Terminator 2D: No Fate review – he said he’d be back

One of the greatest action movies of all time gets a new video game adaptation but is it better than the tie-ins that already existed back in the 90s?

We’re always interested in how different action is portrayed in video games compared to movies. Naturally, this comes to a head when adapting specific properties and it’s interesting that while Indiana Jones And The Great Circle is a great game it has comparatively little action and while it replicates the atmosphere of the movies extremely well the overall experience is very different.

That’s because even in the most action-packed film there’s far more dialogue and scene setting than there is fighting, which makes things especially difficult for any game trying to adapt a single movie and not an overall cinematic universe. That used to happen all the time in the 80s and 90s and while there were a few memorable exceptions it tended to lead to legions of identikit 2D action platformers.

There were a host of such games for Terminator 2, on every format under the sun. Most of them were terrible, even by the standards of the time, with an especially lacklustre effort from Ocean on the Amiga, and other home computers of the day, and truly dire SNES and Mega Drive games from LJN. But now, almost 35 years later, a new attempt has been made and despite all intervening time it’s fascinating how so many of the old problems remain.

Terminator 2 is, of course, one of the best action films ever made, but it has only one enemy in it, which cannot be destroyed by normal means. There’s also the fact that James Cameron intended it to be an anti-war film and none of the leads ever kills anyone. That creates some very obvious problems for a video game adaptation, which is why many of the contemporary ones focused on the brief future war scene at the start of the movie.

For example, the majority of the Midway lightgun game take place in the future, with the events of the movie picking up only with the attack on Cyberdyne headquarters. By comparison, No Fate opens with… John Connor being kidnapped by random bandits, while you play as Sarah Connor slaughtering her way through their ranks in what is a very obvious homage to the Contra series, with nods to Double Dragon and Taito’s RoboCop arcade game.

After that, it’s two levels of Sarah trying to blow up Cyberdyne, followed by two future war levels. You’re six stages in before there’s anything that’s actually from the movie, as you control a naked Arnie as he beats up patrons at the bar. This is actually the best level in the game but it’s also, bizarrely, one of the very few where you get to play as the T-800 (the T-1000 is also barely in the game).

The majority of the game has you playing as either Sarah or a future John Connor. You can aim by press the shoulder button and moving the analogue stick but only in eight preset directions (strangely, Sarah can’t move and shoot but John can). Beyond that, the only thing close to a complication is a slide move and the ability to jump to overhanging platforms, which could’ve worked like Shinobi et al. but lacks the enemies to take advantage of it.

We struggle to understand what the purpose of this game was, other than developer Bitmap Bureau is clearly a big fan of Terminator 2 and 90s action platformers. That’s great – so are we – but this does nothing to honour either. The steals from Contra are obvious and unimaginative, down to specific set pieces and the way the three different types of ammo work. The game borrows from the Midway lightgun game a little more subtlety, but never in any interesting way, with some very weak vehicle levels.

The game has almost no ideas of its own and even when it does, in the hospital escape level, it completely squanders them. Controlling Sarah, it seems as if the game is going to morph into a sort of stealth-based survival horror, but the stage is over almost as soon as it’s begun and the concept instantly wasted.

Strangely, even the 2D pixel artwork isn’t particularly impressive, certainly not compared to the recent Neon Inferno. It all seems like something that could’ve been done just as well back in the early 90s, with some very ugly main sprites and nothing that takes advantage of modern technology.

Apart from using the original soundtrack (including Bad to the Bone but not Guns n’ Roses) and having some neat original tunes for when it’s not, the only potentially interesting thing is a couple of moments where you can change the flow of the story from what happened in the film – assuming you’ve been beaten the game normally first. This leads to a few extra levels but while it’s a faintly interesting what if? scenario they’re functionally no different from the others.

By the way, we advise playing the game on the lowest difficult at first because if you run out of credits that’s it, you have to start right from the beginning again. We suspect that’s an attempt to hide how short the game is, in terms of overall length and each of the individual levels.

We hate to criticise something we were really looking forward to, but this is a crushing disappointment. If you watched the movie when it first came out and wondered what video games would look like in 35 years’ time, we’re pretty sure you wouldn’t have assumed something that was almost exactly the same as what already existed.

Obviously, this is meant to be retro but it’s all to no end, especially as it’s so similar to Contra you could’ve lost the Terminator licence and just called it a homage to that instead. Terminator 2 is a difficult movie to adapt into video game form but to make another attempt, all these years later, it seems there should’ve been a bigger idea at play than just more authentic music.

Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed), Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X/S, and PC
Price: £24.99
Publisher: Reef Entertainment
Developer: Bitmap Bureau
Release Date: 12th December 2025
Age Rating: 16

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