX OF SCRAPS". I dont know, by the end of the campaign, the main character had grown on me, i actually cared about my "resistance" and i even strongly suspect i had a cameo from a character from the previous good timeline. (Pay real good attention to how they describe a certain "Digital Storm"). This game is clearly made with love.

While this is one of my favorite RTSs of all time, I understand why people don’t like it.
This game is hard to the point where it is borderline unfair. You will be expected to achieve k/d ratios where you will kill between ten to thirty units for each loss you take. And this is not a game where you can micro your way to victory. Your infantry squads are comprised of soldiers with individual health bars, and if one of those bars drop to zero and that entire squads combat effectiveness is decreased until the end of the mission. Similarly, your vehicles have armor and each hit they take will strip some of that away, permanently decreasing their health pool.
There is no base building. Instead, your army consists of whatever you managed to keep/salvage from previous missions and whatever you can afford to buy with the rewards you get from completing missions. However each unit has an upkeep cost, so you are forced to keep your army fairly small. Do you want to keep your tank, or do you want 80 men with semi auto rifles?
This means that what units you will be able to field for any given mission is entirely up to what you managed to keep alive and what you decided to keep. Instead of devising some optimal strategy, this game forces you to think tactically, constantly changing your strategy to account for ever changing battlefield conditions.
And this is where the game in my opinion shines. There is a good chance you will need to replay a mission several times (or save scum), but few games have made me feel the way I do after I beat a mission while keeping (almost) everyone alive.
Now for the bad. The AI and pathfinding in this game are not great. You will frequently give your units orders to relocate only to get a notification that they got wiped out because they decided to run in front of a tank with a 30mm rotary cannon instead of going on the other side of the building like you thought they would. There is also a lot of randomness which can result in a vastly superior force getting wiped out because they whiffed all their shots. Feels amazing when it happens to the enemy, not so good when it happens to you. And then there is the aforementioned difficulty. You will always be on the backfoot, and the game will punish you if your troops are out of position.
And of course there is New Tortuga, which is perhaps the dumbest mission ever. For some reason the developers thought making your units fight without letting you control them was a good idea. This is one you will want to look up a guide and save scum for because after the initial ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ this becomes a rather interesting fight.
Some additional notes, this game doesn’t let you just choose your units, but also customize them. There are a few flat upgrades like an ATGM launcher for the Bradley or an active protection system for the Abrams, but most of them are tradeoffs. You can put heavier armor on your vehicles, but they will be slower and handle worse off road. You can upgrade their engine making them faster, but that also increases the cost. Do you want your Humvee to have a 50 cal machine gun, a 7.62 minigun with decreased range but higher rate of fire, a plasma machine gun that does more damage but no penetration, a 40mm grenade launcher that can shoot over cover, a recoilless rifle that deals splash damage and can oneshot light armor, a plasma launcher that can kill medium armor but wont attack infantry, or a anti tank guided missile that can seriously hurt even the heaviest armor (and can even one shot from the rear) but is costly with limited ammo and has a decent chance of missing if the target is moving or if there is smoke. And those are just the options for the light vehicle weapon mount. There are still the medium and heavy vehicle weapon mounts as well as choices for rifles, lmgs, sniper rifles, and shotguns.
Oh, and yes, weapons have limited amounts of ammo that you will need to resupply. Artillery is powerful, but will quickly become useless if you don’t have an ammo truck to keep them topped up. Your vehicles also technically have fuel, but that is rarely an issue.
Your units also level up granting them better stats and letting you pick perks depending on their class.
The main campaign also features RPG like choices, both in and out of combat, which is something I have never seen in any other RTS. And these choices have consequences that you will feel throughout the entire game. A choice that you make in the very first mission can change the outcome of the last one.
The game is also fully (and rather well) voice acted.
Overall I would strongly recommend checking this game out, but understand what you are getting is a very different beast to your standard RTS fare.

