Terminator: Rampage

Now this is the kind of crap that really grinds my gears. A half-assed story twisting the Terminator timeline yet again is just a transparent excuse for a Wolfenstein 3-D clone feeding off the popular film license. Is this really needed? The game’s not even close to what was in the movies! It’s like they expect Terminator fans to just pick up anything with a metal skeleton stamped on the front and not even… wait a minute. Why am I holding this game? You mean I bought thi…? SON OF A BITCH, they tricked me again!

The latest stop in my lackadaisical quest to play all things Terminator is Terminator: Rampage – Bethesda’s fourth game about the ruby-eyed robot terrors, and easily the least inspired. Riding the wave of Wolf3D’s success, Rampage is a mostly gimmicky attempt to merge the most popular license in BethSoft’s stable (the first Elder Scrolls Arena wouldn’t be released until a year later) with the hottest new gameplay style on the PC. Even the most fanatical of Terminator fans will certainly find more enjoyment out of one of Bethesda’s other attempts.

Acting as a direct sequel, SkyNet is faced with impending defeat from your actions in Terminator 2029, and responds by shooting an orbital pod into the past. That pod lands in the 1990s and delivers the “Meta-Node” – a hulking murderbot that carries all of SkyNet’s blueprints and schemes in its CPU. After capturing NORAD’s Cheyenne Mountain complex and eliminating everyone inside, it sets about repurposing the shielded bunker to build SkyNet anew. You arrive as a solo future commando out to crawl the labyrinthine complex, fight SkyNet/Meta-Node’s minions, and cobble together a prototype “V-TEC” plasma rifle that’s the only thing strong enough to zap the Node into dust.

Corridor crawls aplenty await, while your faceless soldier avatar shoots apart significantly weakened Terminators (they’re scrapped together using modern day parts, you see). It’s a pretty silly plot, and setting it inside an enormous indoor bunker plays to the strengths of Wolf3D-esque rendering tech, not necessarily anything identifiable to The Terminator. But, to be fair, the plot’s not significantly more hokey than one about sending a robot assassin back through time to kill the mother of your enemy’s leader.

Pre-Doom, many companies tried to squeeze more mileage out of Wolf3D-equivalent technology by replacing the sprites with bitmap photos (see also: Rise of the Triad and Operation Body Count). 2-D cutout props and foes still remain, but the immediate boost to visuals and “realism” by using digital images made the stills on the box look awesome. That is the highest praise that can be given to Rampage – for the time, it looks great.

Blocky and pixelated? Yes. Levels made of frequently duplicated textures? Sure. But it was the best you were going to do for the period and it certainly adds some immersion to the locations you fight in. These areas indeed look like office floors and labs, without requiring an excess of imagination. Levels aren’t limited to 90-degree walls here, while textured floors, ceilings, and a convincing fade effect (called “lights” in the options) offer further “wow” for the period.

However, the tradeoff to framerate was not worth the cost. Bethesda’s engine clunks along regardless of your actual processor and available memory. You can disable various visual options, but they will not improve performance on a modern machine – your problem will not be lack of processing power. You won’t get more than 10-16 FPS (with wild variance throughout) no matter what you do, or how many DOSBox cycles you allocate. I even checked on my ’90s machine and got no better through real DOS and EMS. You can certainly make it perform worse than it should with underpowered settings, but it will never be as smooth as Wolfenstein or its ilk. I’m usually good with FPS motion sickness – even Descent gave me no problems – but the choppiness here started to get to me after long sessions.

If you manage to steel yourself against the framerate, your next challenge is a significant design flaw. Bethesda seems to have mistaken what was actually fun about Wolf3D – it wasn’t trying to navigate the mazes. The focus here is a treasure hunt inside the massive complex. You’ll be scouring obnoxiously enormous 100×100 levels, first looking for V-TEC parts, then looking for access keys to unlock the next elevator. There are 32 levels in total, but you’ll wish there were far less. Especially considering only the first 16 levels can hold V-TEC pieces (helpfully announced when you enter the level), with the rest just existing to pad out your journey to the Meta-Node.

You have a minimap, which is the only support that makes the game playable, but only elevators are highlighted. X,Y coordinates are displayed, so you can make notes of rooms with pickups to return to later. But other than the debris of destroyed bots, there’s no indication of where you have or haven’t been already. If you’re convinced you’ve checked the entire level, but still haven’t found what you’re looking for, there’s not much that can be done beyond checking everything all over again.

There are similarly no clues in the architecture. Levels have generic names (administration, warehouses) but you can’t pass signs for a “storage” or “lab” area within a level and know that goodies will be found inside. You can’t look at the map and deduce that a group of isolated rooms must be a secure armory with a V-TEC part inside. Ammo is in bathrooms. Guns are in offices. I’d totally believe a maze-drawing program built the layout at random and then designers came in and added some decorations. There’s no function to these levels at all and you will truly have to search every room methodically to find your goal. The best 3D games don’t make key hunts feel like a chore. Rampage absolutely does.

Audio is serviceable. Like Wolfenstein, enemies only have a single alert noise. Once that plays, you’ll never hear them move or give away their location until they shoot at you. Expect a lot of surprise attacks from behind or down side hallways. Rampage also uses a dynamic MIDI music system, similar to LucasArts’ iMUSE. Basically, levels have a more chill “exploration” theme that ramps up into an “action” theme when enemies are alerted. This sounds better in theory. Like all of these dynamic systems, enemy encounters happen so often that you’re basically only hearing the action theme. If it ever does drop tempo, it won’t be long before it has to awkwardly kick right back up again.

