Terminator is one of those 80s/90s franchises that seems like it shouldn't be difficult to get right. But just ask anyone who's tried to make any movie past the second one, or any videogame at all, just how difficult that can be. Teyon's recent sleeper-hit "Terminator: Resistance" smashed onto the scene with throwback gameplay that threw some off, but it captured the desperation of the Future War setting, and the run-and-gun gameplay of 7th gen FPS shooters in a way that vibed with a lot of people, myself included. So maybe it would be, ironically, looking into the past for what the future of the franchise would be.
Considering her position as one of the great sci-fi leading ladies, it's taken a depressing amount of time for Sarah Connor to be placed front-and-center in a videogame, but that's very quietly exactly what this new release from Bitmap Bureau has done.
The game isn't explicitly about Sarah, but she is the controllable character in the majority of stages, and the devs aren't fucking around with the kind of character she is or the kind of gameplay she has: this is a run-and-gun 2D action platformer in the tradition of Metal Slug with tons of frames of animation breathing a surprising amount of life into a world that you will mostly be interacting with at the business end of a gun. And for the most part, it feels absolutely incredible to play.
Character movements are fluid, almost any animation can be immediately cancelled into shooting which gives it a frantic feel as many weapons also fire as fast as you can pull the trigger, and most enemies are on a set pattern, so the urge to try and squeeze off one or two more shots keeps things incredibly tense.
There are levels when you control an adult John Connor in the Future War setting, and these tend to actually be quite a bit more difficult as he cuts a larger figure, making him a bigger target for enemies that Sarah can crouch under, and his plasma rifle actually feels underpowered compared to his mother's trusty pistol or assault rifle.
The T-800 rarely takes center stage, and his levels feel more like bonuses, which works for the game's incredibly arcade-y presentation as the game also makes it clear he is an unstoppable killing machine, but he's also operating under the same time limit as the other characters. So damage inflicted takes time off rather than damaging the machine, though the result of too much is the same: Game Over.
The story mode's runtime is incredibly brief the first playthrough, probably only clocking in around ninety minutes if you can get the feel of the game, but it's where the NO FATE of the game's title rears its head in the aftermath of the "canon" ending that things become more interesting, but still feel sadly lacking.
At a critical story moment, the timeline can fracture and the player is given a way to change things and experience different stages and a fairly unique plotline, but unfortunately while they're given two split points, the results are largely the same: only one stage is truly different, as is the ending the player receives. One a great deal darker and bleaker, and one with slightly more hope.
This is the game's greatest failing: there are apparently three paths, but the levels are almost identical, making the core gimmick fall just a bit flat.
This is truly unfortunate as the rest of the game feels polished and balanced for a great arcade challenge with a lot of replayability. I found myself going back and trying for perfect scores at higher difficulties just to see what would change, the game tending to add enemies and make them more aggressive rather than just increasing damage taken or making them too spongy, and the challenge absolutely ramps up on the harder difficulty. Perhaps a bit too much at times, as the final stage of all 3 timelines takes a sudden spike in how much the player has to contend with at any difficulty, even the lowest. It's the only time the escalation felt like a little too much, falling into pattern recognition and memorization over reflex or tactical positioning, but it hardly ruins the experience.
By centering Sarah Connor, "No Fate" gives a much more unique experience of a Terminator game than a lot of previous entries have, and the focus on arcade action and repeating runs for unlocks will keep a player engaged, so long as they enjoy the agility-based gameplay and increasingly brutal difficulty. My only wish for it would have been fleshing out the "what-if" scenarios further, and maybe one more level with the T-800 behind the wheel.