The Terminator: Rampage

Moby ID: 2520
Note: We may earn an affiliate commission on purchases made via eBay or Amazon links (prices updated 3/22 9:01 PM )

Description official description

Terminator: Rampage is Bethesda's third Terminator-licensed game, and is a standard first-person corridor crawler.

In Rampage, the corrupt defense system SkyNet again finds itself overrun by the human Resistance, and again manages to send a robot into the past to preserve its future existence. Sent to 1984, this time it is the monstrous "Meta-Node;" a machine explicitly designed for infiltration and construction. Four years after landing, this Meta-Node has managed to completely capture Cyberdyne's Cheyenne Mountain complex and uses the armored bunker to start building a fledgling SkyNet, and legions of Terminator robots to protect it.

The player takes command of a human Resistance commando, sent into the past and directly into the entrance of a machine-controlled Cheyenne Mountain. The player must scour each level, searching for upgraded clearance cards, weapons, ammunition, and health. Meanwhile, the full contingent of SkyNet's modern forces try to stop him, from flying drones and floating mines, to disguised Terminators posing as civilians. The player must locate parts to assemble a prototype "V-TEC" plasma rifle, battle through to the final level of the complex, and destroy the Meta-Node to secure victory for humankind.

Groups +

Screenshots

Promos

Credits (DOS version)

23 People (22 developers, 1 thanks) · View all

Design
Programming
Art Director
Computer Realization
Executive Producer
Additional Design
Documentation
Quality Assurance
Music
Post Production Controller
Special Thanks To
Cover Artwork by
Quality Assurance
German Version
  • Softgold Computerspiele GmbH
Project Lead
Program and Manual Translation
Lector
Coordination
Production
[ full credits ]

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 71% (based on 14 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.1 out of 5 (based on 16 ratings with 4 reviews)

An underlooked 3D Terminator blasting FRAGFEST

The Good
The storyline was great, you go back from Los Angeles of 2029 to 1984, to stop a reworked Terminator T-800 from updating SKYNET (as opposed to Microsoft who WANTS you to update Windows xD), after royally whupping it in The Terminator:2029. You get a lot of weapons, such as the 9mm "class", the Uzi and the Beretta pistol. The machine gun "class" like the M-16 and the AK-47 and the "Heavy Weapons" class, such as the SPAS-12 shotgun, the Mini-Cannon, the Grenade Launcher and the plasma gun. Plus some are customizable (a big PLUS), so if you really want to whip a T-800 Infiltrator, just crank that plasma gun up to 200 and BAM

The Bad
Don't make me laugh. I loved it all.

The Bottom Line
Before its time (really), The Terminator Rampage is 32 levels of mechanical destruction. Go get 'em, soldier.

DOS · by RoboCop_2029 (7) · 2005

Could have been really, really good, but turned out below average.

The Good
The game followed Wolf3D in that you have to locate a key in a maze-like structure in order to advance to the next floor/area. Finding keys was a pretty cool thing, in my opinion, because it gave you a objective and you know what to look for on each floor.

The arsenal you controlled in this game was fairly cool. You got everything from a pistol, machine guns, all the way to a futuristic weapon (you had to find each component of the weapon in order to get it). The gun play in this game was excellent.

Other cool things included a awesome interface (at the time I thought). If you hovered your crosshair over a enemy, information came back to you explaining the enemy detail. The information was pretty useless as all you had to do was shoot until the machine blew up, but nonetheless, it was a cool feature to add to the game.

The Bad
In this game you are in a office building. It was horribly implemented. The levels were big and too cramped in my opinion. It was incredibly hard to navigate in this game because the areas were so huge that it turned into nothing more than trying to solve a maze.

It took an alarming amount of bullets to kill something. I understand that Terminators were meant to be hard to kill, but at least there could have been a good supply of ammo throughout the game. If I remembered right, you got a lead pipe, which was pretty much useless.

The Bottom Line
If you are a die-hard Terminator fan, get this game. It's pretty cool if you can look past the mazes. Overally, I was happy with this game.

