Terminator 2D: NO FATE Review

If there is a target audience for Terminator 2D: NO FATE, I can’t imagine a much better fit than myself. I saw the film in theaters at the age of seven and it immediately became my entire personality for the rest of 1st grade. I swooped up anything with that awesome half-human, half-endoskeleton Arnold face on it, from school folders to trading cards. I traded in enough of my Genesis games to get a Sega Menacer light gun and the home version of T2: The Arcade Game. The game was fine, but the things that stuck out to me were any direct allusions to the movie. I specifically remember seeing an inflatable Brontosaurus in the Cyberdyne level and recognizing it from the film. You could tell that actual fans of the movie made this game! In the age of shoddy licensed games that bore little to no resemblance to their source material, this really stood out to me.

That feeling is 10x more prevalent in Terminator 2D: NO FATE. Playing it, you can’t help but feel like the team at Bitmap Bureau had more than a few devs that grew up drawing T-800s in the liners of their elementary school notebooks. With few deviations, NO FATE follows the events of the 1991 classic. An early stage features you playing as the nude T-800 as he enters a biker bar. Dwight Yoakam’s “Guitars & Cadillacs” plays as various rough-and-tumble types pick fights with you in traditional beat-em-up combat.

So far, so good! I was already appreciating what the game was doing, but the depths of its reverence were fully revealed when I punched the jukebox and it promptly changed tracks to George Thorogood’s “Bad to the Bone.” Ok yep, this is a full-on love letter to the coolest movie of all time. By the end of the level, you’re even tossing that one dude on top of the grill in the kitchen.

This level of slavish references to the film continues for better and for worse. Iconic scenes like the semi truck chase in the L.A. River are great to include in theory, but not particularly fun to play when they wind up being retreads of the maligned Battletoads Turbo Tunnel sequence. But then you shoot a gate open with your shotgun and the T-800 does the sweet flippy reload thing and all is forgiven for a moment.

Early sections of the game made me expect a procession of stages with simple gameplay taken straight from 16-bit era beat-em-ups and Contra entries. Before too long, a refreshing amount of variety reveals itself. Sarah Connor may blast her way through a couple early levels, but when it comes time to escape from the asylum it suddenly turns into a stealth challenge. She sneaks around the hospital, picking locks and hiding in closets as guards pass by with flashlights. When the T-1000 appears and begins its hunt for Sarah, it briefly feels like a retro tribute to the Mr. X sections of the Resident Evil 2 remake.

Most of the Sarah and future John levels are reminiscent of Contra, tasking you with dodging bullets and firing back as you progress along a 2D plane. Playing as the T-800 is more akin to Streets of Rage, allowing you to move into the foreground and background as you trade fists with enemies. This section also eschews a standard health bar (he’s an unkillable robot after all) in favor of a system that subtracts time whenever you take damage. It forces you to play aggressively and take out enemies quickly if you want to avoid the timer running out. This approach would likely wear on me if it were the standard for every level, but as is it’s a welcome bit of variety.

I’m referring to this character as the T-800 because there are no clear likenesses of Arnold Schwarzenegger in the game. Bitmap Bureau was able to acquire numerous likenesses for the character portraits — Linda Hamilton and Robert Patrick serve as the visual basis for Sarah Connor and the T-1000, and even more minor characters like Miles Dyson and the future John Connor appear as they did in the film. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for Arnold Schwarzenegger, Edward Furlong, and somehow, Budnick from Salute Your Shorts. He was probably busy.

It doesn’t matter most of the time. When you play as the T-800, there isn’t a lot of confusion regarding who that Mr. Olympia pixel art body is supposed to represent. The only time it’s really apparent is when dialogue portraits pop up and instead of seeing Arnold’s face, it’s a close-up image of a T-800 with the face skin melted away.

Ultimately, my time with Terminator 2D: NO FATE was uneven. I was initially uninspired by the early shooter levels, only to later be impressed by the unfolding variety of missions and cavalcade of meaningful fan service. It’s a mix of serviceable shooter gameplay, one-off themed missions like the asylum escape, and sequences that are cool in theory but not particularly fun to play (the two vehicle chases are the main offenders).

It’s a dedicated throwback to action games of the early 90s, down to the finite amount of continues on the default difficulty. A handful of unlockable modes offer modifications to difficulty and structure, but the most meaningful replay value is derived from a couple of branching paths triggered by decisions made during the story mode. Depending on your choices during two moments, the stage order in the back half of the story mode can be slightly shifted. Replay value is sorely needed here, and unfortunately these limited unlocks and branching paths aren’t enough to justify numerous playthroughs.

My first playthrough of the story mode on default difficulty lasted 46 minutes and 29 seconds. I immediately started my second playthrough and made different decisions, which resulted in an experience that felt about 80% identical but lasted 35 minutes.

I normally don’t factor price into my thoughts on a game, but Terminator 2: NO FATE’s price as it compares to its runtime feels especially egregious. It launched at $30 and I can’t imagine most players feeling the need to complete it more than two or three times at most. Ironically, I probably spent $50 of 1993 money on T2: The Arcade Game (plus the cost of the Menacer!) for an experience that could also be beaten in under an hour. That said, situations like that were more the norm in the 16-bit era and I feel like modern audiences will not be as forgiving of the price-to-length ratio.

As a huge fan of Terminator 2 and the 16-bit era of sidescrolling action games, I certainly found plenty of things to appreciate about this faithful throwback from Bitmap Bureau. If you see NO FATE on sale for $10 and have the same nostalgia that I have for its inspirations, I’d give it a hearty recommendation. It becomes much harder to recommend a $30 purchase for a 45-minute long experience. But then again, it did remind me of that scene where Arnold kneels on the hood of a semi truck and unloads a full assault rifle clip into the T-1000. So it can’t be THAT bad.