""Terminator!""

In the style of Operation Wolf, you have a game that puts you in control of one of the most famous movie figures of all time, the Terminator. Set in a first person view, your job is to go through several different stages of increasing difficulty in order to save a young John Connor from the clutches of the evil T-1000! You’ll start out in the futuristic apocalyptic battlefield and end up in present day, fighting both Terminators and law enforcement officers.

The Game Play

What you have here is a game that you simply point the gun and fire off rounds at different enemies that appear on screen. You can fire at enemies that appear up close and personal and even ones that are way in the background, seemingly out of your range. Each stage that you pass through will get progressively harder with the enemies becoming much faster and harder to destroy in the process! As a two player game, it is easier to have you and a friend run through the game blowing everything up.

Points are given and deducted depending on your ability to blow things up. If you shoot the innocent victims, then you’ll end up having points deducted from the end of your mission. With this being said, weapons of mass destruction such as rockets and smart bombs can be picked up by shooting the different boxes that are located throughout the different stages. Once you’ve made it through the game, the only thing that you can do is play through for a better score!

Control really isn’t something that you need to worry about if you’ve played other light gun games before. Much like Operation Wolf, all you have to do is pull the trigger and blast at whatever comes your way. When you want to fire a rocket, all you have to do is hit a small button on the right side of the light gun and you’ll fire off a ton of rockets. You have to watch your cooling level though, because the more that you fire off your gun, the slower your repeating gun fire comes off!

The Visuals

Dark and moody, you’ll find that the post-apocalyptic battlefields are something that come straight from the movie. You’ll have to watch Terminator 2 in order to really understand what everything here means. From the way that the enemies are designed, to the way that they seem to jump up at you all the time, you’ll find that the action is never truly lacking from one moment to the next with one of the best looking stages being the first battleground that you run and shoot through!

The Audio

There really isn’t much in terms of music to listen to other than a constant droning sound that comes with the game attempting to be dark all the time. The sound effects that you have in the game is what you’ll be hearing more often than not, with sound bytes coming in from Arnold depending on your attacks. The explosions and otherwise do bring the game together in a rather interesting way and it does keep the game up on a constant pace.

Why you might not like this game:

Terminator 2 is extremely difficult from the first stage on. With the amount of enemies that are coming at you, there is no possible way that you can actually get through the game without dying a few times. With two players, you might get through most of the game, but this is a quarter eating machine that will leave you broke if you’re not careful!

The Verdict

As a gun game, this is something that you might enjoy as long as you’ve got a few bucks to spend. With all of the ties to the movie that you would expect, there is nothing better than kicking the crap out of a ton of robotic killing machines and keeping you on your toes. However, once the game is done and over with, there is nothing new that you’ll find and most of the game consists of just keeping your score up to a huge level!

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 05/21/02, Updated 05/21/02