Bought this on a whim when I was starting to scrape the bottom of the barrel for another RTS/RTT game... and it was genuinely worth the $30 AUD or so I paid at the time, given that I replayed it from start to finish about 4 times?
For starters, I'd recommend just playing this on normal difficulty the first time around just to get a handle on things and what to expect combat wise before bumping it up in later repeat playthroughs (if you want). Though its still fun to just redo runs on normal difficulty following different strategies/army builds or trying to min max the crap out of everything. (more on that later) The game does basically push you into the deep end of figuring things out. (At the very least read the manual that comes with the game...)
I haven't seen or heard of the Dark Fate spinoff (?) having only seen the first 2 movies a long time ago, so you don't need a deep understanding or background knowledge of the series to get into it. Essentially you can treat this game's story as another post war apocalypse with humanity being hunted to extinction by an AI/machine army. The ingame story narrative was probably engaging enough that I wouldn't skip it. Also its all voice acted too.
Music is great and memorable, mainly when it gets to combat that I felt it was worth buying the soundtrack too. I'm not really one to describe music well, if you enjoyed the OST from games like Command & Conquer, then you'll probably like the music in this one too.
If you are familiar with Syrian Warfare or its even older predecessor just "Warfare" then you'll pick this game up really easily. The game leans towards the more realistic side of time to kill and vehicle durability systems along with ammo and fuel supply management. Additionally, a lot more focus is applied to scavenging empty or abandonded vehicles (civilian vehicles with kitbash armor, APCs to tanks and various types of artillery pieces like M109's and mortars) to grow your core army or to resell at shops on the overworld for army upkeep, which I found to be quite enjoyable, since I basically spent each mission stealing everything that wasn't nailed down, the only limits being whether you have picked the map clean or you lack personnel to drive said equipment off the map to safety.
It does have the same issue of having to save scum to get a better result, whether due to your ATGM missile missing its target or you accidentally blew up a vehicle you only wanted to decrew in order to steal, but I think its still worth putting up with. If you want to avoid having to do this, probably best to set yourself "acceptable casualty limits". As long as one man in the squad survives, you can always bring them back up to full strength after the mission with no loss of XP. Losing experienced crew isn't the end of the run but infantry and crew with some levels are allowed to have passive or active skills which makes them noticeably better, whether just reloading and driving faster or options to use EMP grenades to disable vehicles or increasing the squad size.
Another big thing is the ability to customize vehicles with different weapons, pintle mounts with secondary weapons of varying types (MGs or a pintle mount ATGM launcher for example) along with different armor plating with obvious degrees of protections and downsides (steel armor on a car for obvious reasons makes it super slow), which of course leads to incentivizing the player to not throw away their units meaninglessly. For infantry, its limited to just the type of primary and secondary firearms, but there is still some variety going from bullets and upgrading to laser/plasma weapons for end tier stuff.
Its definitely a lot less buggy than the other games in the Warfare series (as its basically the same devs, even if its not in name) but performance wise it can get pretty bad in larger maps . Graphics settings aren't too detailed for you to choose from either, though if you have a CPU with good single core performance, you'll most likely be fine.
*EDIT* I forgot one more important thing of course, the bugs (and some quality of life features). I'm not saying the game is perfect but I still enjoy it despite said issues, which I will point out:
- Individual soldiers in a squad can get stuck on objects, which might be an issue when boarding transports or leaving the map... though that does lead to a beneficial exploit where you can duplicate a potentially high experienced infantry squad for free
- Pathfinding isn't the greatest, but the best way to get around that is to order vehicles individually, which you kinda want to anyway given how badly attack moving an army is in this game (let alone the entire Warfare series)
- Not being able to pick up multiple weapons on the ground mid-mission (which is very likely an engine limitation given we had the same problem in the past games)
- I don't think there was an overall hold fire command like how CoH/Starcraft II does it, so you have to turn off weapons individually for each vehicle/infantry but I really you would only be doing this on artillery pieces to stop them from just auto shooting anything visible immediately to save on ammo.
This was a guest review on behalf of the Curator, Narmaya Onee-chan.

