Terminator: Dark Fate - Defiance: Uprising Review

I never expected to play Terminator: Dark Fate - Defiance again after reviewing it last year. There was nothing wrong with the game, and if anything, it was one of the better strategy titles to come out in recent memory. However, the lifespan for niche games loosely based on films isn’t great, especially ones from relatively unknown developers. It’s 2025 now, though, and I still keep Slitherine Ltd’s take on a heavily modified Company of Heroes installed. That’s partially because I occasionally want to play as the commander of a resistance force, and partially because I never know when its next expansion will drop. Its most recent one, Uprising, doesn’t venture into unexplored territory. Instead, it plays it safe by offering what boils down to being more Terminator: Dark Fate - Defiance. And even though “safe” and “Terminator” should be antonyms, they aren’t in this case, and that’s not a bad thing.

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Taking place after the events of Terminator: Dark Fate - Defiance: We Are Legion, Uprising’s premise isn’t all that different from that expansion, nor their respective base game. You play as the commander of the last not evil human army that’s trying to, uh, resist the Terminators who control what was once the United States. The title’s protagonist, Lieutenant Church, is gone. And in his stead, you need to do the same thing he did. You have to capture maps controlled by Legion, maintain your forces, and choose how to deal with the few humans who are still trying to survive the post-post apocalypse. All of this is done in the same manner as it was in the base game: you move your forces around a giant map, then engage in real-time battles from an overhead perspective, and then return to the map to manage your soldiers’ equipment and supplies.

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The difference, singular, between Terminator: Dark Fate - Defiance and its second DLC Uprising is that the latter is substantially more free-form. Although there are set objectives you need to complete, and what equates to main missions, you’re allowed to tackle both in whatever order you want. It’s up to you to decide what fights you want to engage in, which ones you want to run from, and which ones you don’t want to deal with at all. It’s an open sandbox where you get to decide the fate of the world, and the assorted factions within it. It should go without saying, but it’s a good one, too. The expansion is extremely punishing, and yet it never feels like you’re throwing your head into a brick wall purely for the sake of it. You have to deal with the consequences of every decision you make and every soldier you lose, but it’s extremely satisfying to figure out how to lead your army. 

Admittedly, that was true for both Terminator: Dark Fate - Defiance and Terminator: Dark Fate - Defiance: We Are Legion (its first expansion). And, in a broad sense, that’s Uprising’s only real problem. It doesn’t add much content, and doesn’t do much that its base game didn’t do. There are a few new maps to fight in, a handful of new units to toy around with, and the ability to actually play however you want to. It doesn’t change the way you play the game, though. Instead, it just offers you another excuse to boot it up. That’s not a bad thing; Terminator: Dark Fate - Defiance: Uprising is, like the title you have to own to purchase its expansion, fantastic. It’s balanced, fun, and almost completely without technical issues. It does everything a real-time military strategy game should do, with the added benefit of being one of the only true resistance simulators on the market.

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Whether or not that means you should pick it up largely depends on how desperate you are to play Terminator: Dark Fate - Defiance again. If you like its unique take on the age-old genre, there isn’t any reason to buy a single meal from McDonald’s instead of the expansion. If you didn’t enjoy the game, though, Uprising won’t change your mind about it. It doesn’t add as much content as it could have, and it doesn’t change all that much, either. Instead, Terminator: Dark Fate - Defiance’s second DLC offers you a true freeform sandbox where you can ignore annoying missions and shape your role in its world. You need to decide when to run, when to hide, and when to fight, and contend with the consequences for doing all three of those. Terminator: Dark Fate - Defiance: Uprising doesn’t reinvent the genre’s wheel, or even its game’s wheel. It merely offers you another way to use it.