The Terminator: Rampage (1993)
STORY: Movies aren't my thing, by and large, and so my memory of the Terminator movie is very limited. As a result, no clue what's going on here. I briefly thought I was the titular Terminator, but I think I'm actually just a guy. We've been sent to the past, which is represented by an office building, to shoot at robots. We're going to destroy SkyNet, and that's about all I gathered. To do this, we must piece together a VTEC plasma rifle, which is scattered around the complex in parts, meaning we've got to search for them all. Yay!
MUSIC: Who knows? Sound wouldn't play on DOSBox. To avoid playing in absolute silence, I put some internet radio on, which resulted in me battling terminators to the soundtrack of Finally by CeCe Peniston. Not bad, I guess?
THE VERDICT: Ok, before anything else, let's get this out of the way: what the fuck is happening with the controls? You're made to pick between three options: Mouse, Joystick and Keyboard.
All of them exclude the other, meaning you either play entirely with the keyboard or just with the mouse. Moving is stupid with the mouse, while turning and aiming is stupid with the keyboard.
Settled on keyboard in the end, but what the fuck? If you pick mouse, the use key is still space on the keyboard, just to mess with you and remind you that the game is still receiving keyboard input, it just won't let you move with it, because fuck you.
Anyway, this feels a lot like the Elder Scrolls Arena engine - no surprise, since I'm pretty sure it is the engine that would go on to produce Arena. But if you thought TES Arena was janky, welcome to hell. This is borderline unplayable. Everything's choppy as fuck, and no amount of fucking with DOSBox cycles can help.
Let's look at the positives first: the graphics are actually great. My screenshots don't show it well at all, but there are textured floors and ceilings, good-looking weapon sprites, animated scenery such as fountains and TV screens showing static, rooms that actually seem to have real purposes like offices, storage rooms, etc. You can even shoot out the TV screens. While the levels are still abstract mazes, the designers did go to a lot of effort to make them seem like a real office building, and the game benefits massively as a result. It must have looked impressive at the time, especially since Wolf3D's Castle Wolfenstein looks nothing like a castle and, later this year, Doom's Phobos base doesn't really look anything like a real believable location. As you advance through the levels, the textures and sprites change too - something Wolfenstein 3D could really have done with. The enemy sprites look like dogshit though, no clue what's going on with those, although when you aim at them, a flattering 3D spinning version of their sprite appears in your targeting thing, which shows what I suppose they're meant to look like.
Another good aspect of this game is the minimap in the bottom right. Like in Arena, entrances and exits are marked with coloured squares on this map, and it's massively appreciated. These levels are big and running around them with no reference on where the fuck you are or where the fuck you're going would wear thing very quickly.
I like the targeting thing I mentioned earlier, it's a cool touch and it lets you know when you're actually hitting an enemy or not, and enemies have good variety - airborne enemies, enemies that rush towards you to explode if they touch you, etc.
That's about it for the good aspects. Onto the bullshit: the combat is basically crap, you just unload on everyone you see. Because you’re choppily moving around and they’re choppily moving around, this means you’ll be lucky to hit unless they’re approaching you in a straight line (which the AI does almost every time).
Look at this by the way:
This "Infiltrator" is invincible and there were like three more identical ones nearby, then a fuckton on the floor below. Is this guy from the movie? I emptied 30 beretta rounds into him before giving up and running for it. Had no idea what the fuck they wanted me to do there. These guys can walk through you, by the way, and they kept magically phasing through my body then shooting me from behind, as I turned around at a rate of 2 degrees per hour thanks to the shitty keyboard-only controls. Cool enemy ability or shitty engine? Anyway, it turns out they’re immune to the pistol or something, and you need heavier firepower to take them on:
It’s a Terminator!!!
After you clear the enemies from a floor, it turns into a methodical map-checking exercise where you walk around going into every room you see on the map trying to get the VTEC rifle parts. It feels a lot like the worst parts of Wolfenstein 3D, and I’m not sure if the presence of the map makes it better or worse. On one hand it’s good to know where you are and what you’re going to check next, on the other hand seeing how much you’ve still got to go and knowing that 95% of the rooms will be empty is demoralizing enough to encourage you to just drop the game right there.
Speaking of dropping the game, I played for nearly two hours and got a few floors in, but I don’t think there’s much more to see or much fun to be had going back to the floors I’ve already been through to try and scavenge the VTEC components, so I’m going to leave it here. I'll try to always finish games to completion during FPS NIGHTMARES but I think I've seen all this one has to offer and it's not fun enough to continue playing for its own sake.
So yeah, fantastic visuals but not much else. Next game: Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold (1993)
FINAL RATING: 1 Stupid Control Scheme out of a possible 5