Too complicated, however if you like Terminator and strategy games, this is game for you. Everything is made SO GOOD!
For example, you have to attach and detach trailers... feels like trucking game. Also a lot of time is wasted on customizations, you have a lot of units and you can customize every single one of them. Micromanaging is taking the pleasure away.
Units movement, explosions, sound, all that is PERFECT. Story is cool, too. My favorite strategy game but I think it can improve.
Also, it needs more factions and way more skirmish maps.

I've just finished the human campaign and just about to start the Legion campaign. This is one of the best RTS's i've ever played. Severely underrated and i'm so confused as to why it doesn't get spoken about more. This is genuinely great. As a long time fan of RTS's from the original Warcrafts, Starcraft, KKnD and odd-balls like Dark Reign, this stands strong. It has some pretty hectic difficulty spikes, but aside from that it's really good.

If you can handle the, at times, extreme difficulty, you will enjoy it a lot. It's nothing that being a little save scummy can't fix.

I give this, five big booms.

Recommended (with caveats)
I have a serious love/hate relationship with Terminator: Dark Fate Defiance. You can tell the developers didn’t have the resources they needed, but honestly, with what they did have, they’ve made a really promising game. There’s a strong foundation here. The core systems work, the atmosphere is great, and the game has a ton of potential. Despite its issues, I do recommend it, especially if you enjoy tactical RTS or wargame-style experiences. Just be aware that it still needs polish.
Main Issues (What you should know before you buy)
Optimization needs work.
Expect to have your frames drop to the lower 30s during battles and while roaming on the maps. The final mission was a nightmare to play on.
Pathfinding & responsiveness.
Units can and will get stuck the most inconvenient piece of rubble it can find. If playing on a higher difficulty, expect to lose your lovely Bradleys and M1 Abrams due to pathfinding shenangians. In a game like this, this issue will require a lot of save scumming. Which can lead to long mission times, and this is not great for people with real world commitments.
Loading & stability.
There are still moments where the game hangs between missions or during loading screens. This is incredibly frustrating, please fix.
DLCs
We Are Legion:
The Legion DLC is awesome. Playing as the machines is a fantastic change of pace. Going from fragile humans to unstoppable chrome death machines is an incredible experience. The campaign introduces new mechanics that really sell the idea that the machines are everywhere and overwhelming. It’s a bit short, but overall, absolutely worth playing.
Uprising:
The Uprising DLC is a mixed bag. It introduces a Conquest-style mode that should have added a ton of longevity. It provides a sandbox experience where you take territory and manage your army. The idea is great, and there’s real potential here. However, there are some frustrating design choices. You’re locked to playing as the Founders/Movement, which is a huge missed opportunity. The Cartel, Integrators, and Legion are all really fun factions, and not being able to play with your toys is a big letdown. It also feels like this could have been a free update rather than paid DLC. Personally, I think the resources might have been better spent on a story-driven expansion that feeds into this kind of sandbox mode.
Final Thoughts
This game is so close to being something special. There are genuinely great systems, strong faction design, and a really compelling foundation here. When everything clicks, it’s a fantastic experience. If the developers can continue to improve optimization, pathfinding, and overall polish, this can easily become a great game.
For now, I recommend it with the understanding that you’re buying into a game with huge potential that isn’t fully realized yet. Also I highly recommend you play on normal for your first experience so you do not ALT F 4 your PC and wake up your poor family because you are screaming at your toaster.

