PlayStation 2

The Terminator: Dawn of Fate

Terminator: Dawn of Fate possesses all the right movie elements and it does makes full use of them, but the action isn’t quite as fulfilling or diverse as one might expect. Is the game worthy of a rental? Yes, in fact, I recommend all action fans rent this for the interesting story and especially for the chance to trash all the great Skynet machines. Long live the human resistance!

The Terminator: Dawn of Fate is a mediocre action game with a terrific license. Even with its mix of hand-to-hand combat and third- and first-person shooting, the gameplay becomes highly repetitive after just a few hours. The constant fighting you'll have to do not with the terminators but with the control issues often makes the game quite frustrating, especially as you'll find yourself wandering around looking for the exit to the level. The storyline isn't especially compelling even for die-hard Terminator fans, but at least the game's visuals and overall presentation, minus the voice acting, are very well done.

As long as your devotion to the Terminator series never wavers, it can be just plain fun to blast away at the waves of T-800 endoskeletons. Absent of that, Dawn of Fate's frustration factor might be too much to overcome.

In the end, it was a noble effort on the part of the developers, Paradigm Entertainment. They managed to get the look and vibe of the Terminator movies into their game and it totally works. I think if they had a little more time to work on the camera and control issues (and improve the graphics), Terminator: Dawn of Fate could've been a great game. Instead it's just a game that the publisher rushed out the door, and it's mediocre (at best) because of it.

And so another failed movie license stumbles into the halls of obscurity. Nowhere near the same level of enjoyment that past versions of the license have given us (who remembers the stellar Bethesda FPS Future Shock? Or the excellent crossover SNES title Robocop vs. Terminator?), and plagued with design choices that make us do double-takes, we can't help but shake our heads in sour disappointment.

The pity of it all is the enormous potential. I can't recall a well-done action game based on the Skynet vs. human mythos in recent memory. The immense enthusiasm in seeing a third title made for this cinematic franchise is testament enough that surely, a good Terminator game is almost guaranteed to succeed. This, however, is not it. Like the short futuristic sequence in Terminator 2, it is purely a glimpse of what could be done. And to paraphrase a recent holiday movie, a glimpse by definition is an impermanent thing.