T2 - The Arcade Game

The Terminator returns, this time as a graphically primitive shadow of its famous predecessor. T2: The Arcade Game is a straight port of the arcade version to PC, which unfortunately means all its strengths and weaknesses at once — a classic that looked like a dead fly even in 1993 on PC.

It's a run-and-gun shooter where you guide Schwarzenegger's T-800 horizontally through levels full of Skynet soldiers. The goal is simple: move forward and shoot anything that moves. There's no complexity, no plot — just guns, grenades, and endless waves of enemies on a horribly limited screen. The game comes from an era when arcade action at the simplest level was the gold standard.

Controls work, which is all you can say. Movement, shooting, jumping — everything is responsive, but without any flair. Shooting hesitantly waits for the rate of fire, graphics are flat and blurry, music gets into your ears after a while like a habit you don't want to get rid of. Levels are short, which means you can beat the game at noon if you're not sweating. But the difficulty increases so that later missions become tedious repetition — position yourself, wait for the enemy, fire. Repeat three times in a row.

In the nineties it was an interesting curiosity — a direct transfer of arcade mechanics to the home computer. Today it's mainly a historical artifact from a time when the Terminator IP tried to monetize almost everyone who had access to a license and a modest budget. The game isn't bad, but its immediate forgettability condemns it more to the role of a reflex trainer for beginners.

If you want to spend fifty minutes trying what shooters of the B-movie class looked like from the early DOS era and have no interest in anything with real invention, you can find it in your browser. Consciously, however, nobody looks for it. There are better and more classic pieces even from that time.