The original Terminator movie and its sequel Terminator 2: Judgment Day solidified the Terminator franchise as one of the most beloved, legendary science fiction franchises of all time. An epic tale of man versus machine, with both the present and future juxtaposed against one another in a desperate race for survival, few other science fiction stories capture Terminator’s muscular action, sheer brutality and its constant tug of war between despair and hope.  Yet beyond the first two movies, literally not one good piece of notable Terminator media has been made in almost THIRTY damn years. Instead, we saw one terrible sequel after the other get churned out like Terminators being sent back in time to kill a successful story. This culminated in the awful, awful Dark Fate which, thanks to its terrible box office performance, has put off studios from making another Terminator movie for the foreseeable future. How strange, then, that after so many avoidable missteps, a small and unknown Polish game developer called Teyon has finally put out the single best Terminator story in three decades that explores a narrative fans actually want to see, while fleshing out the franchise lore so meaningfully: Terminator: Resistance.

Resistance takes place during the future war set between Skynet and the human resistance, and unlike the Mad-Max-esque, sun-soaked Terminator: Salvation, Teyon really did their homework and scrutinized every detail of the future war sequences in both the original movie and Judgment Day in order to craft their game’s aesthetic. The result is a truly immersive post-apocalyptic setting that feels distinct from other franchises like Fallout. Set in the carcass of a bombed-out Los Angeles (which, by the way, isn’t too far-off from that today), the game levels are large and filled with many structures to explore for supplies while you stay out of sight from hunter-killer drones and Terminator endoskeletons. The sense of atmosphere is filled with so many wonderful details; the color palette is dominated by a grim blue-gray tint, hunter-killer aerials patrol the skies with their searchlights piercing the night, and battles are filled with bright red and purple plasma bolts streaking across rubble while accompanied by sound effects straight out of the movies. For Terminator fans who salivated at the brief glimpses of the future in the first two movies, the visual and sound design of Resistance is a godsend.

Terminator: Resistance is a small-budget game by a small studio, and this shows in a few places. The quality of its voice acting and character animations would have been considered first rate a decade ago, but certainly not today. The game, by default, gives you way too many advantages, such as night vision goggles with unlimited batteries that let you wallhack the Terminators. This was likely done to make up for the game’s lack of sophisticated stealth mechanics and one-note AI. In my playthrough, I played on Extreme difficulty and disabled the wallhack vision, along with most of the UI, and found this to be a definitive survival experience, in which the Terminators can only be engaged with guerrilla tactics such as hacking their defensive turrets and setting traps. Even so, there are areas where the AI can be exploited by simply taking pot shots at them and falling back by a certain distance until their parameters prevent them from chasing you any further.

In spite of these shortcomings, I enjoyed Resistance immensely because it’s a game made with a lot of heart and commitment to doing its source material justice, and its weaknesses were mainly the result of the studio’s size and budget. In many ways, it also reminded me of classic single-player shooters from the early 2000s like F.E.A.R. and Far Cry. These were games that largely stayed within the parameters of a linear, story-driven first-person shooter, while at the same expanding gameplay to allow for more flexibility to approach missions. This is something that many shooters today have lost by adopting open-world gameplay; with so many sidequests and distractions to get lost in, the main narrative becomes a disjointed mess with no sense of urgency. Resistance never lets you forget about where you are at in the story, and the missions are nicely varied between large, open areas in which you can explore, sneak or fight behind enemy lines, and more linear sequences in which you are accompanied by fellow resistance forces. There’s no tacked-on multiplayer, no microtransactions, nothing to grind for; absolutely none of the irritating gameplay features that have creeped their way into most modern titles. This is a nice, old-fashioned, meaty first-person shooter that knows which modern gameplay elements to include and which to leave out.

This leads me to Resistance’s other strong point, which is its surprisingly well thought-out story that slots in perfectly with the other two movies, forming a cohesive trilogy that begins with this game and concludes with Judgment Day. The details of how the resistance came to defeat Skynet, leading it to send Terminators back in time, and how the resistance captured and reprogrammed a T-800, are only hinted at in the movies. Resistance reveals that entire side of that story, as well as finally answering the question as to how exactly Skynet sent a second terminator to go after a young John Connor despite its failure in the first movie. The beauty of the story is how it slowly unravels itself to reveal the role your character, Jacob Rivers, plays in all this. None of it feels contrived, and thanks to a pretty memorable cast of characters, Resistance’s story makes you think it’s a standalone side story until it reveals towards the end that it is, in fact, a direct prequel to both Terminator movies. The problem with the sequel films is that they pretended to be directly tied to the original movies, but were in fact studio-mandated springboards from which entirely new Terminator movies could be churned out. Resistance, on the other hand, feels like an integral and necessary third chapter to the Terminator story that stands on its own while lending so much more context to the other two chapters.

Thanks to its excellent story and capturing of the future war setting perfectly, the climactic battle at the end is one of the most fun and awe-inspiring sequences I’ve experienced in a while, far better than any of the grand setpieces in the Call of Duty games. There is nothing quite like charging across a battlefield alongside resistance troopers against an army of terminators, with a hijacked hunter-killer tank raining plasma fire on the enemy while Brad Fiedel’s signature theme booms in the background. This is literally what so many Terminator fans, myself included, have been crying out for for decades, and it is a testament to Hollywood’s creative bankruptcy that a small Polish developer of less than 100 people finally made it happen.

There’s no question in my mind: Terminator Resistance is the true follow-up to Judgment Day. The developers effectively captured the aesthetic appeal of the Terminator universe and crafted a brilliant story that fills in all the gaps with the first two movies. It’s also a damn good shooter, with good old-fashioned single player FPS design coupled with modern features like large, explorable levels, crafting, skill points, dialogue choices and multiple endings. It has the ambition and scope of a triple-A game jammed into the confines of a small studio, and while it lacks the polish and sophistication of its more big-budgeted peers, it has a much bigger heart that it wears on its sleeve. Forget Rise of the Machines, Salvation, Genisys and Dark Fate: Resistance is the true heir to the Terminator throne.