Arnie 2

A shooting range with Arnold Schwarzenegger's icon — that's Arnie 2 from 1993, and there's nothing suggesting it's about some deep plot. It's just about shooting.

This was released by some lesser-known studio, not Terminator Films or Schwarzenegger Productions — so you know where you stand. Top-down view, simple figures, targets and lots of enemies in pixel resolution that looks like Zombies Ate My Neighbors without story and with fewer jokes. You just wander around the map and shoot at anything that moves and isn't your color. Bullets fly, things fall, points are counted. Fifty levels, various environments, always the same mechanics.

Controls are a trap. Movement and shooting work, but it's not elegant — more like steering a ship through mud. You can barely say it had any personality. The graphics are functional, the sounds are plastic without character. Playability rapidly disappears around the tenth level when you realize the game won't change. Repetition without substance. No weapon upgrades, no story, no reason to keep playing.

In the nineties it was just another action three-liner you'd rent from the rental place when there was nothing better. Today it's mainly a curiosity — proof that not every big name actor's name made sense in the catalog. Graphically archaic, game-design boring.

You can play it today in an emulator from any junkyard, but there's no reason to. If you miss raw, simple shooting without ceremony, there's Commando, Alien Carnage or Smash TV — all much more polished. Arnie 2 is more a chapter in the story of how it was done wrong when the director was afraid to say no.