I'm an old school gamer. I am 35+ years old. At this point I don't play games just to have a good time but instead I play games to challenge my mind. If I play a strategy game I expect it to not be one of those games where you select your blob and throw it at the enemy. This game is the opposite of that and it was an ongoing learning experience on how to use the units in order to have success, even to the last mission.
People complain about lots of things but there is no such thing as the perfect game out there in any genre. The biggest complain is that you need to solve problems only in the way the devs intended it and that's not true because there are multiple ways to solve any problem. Yes you will be surprised by something you weren't ready for and there comes the save reload. I don't mind it. Sometimes I even reloaded 4-5 times in the same area just to experiment with different stuff. It's fun for me. Make a habbit to save after a succesful encounter. hard save for objective completion and quick saves f5's for regular encounter successes. With this I managed to end missions with 0 to 20 losses on average in all the missions. In the last mission I had 9 losses and 1 vehicle lost. I play in normal difficulty so I'm not bragging by any means. I had an excellent roster for the last mission.
The management of troops, equipment and supplies can be overwhelming at first but half way in I actually loved to fiddle with every individual squad or vehicle weapon and upgrade. Yes you have to sacrifice sometimes. I think in the beginning it's a rule to don't go over 30k then 50k mid game then 65k mid towards end and 90-100 000 at the end. Ask the internet at what K supplies you should be after a certain mission in preparation for the next one. Do that and you won't have issues with running out of supplies. Generally you sell ammo trucks, fuel tanks, light vehicles and trim some troops. Obviously keep the tanks and the original founder troops or other founder troops you find. but some movement troops are good too like the rpg teams, heavy infantry and guerillas with emp and c4. guerillas can smoke their way to approach a tank, drop an emp and then the tank stops for a while in which you implant the c4 get away from it and detonate it. It's very satisfying.
The story is cool, I hated Alex Church (the main character) in the beginning but towards the end I understood him, he was right all along. and his partner was very militaristic initially but towards the end he sees the value of not thinking militaristically so he goes through a transformation that's cool to see. Lucia was annoying af but the other women characters were ok yet still felt like a bit too much equality and diversity to me. In fact I saw it in the credits there was a person hired for "equity, equality and diversity" and so that explains lines like "I have more balls than you" from Lucia or the extra diversity of the characters in this game. I'ts sci-fi and it's ok but I am old school and even though it sounds off for a 2026 landscape to say I will say it. I think mostly men play games about war and especially strategy games. There may be a woman somehwere here and there or a black guy etc. but that's a minority. I would like that games like this not forcefully represent others who don't even care about such games. Let writers write how they want don't hire someone to lecture them what characters to put.
The AI is not good. The AI doesn't use cover well unless they're scripted to be in a house but you just don't see terminators back up their vehicles into cover or their terminators. but I guess that's why we can beat them with an inferior force because we have the tactical advantage so it ends up feeling great knowing you defeated many foes with your super tactical force.
There are secret functions for the tactics that are not explained to you or maybe I skipped when they were but basically it's very important when you put units in buildings to hold the right mouse click and drag in the direction you want your soldiers to face and if you zoom into the building you can drag on a certain level of the building and then you will let go and watch that squad go to that level and on the side of the building you wanted. Amazing mechanic!
The models, destructability and sound effects are very satisfying!
game will lag a bit when too many unit movements or actions are being calculated but to me it's not a big deal. I played 90's and 2000's games with things barely resembling a human form. The fact that today I can play these kind of detailed games with detailed mechanics is incredible and if that means to have a few moments where it lags a bit in fps then that's totally fine trade for me.
I have to also mention that the title really is kinda bad. Terminator: Dark Fate: Defiance like what? The game has nothing to do with the movie except for using its post apocalyptic timeline. Dark Fate was garabge anyway. Why not buy the old school T1 timeline where we would see T-600's and T-800's etc. epic well known models of terminators? or simply a license to call yourself Terminator: Defiance and do your unique terminators in that because it's your universe? but you can't do that because that would probably be very expensive. cheapest license was this "dark fate" deal so I understand it, because the game is great. I expected it to be not so great but it was great. but it gets ridiculous with the dlc's where the title becomes " Terminator: Dark Fate: Defiance: Evolution " lol
All this being said the game was amazing! from agony to extasy! exploring all kinds of strategical situations and solutions for them! Maybe it is even the best strategy game I have ever played. It has mechanics that you just don't see in other strategy games.
Thanks for making the game Slitherine! Maybe it's your best or one of your best. I also have fun in your "Broken Arrow" multiplayer modern warfare!