DOS · by Daniel Allen (13) · 2007

A technically amazing game with interesting ideas that falls flat on execution.

The Good
The game has quite a few interesting ideas. The adage in the promotional poster "you can't keep a bad 'droid down" tends to hold true here. I remember being upset that no matter what I did, when I put a Terminator Infiltrator down, it would keep getting back up. Turns out once they're knocked down, you have to MAKE them stay down. When faced with a great number of enemies, and the player often is, target management becomes an important factor of survivability. If an enemy is knocked down, it becomes critical that the right decision is made: Do you destroy the knocked-out bot, or do you engage his still-standing buddy to the side, and come back to the other later? It adds a lot to the gameplay.

Some areas of the game are incredibly suspenseful. In one of the earlier levels, The Arboretum, you must make your way through a dimly-lit indoor park. The thing is, there are no Terminators to be found here. Instead, the level is filled with an overwhelming number of Seeker units, essentially floating bombs that follow the player and only alert their presence with a barely-audible hum. This turns an otherwise boring level into a frantic race for survival, where no place is safe, and a seeker could be behind you at any given time. This exciting scenario is an exception to the rule though, as I later found out.

The graphics were mostly well-done. Terminator Rampage was released on November 12, 1993, basically a month before DOOM was released. At the time of release, Terminator Rampage was one of the first first-person-shooter games to exhibit true full-screen display. The sprite (2D Prop) objects were animated well, as they were mostly digitized (as with the weapons) or 3d-rendered (as with the enemies). The only real fault here is that some of the base wall textures are bland and used in really odd locations (Why does a gymnasium/recreation center look like it is in the middle of a rusted-over gulag?), but this has more to do with the level-design itself than graphics.

The music is particularly pleasing. In a move that would later become a Bethesda staple, Terminator Rampage supported dynamic, situational music. When exploring, the music is calm and subdued, but when an enemy is encountered, it ramps up to a fast-paced action set of music. It creates a nice change from games where one hard-set music piece is present throughout entire levels, and considering how insanely large levels are in Terminator: Rampage, it is nice to have the variety. Technically, the music is well-composed. The instrumentation is spot-on, and sounds fantastic on just about any General-MIDI device. Even the Soundblaster 4-Operator FM music sounds decent enough. It is somewhat a pity though that about half of the tracks (the exploring scores) are re-used from Terminator 2029, but the music is so fitting that it isn't very distracting.

The Bad
The sound effects aren't the best, and can range from decent to ear-screechingly bad (mainly dealing with rising doors that make up about 50% of the levels after sublevel 5). It isn't a main detractor though, so I'll just move on.

Terminator: Rampage was oft-criticized in its day for being a resource-hog that demanded a top-of-the-line system. This criticism holds true. In a time when most people were running 386 SX-33 systems, Terminator Rampage practically demanded a 486 DX-66 with 4meg of free Expanded (EMS) memory and a decent 1meg or better video card. While these requirements might sound pathetic today, they were ridiculous for the time.

Of course not all the problems of being a resource-hog can be attributed to the high requirements. Compounding the issue is the fact that the engine is very, VERY clunky. The movement and scrolling, even at the lowest detail level on a super-powered system is slow and choppy. It is somewhat confusing given that the game uses the same engine as in The Elder Scrolls: Arena, but Arena was far smoother and playable. The keyboard and joystick control options are useless, and provide either an infuriatingly slow turning radius or completely imprecise, choppy aiming control. I suppose that this was the price that had to be paid for the amazing visuals and large play-area.

The main problem with Terminator Rampage, despite all of its interesting ideas and polished graphics, is the disappointing, confusing, and frustrating level design. There are really two separate areas of criticism here, so they should really be split up: The gameplay itself, and the actual level design.

