The Terminator...Sounds like it could make a good game, right? Wrong this time, buddy...

Graphics:They have some detail, but it manages to look so amateurish, with the colors! Most of the time, the colors are limited to gray, black, brown, white, and red. The NES has more colors than that, y'know! You would actually have to ADD colors to get this game's used palette up to the level of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade on the NES(Ubisoft version). That's a color deficiency if I've ever seen one.

Music/Sound:The sounds are generic for this type of game, nothing special. The music, on the other hand, can get torturously annoying if you listen to it for a long time, as most of the songs are 5-second loops or worse. The music in the Present level is "dun-dun-dun-dundundun-" And it repeats over and over again.

Gameplay:Here's the kicker...
The first thing you will notice is the controls. The controls are really awkward to use, for two reasons. First of all, unless you're moving, jumping is delayed by a full second. This obviously makes it much more difficult to platform and dodge projectiles. The second reason is that you can't shoot while ducking, standing, or jumping. So when can you shoot? Well, you press the A button(forgot to mention, B is jump and A is attack in this game), and you'll crouch down. THEN, while you're in that crouching position, which you can't move from, or it will be disengaged, you can aim and shoot your gun. Oh, and you can only aim straight forward, and diagonally upwards and downwards at 45-degree angles. Sound bad? That's because it is.

The enemy's AI is poor, but it can still kill you easily. For one thing, it will constantly try to follow you, and it will happily leap into pits trying to do so. However, they have a bad habit of spawning out of nowhere, and then jumping at you and knocking you off narrow platforms to instant death. Also, at a certain part, it can be almost impossible to NOT take damage, because you simply can't shoot fast enough, and they take 4 to 5 hits from the gun.

The level design is not accustomed to the control, and thus, it fails. For one thing, this game has what I'll call "Predator Syndrome". Most of what looks like solid ground, unless it's the surface, is not solid, and you'll fall right through it. This is quite irritating sometimes, and occasionally, you'll find blocks you can jump on, and blocks that look exactly the same that you CAN'T jump on.

The story, from what I can tell, is the same as the movie. However, it is terribly explained:the first cut scene is a mostly gray image of the main character, which says, "FIGHT YOUR WAY TO THE SKYNET BASE TO TRAVEL BACK TO 1984." Questions:Why are we doing this? And why am I asking pointless questions?

So, let's chronicle my playing of the game. At least, the play through in which I got the farthest. So, I kept going through the game, and lost two lives, neither of them truly my fault. The first was an enemy pushing me off a ledge, and the second was when I made a long jump, and after landing safely, I fell right off, for no reason whatsoever. Great. So, after getting out of the sewers, I'm at ground level, and the graphics suddenly became almost eye-bleeding. Sure, they were eye-searing before, but they just got worse. Oh, and chances are, you'll take damage at this first long stretch, because an enemy with a gun is sure to appear, and it will shoot you before you can destroy it with your bullets.

The grenades, while they kill enemies in one hit, are useless. Why? Because the blast radius is small, and the hit detection is awful on the grenades. You can throw them at two different angles, but you probably won't hit anything with either of them. It's a better idea to just use your gun.

The collision detection is terrible, especially with platforming. When you try to platform, you'd better land away from the edge, or you'll fall right off. And, the collision detection when you try to land on something is the main reason why most people can't beat this game. This is a problem, since there is a part where you have to precision-jump...

So, after you finish that level, you have to go through two car chase levels in a row without any power ups. Yay! It's basically impossible to aim in the first one, so just keep mashing the fire button and keep slowing down and speeding up to at least try to dodge the projectiles. After that, you have to deal with an enemy directly behind you. It took me several tries to figure out how to aim the gun on the truck. Guess how you aim the gun? Up and down on the d-pad. This is especially bad since there isn't much of a way you could know this, and the enemy's constantly pelting you with bullets, so that you have to concentrate on trying to shoot it, and you have to be concentrating on slowing down and speeding up to at least try to dodge the bullets.

Then, you get to the precision-jumping part I mentioned before. And when I said precision, I meant precision. Most of these blocks are barely wide enough to stand on, and there's also pits waiting to eat up your lives if you miss a jump. However, in being careful, I managed to beat this level in one life. I did what the AVGN couldn't do, it seems...

Then I got to the present, where you lose your gun for no reason whatsoever, and got killed by a dog that takes a third of your life bar each time it hits you. How anticlimactic.

So, in conclusion, this game's awful, and it's also ridiculously hard. Stay away from it.

Final Rating: