The opening is narrated by General John Connor himself. The year is 2027 and man's creations, collectively referred to as Skynet, have all but taken over the world. Connor leads a small resistance force, Tech Com, and knows the machines are now capable of time travel. They plan to send a force back in time to eliminate Connor's mother, Sarah. If you've seen the original movie, you'll realize the game is set in the days leading up to one of the last battles between the humans and the machines.

The biggest plusses and minuses of the game are clear from the very beginning. The cut scenes are pretty good with decent voice acting. The menus are solid, futuristic and high-tech. The game graphics are very good. Great lighting effects and nice detail, even when the room is full of people. There are times when the whole screen is far too dark to see what's going on, but there's an in-game contrast meter so you can choose your mood without messing with the TV's settings. Sounds are way above average: Gun shots, explosions, etc. Visually and aurally, Dawn of Fate ranks up there with some of the best, and Terminator fans will undoubtedly enjoy a more detailed peak into the post-apocalyptic setting that frames the movies.

Unfortunately the training sequence in the very beginning wastes no time introducing you to the biggest problem with Dawn of Fate: the controls. As with most 3D games, the camera is a problem. Depending on where you go in a room or hallway, up is sometimes up and down is sometimes down, but not always. In other words, when you move the camera switches perspective to give you a better view, but it also causes your directional movement to swap back and forth with maddening frequency. If you push up to run through a hallway pretty soon you'll be pushing the wrong way and you'll turn around, all because the camera changed location. If that sounds confusing you've got a pretty good idea of the problem.

One button will always fire your ranged weapon, whether it's a rifle, twin sub-machine guns or hand grenades (they're called canister bombs here). Holding down the right trigger creates a lock on the nearest target. Another button controls a melee attack with an electrically charged baton (plasma baton). If the ranged attack is too easy because of automatic lock-on, the melee attack is just plain sloppy. Pushing down while attacking is meant to trigger a leg sweep and another combination is supposed to cause a coup de grace attack once your enemy is on the ground. But getting these to work usually results in your character running around like he's on fire.

If you prefer the precise targeting of first person, you can switch the view by holding down a trigger. The trade off is movement; you're stuck where you are while in first person mode. There are mounted plasma cannons throughout the game that put you in first person automatically, but they're pretty powerful so it's definitely worth the sacrifice of movement.

There are eleven missions, including opportunities to play as characters other than Kyle Reese, who is your main character most of the time. The other characters give you a different look, but they play pretty much the same. You'll encounter a huge variety of bad guys: from clunky, slow terminators that must be last year's model to the almost unstoppable T-800 to giant, gleaming warships patrolling outside. The missions are fairly varied, but the actual fighting gets repetitive. The game simply doesn't provide many variations when it comes to eliminating the hordes of Skynet.

The bottom line is, no matter how great it looks I'd rather struggle against the enemies in a game than fight with the controller. It's one thing to master the controls of a game in order to succeed. It's another to spend most of your time screwing with the controls, so much so that the action on the screen becomes secondary. And that's a shame, because Dawn of Fate has a lot to offer: a decent story, good graphics and one of the best sci-fi licenses around. If you have an inordinate amount of patience, you might be able to overlook this one flaw in an otherwise great game.