Targeting feels off as well. I swear enemies can sometimes shoot through walls, while corners and 2D props can block your shots – even if the enemy is standing a pretty good distance from them. It looks like you have a clear shot, but you’ll never do any damage. To help with this, you’re given a “target lock” window and a little digital honk when your sights are over an enemy you can hit. Don’t see the lock? Don’t waste the ammo. This helps you nudge around until your aim is true, or to hit unseen enemies down distant, faded hallways. It also makes the gameplay a little more mechanical than intuitive or fun – just shoot when you’re told to – turning you into, I dunno, some kind of hypothetical future robot that’s really good at killing.

It also doesn’t help that any new player stands to be turned off by the game’s lame first impression. The first two levels have you wandering through impressive-looking offices, sniping at undistinguished flying machines and floating bombs that look like a Star Wars droid. The title baddies are absent, giving you two full levels of generic shooting to notice all the flaws. Rooms are usually empty. Enemies are just “there” around corners and quickly dispatched – no strategy, no tense fights, no real escalation. Nothing particularly grabbed me, and I was prepared to walk away disappointed.

Then I met my first Terminator. I popped open a routine door to find a civilian in slacks and tie. I actually hesitated – even knowing from Terminator: 2029 that everyone moving is certainly a machine, the obvious disguise still worked! He shoots a gun, I snap out of it and open fire. Flesh splats away to reveal the metal endoskeleton underneath; very nice. After enough gunfire, the machine finally falls and I move on to the next room.

On my way back through, I happen to pass by the room and noticed that the body wasn’t there. I had just enough time to process this new information before the half-shredded Terminator rounds the corner shooting – they actually GET BACK UP if you don’t put extra rounds into them after they’ve fallen. You’ll even need to go back to the first two levels if you haven’t found stronger weapons, because your starting pistol will only scratch a Terminator’s paint. Even with the points stacking up against this particular game, Bethesda demonstrates again why they were always good stewards of the series.

It’s a surprisingly tough game, too. Even on the Normal difficulty setting, you’ll take a heavy beating through a combination of randomized damage and less protection as your armor level goes down. Enemies rarely drop ammo, so fights only serve to chip away at your health. Armor and health pickups are uncomfortably rare – usually no more than one or two rooms per level hold a cache of supplies – so the more you search the complex, the more you open yourself up to damage.

If it hasn’t been clear, you really can’t damage the Meta-Node without the V-TEC. You will always get a message when entering a level if there are any parts nearby, and you can return to previous levels (with enemies staying dead) if you missed one. No parts on this level? You might want to skip ahead to the staircase. You only have one life to save the future with, but free ability to save anywhere means you can, at a minimum, use your deaths to recon ahead.

But once you assemble the V-TEC, you’ll find it’s the strongest weapon in the game and has infinite ammo. You’ll never need to find or use another gun. You can manually adjust its power for stronger shots, but all this does is to deplete a “heat” meter faster. The meter charges itself back up in a few seconds, while enemy AI isn’t coordinated enough to press attacks. There’s always time to let the meter safely refill before moving on. It’s not like you can ignore the V-TEC anyway, but I really like that it’s a literal game-changer once completed.

There are two versions of Rampage: floppy disk and CD. The CD adds 6 additional cinematics, but these are minor. Certainly nothing like the new voices, better music, or FMV movies of a usual CD upgrade. Instead, it mostly acts as a patch to the floppy version. One of these improvements a literal patch to fix the game crashing on Pentium processors, but the rest address balance. The floppy version starts you with 50 pistol ammo, which makes thoroughly searching each level for supplies almost mandatory. The CD version, by contrast, starts you with 600+ bullets and even 50+ grenades and shells for weapons you won’t find for a long while. As far as adjustments go, this seems a bit extreme, but Rampage is now much less of a survival horror game than the floppy release was.

Bethesda also includes X,Y coordinates of all notable pickups in a HINTS.TXT file included on the CD. I initially shied away from this extra help, thinking it would be cheating and ruining the experience. Not so. Once you actually know where to go, the entire game (for me, at least) got closer to typical enjoyment for this kind of FPS. With an AK-47 in your paws and a clear destination, it became somewhat fun to mow down reams of budget Terminators along the way. Is this a mea culpa on Bethesda’s part, or just trying to broaden the appeal? Hard to say, but it does mean the CD version is likely the one you’re going to want to play.

There’s definite positives here, but the game never gets past being slightly below average. The core gameplay of searching an oversized complex for parts just isn’t that attractive. The game engine and textures do look nice, but the choppy framerate can’t deliver the smooth and fast action expected of an FPS. Your enemies put up a challenge mostly by absorbing tons of bullets while wearing down your meager health and armor supplies. Again, if you’re interested at all, there’s no shame in using the CD’s hint file. There’s a serviceable game here when you get away from the artificial padding, and not wandering for boring hours helps the choppy framerate become more forgivable.

In all, Rampage demands more from your patience than it pays off, but it’s not worthless. I probably would have played the hell out of it in 1994, though it’s doubtful too many would feel that way about it today. Not awful, but easily the worst of Bethesda’s series.

 

The Good

Looks great for a Wolfenstein clone. Dynamic music transitions from level-specific background tunes to action beats when bullets fly. Terminators have basic (dumb) AI, but some classic tricks.

 

The Bad

Jerky framerate no matter what you play it on. Enormous levels require too much “needle-in-a-haystack” searching for keys. Less speed and action (without something like strategy to compensate) compared to similar FPSs.