As to the gameplay, the game takes a primitive Wolfenstein-styled approach. Kill everything that moves, get the elevator key, collect parts to make a Phased Plasma Rifle (the V-TEC rifle as it is called ingame), and progress to the next sublevel. The game offers no real improvements on the genre and is only aggravated by the slow, unoptimized controls. The game also exhibits an almost unheard-of difficulty. Enemies dish out a lot of damage, but health and ammo are placed so sparsely that finding any can take an hour or more. By that time though it is likely you will either be so far from being able to heal adequately or so bored that you've already given up. The placement of weapons and health are so sporadic and isolated in the humongous levels that it makes playing the game without cheating an exercise in masochism. It is like Bethesda had a team meeting and asked themselves "How can we make this game so impossible that it artificially extends the playtime by hundreds of hours?" These factors may not be a deathblow to the gameplay by themselves, but when coupled with the atrocious level design, they ascend into a new rung of frustration.

And the level design. Imagine if you will, the levels in Wolfenstein or Corridor 7 if you have played those games (essentially small to medium-sized mazes that are relatively easy to navigate). Now cube the size of the mazes and add a single key and V-TEC part in some far-off corner of the level with absolutely NO indicators to where they might be. Fill said levels with overwhelming amounts of enemies, give inadequate supplies, and make the flow and setting of the levels have no purpose whatsoever.

Essentially, all of the levels are gigantic mazes repeated over and over again with only slightly-variating textures and settings. The levels only get worse as the game progresses, like the developers ran out of ideas and thought to themselves "Well, we don't know what to make anymore, so we'll just fill the last 20 levels of the game with nondescript brick walls and dirt tunnels." I actually spent the time to beat this game when I was younger, and I wouldn't even think of attempting it again. It makes the game, above all else, boring. Unfortunately despite all of the game's strong-points, the simple fact that it loses the entirety of its fun factor over a short period of time ruins its staying power.

There was a reason Doom completely drowned out Terminator Rampage in the Christmas rush of 1993, and that reason was playability.

The Bottom Line
While the game is impressive on a superficial basis, its lacking level design, drawn-out gameplay, and flawed execution bring what could have been a fantastic and groundbreaking game to a level best described as mediocre. It is unfortunate as the game really wants to succeed at its core, but poor decisions on Bethesda's part in regards to fun-factor and playability ensured this Terminator's fate: to be beached upon the shores of hell in the wake of the FPS revolution soon to come.

DOS · by Rekoil (28) · 2006

[ View all 4 player reviews ]

Trivia

CD Version

The CD release contains extra cutscenes (like an extended intro), but is otherwise identical to the floppy release.

Cover Art

As with The Terminator 2029, Bethesda licensed art from Dark Horse Comics for the game's cover. In this case, Simon Bisley's cover art from issue #1 of 1991's The Terminator: The Enemy Within.

References

The game's intro makes reference to Cyberdyne's facility in "the Cheyenne Mountains", however no such place exists.Cheyenne Mountain is a single place that exists within the Rocky Mountain Range near Colorado Springs, Colorado in the United States. As of this writing in 2010, it is occupied by the United States' Military NORAD organization, and even was in 1984 when this game takes place. Though the fictional Cyberdyne is supposed to have military ties...

Information also contributed by WildKard

Analytics

MobyPro Early Access

Upgrade to MobyPro to view research rankings!

Related Games

Terminator
Released 1986 on Commodore 64
Terminator
Released 1993 on Atari 8-bit
The Terminator
Released 2003 on ExEn, J2ME, BREW
The Terminator
Released 1993 on SEGA CD
The Terminator
Released 1991 on DOS
The Terminator
Released 1993 on SNES
The Terminator
Released 1992 on Genesis, Game Gear, SEGA Master System
The Terminator
Released 1992 on NES
The Terminator
Released 1991 on Dedicated handheld

Related Sites +

Identifiers +

  • MobyGames ID: 2520
  • [ Please login / register to view all identifiers ]

Contribute

Are you familiar with this game? Help document and preserve this entry in video game history! If your contribution is approved, you will earn points and be credited as a contributor.

Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Zovni.

Additional contributors: Alaka, BurningStickMan, Victor Vance.

Game added October 18, 2000. Last modified November 8, 2023.