Successful product designs are often copied in the gaming industry. While many fantastic games take their cues from previous classics, there are also many lackluster clones that do little to advance the genre--or even fail to execute concepts as well as their predecessors. Terminator 3: War of the Machines falls into the latter category. As a team-based shooter with vehicles, the game strives to recapture the magic of Battlefield 1942 in a sci-fi setting but fails miserably.

Terminator 3's problems start with its graphics. While it includes a mix of contemporary and postapocalyptic maps, the map designs are poorly devised, which cuts into the gameplay value. You'll find that many bases have only one approach angle, and many pathways lead to dead ends, which creates a lot of wasted space on the maps. The character models offer a decent level of detail, but they animate extremely poorly. Additionally, it appears that the developers have neglected to include death animations. When you kill an enemy, it stiffly falls over on its back or face. (If you can just imagine pushing a mannequin over, you have a good idea of what death animations in Terminator 3 look like.) While this might be excusable in the case of killing one of the Skynet robots, there's no explanation for why the humans of the Tech-Com faction fall over in this manner. Perhaps the worst aspect of Terminator 3's graphics comes when you play as one of the sentient Skynet machines. As a robot, your viewscreen is bathed in an annoying red glow that makes it difficult to see. There's no way to shut this gimmick off. Perhaps the developers thought that forcing you to see through rose-colored lenses might fool you into thinking Terminator 3 isn't a horrible game.