The Fight for the Future is In Your Hands

The Terminator 2029 (1992 DOS Game)

While the movies were getting adapted over on consoles, with multiple versions of The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day hitting the likes of the NES, SNES, Genesis, and even the ZX Spectrum, the PC market had its own series of games trucking along as well. Bethesda Softworks had produced one of the first ever games based on The Terminator, creating a first person shooter for DOS that had a lot of great ideas, although its play mechanics left a lot to be desired. This gave them the license to make more games based on that first movie, and the company absolutely took the liberties they were afforded.

The first “sequel” they made was a wargame shooter taking place during the future war of 2029 AD called, naturally, The Terminator 2029. In the game you take on the role of Sgt. “Iron Wolf”, a lone soldier equipped with powerful battle armor, who will get sent on various missions to take on SkyNet and the war with the machines. There’s no Sarah Connoer, no John Connor, and no Kyle Reese, as well as no one that looks vaguely like Arnold in any of the lead roles. This game is comp;letely removed from the events of the films, which is actually kind of a blessing for the whole experience.

From the start, you’re dropped right into the world and have to fend for yourself. You’ll get mission briefings between your assignments, telling you what you should do while, occasionally, providing some hints of things to watch out for. But, for the most part, it’s just you, out on the battlefield of the future war, blowing up things good top-side and then heading into bases built underground to battle terminators and collect needed supplies. Get it, blow stuff up, and do your job efficiently, soldier.

From the start, I’m going to note that this game is a mixed bag when it comes to, well, every aspect of its experience. Technically it’s a first person shooter, but it doesn’t operate the way that The Terminator for DOS did. Where that game was a free-roaming, fully 3D experience, The terminator 2029 feels very different. You are stuck moving rigidly along the four cardinal directions, and movement along those directions is set to very specific paces. It’s a lot like exploring dungeons in older RPGs, where you could move around and explore, but it was all very rigid and tightly constrained. Think Shining in the Darkness or the early Shin Megami Tensei games.

Honestly, I found the exploration to be quite painful. My brain doesn’t work well with this kind of rigid movement, and I found it hard to keep track of where I was and where I needed to go. I ended up spending more time looking at the active mini-map in the bottom corner of the screen than I did the main window, only looking up when an enemy came about or an objective was near. Free flowing movement would have been much nicer and worked much better for my brain meats.

I understand why the decision was made to limit the movement along these four directions. Where a free flowing 3D game would have had to draw textures on the fly, rigid movement allowed the team to put more work into the graphics without fear of texture stretching or making the engine even display everything properly. It kept everything far more tightly controlled and easier to work with that a fully 3D game would do. And bear in mind this came out the same year as Wolfenstein 3D, which completely reinvented the first person shooter experience. Bethesda didn’t have that game to work off of as a template, so they had to find their own way to make their shooter work. It’s a compromise, one that I don’t think works that well, but I get why they did it.

Of course, the rigid movement also makes the combat more difficult. You can’t really strafe or sneak around in this game because you’re stuck to specific directions and specifically measured paces. Instead of being able to sneak around a corner and snipe an enemy from a good vantage, you just get to charge in, be seen immediately, and share fire with bad guys… unless you elect to ignore them and run away. I ended up running away a lot because it was safer and faster than trying to combat everything. When all you gotta do is complete a mission and then get back to base, whereupon you get a full heal and a new mission briefing, why stress about clearing everything out?

Although, honestly, you’re going to struggle to get through the game. The rigid controls are one thing, but then you have to actually shoot at stuff and the game feels even more unforgiving. You get a reticule that you can drag around in the main window to aim and fire, and this is fine. Mouse-based controls work well in this context. The issue, though, is that it never feels like the hit boxes work as well as they should. I can shoot guns and throw grenades at enemies and it doesn’t always feel like I hit them, even when I have the enemies dead to rights. There just isn’t enough feedback from the game to let me know if I’m doing things right or wrong which is a massive issue in a shooter. You need enough feedback to know if you aimed right, and if not, what you hit and why.

And in fairness, the game does look good. All the graphics are sprite-based with the artists at the time for Bethesda putting in a lot of work to sell the feel of the future war from The Terminator. Everything top side is blasted out rubble while the bases underground sport clean lines and shiny chrome. About the only part that doesn’t look that great is the mission briefing sections. While the information conveyed is often useful, it’s relayed to you by three goofy looking humans, all of whom look like poorly drawn action figures and not real people. Call it the limits of the graphics for the time, but where the main game sucked me in, the style of these mission briefings pulled me back out.

Thankfully, the audio for the game sounds amazing. The music is all heavy synths and metal and metal as hell, with a lot of great tracks that feel like they were pulled from the world of The Terminator. While the mission briefings aren’t the best to look at, the voice acting is great and every single briefing (and there’s a lot of it) features full voice acting audio. Even the sound effects in the game sound fantastic, rising above the usual DOS fare of the era to make this a game actually worth playing with the audio on.

I just wish the game itself were more fun to play. Honestly, I found it very difficult to even get through the early missions, and these are, effectively, the “tutorial” for the game. Getting through the later sections was an absolute slog, and that’s even before you consider that, should you be good at this game, it’ll take you a couple of hours to complete. If you’re bad, like me, you’re in for the long haul just to get to the ending.

This leaves me with a feeling for The Terminator 2029 not unlike what I had for Bethesda’s previous The Terminator game: it’s a mixed bag with good ideas dragged down by a lot of compromises. It’s pretty obvious Bethesda took the feedback from their first The Terminator game and tried to make something that answered all these critiques. In the process, though, they crippled the game in other ways, making something just as displeasing as their first effort. The company was trying, and I appreciate the effort, but end of the day their games just weren’t fun.