Terminator 2: Judgment Day

"How can a game be so bad!?"

Terminator 2 is probably the best Arnold movie other than Total Recall; it's also the Best James Cameron movie except maybe Aliens. It spawned a great arcade game in which you fire a gun at the Terminators on the screen. However this is not that game, this is a terrible side scroller that never manages to capture the greatness of the movie.

Graphics:7/10
Things are always pretty well defined but the problem lies in the fact that they are too bright and shiny. In the movie locations were usually gritty excepting the foster parent's house. Locations also rarely look like they did in the movie in a dimensional sense too. Arnold the great man himself doesn't really look like he should; he looks like a scrawny guy in a black suit. If there was one character from a movie that the Arnold sprite looks like it would be Ian Malcom from Jurassic park and that's just plain wrong. The enemies look very bad and move very clunkily, especially the T-1000. The driving stages look flat boring and basic. On a good point however the Conners look like themselves and move relatively smoothly.

Sound:3/10
Awful just plain awful, explosions don't sound like explosions. The enemy death scream sounds half assed and the guns make little pops. At least the T2 theme is in there or there wouldn't be anything good at all.

Gameplay1/10
Ah, now we get into the meat of why this game is such a stinker. The primary reason would probably be the way the missions play, basically they give you a couple of sensible objectives, which you must carry out like “look up where John Conner lives” and “Keep John Conner alive”. However these objectives are rarely carried out in a sensible way and there are no clues as to how to accomplish them, you learn by trial and error alone. For example to complete the objective “Find John Conner’s student I.D.” you must search dressers and other things by pressing a certain button on your controller. That wouldn’t be bad if the I.D. was placed in locations that make sense but a lot of the time you’ll end up finding it in a drawer in the kitchen, his foster parents dresser or in the tool chest in the garage, I guess John Conner has an issue with keeping his I.D. in his own room. Even worse is that in all the missions you are always treated to the same unpleasant objective “find all future objects” this involves walking around until you find all the red box’s and then shooting them to reveal terminator heads within. Sorry but that is just stupid considering that these can be found anyplace from on the street, in a pool hall and within a cell in a mental institution to name a few. Supposedly Skynet sent them back in time but why it would do that, why it would put them in these places and why you would care remain a mystery. Obviously this objective was just thrown in to make you have to wander around the levels like an idiot and make the missions longer. Speaking of the levels themselves these levels are confusing and maze like, room placement is also quite illogical most of the time. Additionally many are too big for their own good, which makes them, feel very empty, or at least they would if it was not for the swarms of enemies. The enemies are pretty much all cops and they exist in staggering numbers, if you kill one another will quickly pop in from the side of the screen to take his place which is very annoying and makes killing them near pointless. Not only do these enemies insta-spawn their attack pattern is just wacky they will walk around moronicly, kneel, fire a bullet which does you very little damage, stand up and repeat. It’s almost as if they’re thinking “Oh there’s the guy who killed seventeen cops all those years ago, I think I’ll shoot at him. Ok I kneeled and I shot at him and now I’m going to assume it killed him, oops he’s still alive? Well since the first shot didn’t work I’m sure a second one will and then I can walk around aimlessly again just like the other 57 cops stationed at this mall.” They will continue this pattern to infinity and it will wear you down. You get 150 damage points each level and most attacks take away about two, should you die you have to start all over you only get one life and there is no password system. Should you decide that you want to kill the enemies there are some extra weapons you can pick up. These are the shotgun, the M16 and the mini gun. Although they are more effective than your pistol they sound just as terrible and using them on the enemies is unsatisfying as such stupid worthless and instantly replaceable enemies feel like a waste of time. The last thing I’m going to discuss in this section is the driving levels, between the absolutely terrible side scrolling levels you will get to play some disturbingly mind-blowingly awful driving levels. In these levels you guide a vehicle to a destination using unintuitive controls and a useless compass that steers you wrong more often than not. During these levels motorists drive their cars at speeds of approximately 300 mph and relish rear-ending you whenever you stop to make a turn. Cops you cannot outrun will also chase you and should you turn onto another street to evade them you become so lost you’ll never find your destination. These levels like the rest of the game are so ridiculously hard that you can only navigate them by memory gained from hours of trial and error experience, however due to this games all around badness I don’t see why you’d put that time into it.

Story:5/10
While the flow of the game is accurate to the movie it doesn’t tell you the story very well and if you’ve never seen the movie it will make no sense to you hence the five.

Controls:4/10
Clunky and slow are the two words best to describe these controls. The jump only takes Arnold about three feet off the ground and wont do anything i.e. help you dodge fire other than to make Arnold look stupid.

Buy, rent or emulate?
None of the above stay far far away from this one and you will be much happier.

Overall:1/10

Reviewer's Score: 1/10, Originally Posted: 12/07/02, Updated 12/07/02