Reviews from

in the past


Props for attempting an open world game of cat and mouse with the Terminator license, but the gameplay is so utterly clunky that it just falls apart in execution.

I gave this one a genuine shot out of raw curiosity and I'm sad to say I didn't have fun with it. What Bethesda tried to do here was highly ambitious for the early 90s and frankly is a great concept for a game even nowadays. However, the execution is just...dull. I poured through the game's manual and put a genuine amount of effort into learning the game's systems and how it functioned instead of being filtered, but even once I understood what I was doing, The Terminator never became immersive, exciting, or interesting past the raw technical feat Bethesda accomplished. Running a full 3D game with an open world populated by numerous shops, NPCs, and driveable vehicles is incredibly impressive but it doesn't translate into a fun game. The problem is that there's simply just not much to do. You can explore the open world to some degree, but despite how innovative it may be, it's fairly barren in terms of intractability, being limited to driving, interacting with stores, training your aim at the shooting range, and healing at a hospital. Combine this with the game's fairly slow pace and The Terminator becomes a game with a lot of downtime with very little payoff. It's also not much of a looker, despite the highly impressive tech under the hood, and the lack of any music while playing hurts the atmosphere which that first film is so well known for. I hate to call The Terminator a bad game because it's just so ambitious and you can tell Bethesda wanted to create something unique, but it ultimately ended up being fairly dull despite the potential innovation.