The movie tie-in game is something of a dying art, but in many ways you would have to rule it death by way of suicide. The very model for movie games ensured that they would die out.
This was never terribly surprising; classically speaking, lots of money got spent getting licences and games were churned out to very strict deadlines so that they could ride the wave of movie hype. Publishers gambled that the allure of a movie poster on the box would be enough to get gamers to buy in so they could cash in.
The losers here were the art of making good video games and the consumers suckered into buying a mediocre-at-best platform or fighting game just because it had an association with a film or movie series they loved.
The exceptions to this rule were few, and they were mostly when a developer was given both time and money to realise a vision of a movie tie-in game. GoldenEye famously came out years after the movie was quite cold, and the better Star Wars movie tie-in games were developed years after their movie debuts.
Terminator 2D: No Fate might just have them all beaten in terms of coming way, way after a given movie was in cinemas, given that the film it takes as its inspiration, Terminator 2: Judgement Day, came out in 1991.
If you’ll forgive me for a moment, I’m going to go and cry in the corner, because I just worked out that was 34 years ago.
That’s the equivalent in 1991 of releasing a game based around a 1957 movie. As yet, nobody’s released a video game adaptation of The Bridge On The River Kwai, so I think Terminator 2D: No Fate is likely to remain the winner in terms of long gestation periods until that happens.
Then again, Terminator 2D: No Fate has its 2D suffix because it’s very deliberately a throwback style game, rendered in a 2D pixel art style that mostly mimics the look you would have gotten out of an Amiga game of the era, with the benefit of a little more processing power to deliver more on-screen pixel effects and parallax scrolling for each of the game’s levels.
Terminator 2D: No Fate follows the plot of Terminator 2: Judgement Day fairly closely, though in typical movie game style it does expand upon that film’s run time by offering up levels that explain how Sarah Connor came to get put in an asylum at the start of the film, as well as future John Connor’s battle to send a T-800 back in time to protect his younger self.
With those out of the way, you’ll hit all the familiar big notes from Terminator 2: Judgement Day, all rendered in surprisingly effective pixel art. Somehow they even got the cocky attitude of the T-1000 right with just a few square pixels to make it happen. So, far, so familiar.
Familiar to a point though, the first time you play through it, because one of the hooks for Terminator 2D: No Fate is that you do, to quote from Sarah Connor herself, have no fate but that which you make yourself. On subsequent playthroughs of the game after your first, in just a few key scenes you get the option to make some alternative choices that unlock new levels and different outcomes.
Before you get those choices, though, you’ve got to play through what are mostly run-and-gun Contra-style levels with a smattering of vehicle sections and a single scrolling beat-em-up level that recreates the arrival of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s T-800 to a biker bar, complete with pixellated full-frontal nudity.
Something tells me that developers Bitmap Bureau would never have gotten away with that back in the early 90s, but then the history of T2-themed games is (with the possible exception of the pinball machine) replete with some truly ordinary games.
Bitmap Bureau does know a thing or two about creating satisfying shoot-em-up action, as seen in games such as the classic Xeno Crisis, but that’s a game for the hardcore player who enjoys a truly stiff challenge. Terminator 2D: No Fate isn’t that supremely hard, especially if you do play it on the game’s easy mode.
Actually, a word to the wise here: Don’t play Terminator 2D: No Fate on easy mode. It’s simply too easy, not challenging or fun and a way to burn through the game’s levels far too quickly.
Stick to normal or hard modes and Terminator 2D: No Fate will reward you with an interesting and challenging game that affords some replayability as you chase S ranks and higher scores for each level. The alternative paths also offer up some more challenging levels, including the opportunity to let rip with the T-800 in quite spectacular fashion.
Still, this is not a long game, not that game length is an absolute arbiter of game quality. Far too many games pad out their run times with repetition or poorly designed difficulty spikes, and if there’s a criticism to be made here, it’s the one above about the easy mode being simply too easy.
If you are the type that might have bought a Terminator 2 game back in the 1990s when it was something of a cultural institution, and as long as you stick to the regular difficulty modes you’ll enough to entertain you here. Otherwise, though, this is going to be a bit niche for everyone else.
