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Terminator Fans Shouldn’t Skip This New Shooter
With regards to great games, 2025’s cup runneth over. Heaters from a menagerie of genres seemingly came down like raindrops during monsoon season. Even for the most studious backlog destroyers, there was no way to keep up with everything or even a notable fraction of it. This exhausting flurry meant that it was hard to pay attention in December when awards season was in full force. December is usually quiet, but not even 2025 could follow that trend, as games like Marvel Cosmic Invasion and Metroid Prime 4 brought life to a usually light month. But there was one other game, Terminator 2D: No Fate, that came out during that timeframe and, sadly, seemed to have flown under the radar. And given how great this retro side-scrolling shooter is, it would be a mistake to leave this one behind.
Terminator 2D: No Fate looks like a game that could have coincided with the 1991 film. With its detailed pixel art, No Fate looks like a lost Amiga or Sega CD game. It’s fitting for a game based on a film to emulate the time period of said film, but No Fate’s visual style isn’t just a novel, surface-level hook. Even with all the pixelated games that have flooded the market over the last couple decades, No Fate’s sprite work and animation are utterly fantastic. The close-ups are filled with detail, and the art in the gameplay segments is able to evoke so much with such limited technical specs. The latter is particularly effective when No Fate directly plays a scene from the iconic film and, even in its more primitive and pixelated form, is able to communicate the same ideas, tone, and tension. Instead of flailing in the uncanny valley with more realistic visuals and poorly emulating the movie, No Fate smartly takes a different path.
Seeing the T-1000 finger poke a cop in the head or the T-800 grab John Connor off his dirtbike are just two of the many scenes that are nice to see in this retro game wrapping, but No Fate picks up on the deeper essence of the film by not letting up. It blazes through the events of the 1991 movie and provides a condensed synopsis of it, playing like a Greatest Hits of one of the best action films of all time. It glosses over some of the more intimate and funnier moments of the film — don’t expect to see the T-800 try to smile or the buildup to the T-1000’s truck pursuit of John Connor — but it makes sense for an arcadey shooter to prioritize arcadey action.
Terminator 2D: No Fate Is Short and Sweet
It’s a relentless tempo and means the game can be completed in around 50 minutes. But No Fate’s brevity is not a weakness; it is a boon in an industry filled with games that don’t know when to end. In addition to its canon story, No Fate also has two paths that branch out from the film and offer new levels. Neither are especially deep, but they offer a solid enough incentive to dive back in, as the added level with a chain gun-wielding T-800 and the carnage inherent to that combo allows for some gratifying catharsis. With a boss rush mode and multiple difficulty settings, No Fate gives players the means to check out when they’ve had enough instead of having an overly long campaign that isn’t as flexible.
It’s easy to want to jump back into No Fate, too, since it’s a surprisingly smooth shooter. Even though the rigid aiming system and clunky dodge roll can cause some headaches, firing any of the many weapons is snappy, and it (aside from the final level that’s full of annoying robotic dogs) doesn’t resort to cheap old school tactics designed to drain the player’s lives.
Terminator 2D: No Fate Has a Surprising Amount of Variety
No Fate could have been fine if it had been just a shooter, but it goes beyond that narrow framework and has many different types of gameplay that pack in an incredible amount of variety. Sarah’s breakout from the Pescadero State Hospital calls for sneakier tactics as she ducks and weaves guards and the terrifying T-1000, while John’s dirt bike escape means players have to deftly dodge traffic and obstacles. Players can also briefly beat up bikers at the bar as the T-800 while “Bad to the Bone” blares out of the jukebox, shoot the T-1000’s helicopter from the back of a van, or quickly blast shotgun shells at the sneaky T-1000 as it pursues John in the steel mill. A game this short didn’t need to have this many mechanics, but they make No Fate a better game that’s also simultaneously more honest to the movie.
This honesty and overall quality makes Terminator 2D: No Fate the best game based on the seminal James Cameron action flick; it’s hard for the other five to compete with a title this solid. Not even No Fate designer Mike Tucker could sugarcoat previous Terminator 2 games, as he called the Genesis and SNES tie-ins “pretty woeful” and said the film “needed a decent game adaptation, especially after what happened in the ‘80s and ‘90s.” Developer Bitmap Bureau hinted in that same aforementioned interview that it was working on yet another licensed game, so hopefully that title will be just as solid and not get shoved out when hardly anyone is paying attention.
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