The wildly successful coin-op took a very old gamestyle (the Operation Wolf-type duck shoot), and beefed it up for the 90s with some very spanky (and slightly worrying, really - we're getting to the stage now where graphics are extremely close to real-life in games like this, and I'm not totally sure that we want to be encouraging people to go around mindlessly slaughtering such realistic images) digitised graphics and all that kind of palaver. After a load of licences which turned the Terminator saga into various dull little beat-'em-ups and platform games, Sega have finally brought us the game everyone wanted to see in the first place. But the coin-op costs thousands of quid - is the humble Mega Drive up to it?

In a word, yes. The old MD's really pulling out all the stops with this game, with some of the most impressive graphics yet seen outside of a Mega CD game. Recognisable Terminators, John Connors and Arnies glare out of the screen at you, and some enormous sprites lurch around the place in stunningly smooth fashion. It sounds pretty excellent too, with lots of rousing music and sampled sounds, although the noise of your gun firing is irritatingly akin to someone playing a washboard in a skiffle band after a minute or two. Playability's probably the weakest point, not that it's actually very weak at all, but the joypad response is a bit skittery in a game that's tough enough to demand some real precision control. Of course, maybe that's just a sneaky way to get people to buy Sega's new Menacer light gun, for which this is the first compatible game...

This is extremely entertaining stuff, and (as with the original coin-op), even more fun if you get a chum along to join in at the same time. Indeed, if you don't, you can pretty much forget about seeing the end without some fairly major practice - after a couple of not-exactly-easy but reasonable first levels, you get to the third stage, where you have to protect a truck carrying John Connor from a massed attack of Terminators, backed up by a squadron of bombers who come in from nowhere at a height of about 20 feet. This is phenomenally mean, which isn't really such a bad thing - in a game this simplistic, serious challenge is the only way you're going to get enough playing time to get value for your money, and serious challenge is certainly what you get here.

It's all very well to slate games like this for having no depth and being too simple to spend 40 quid and upwards on, but the thing is, it's billed as Terminator 2 The Arcade Game. Why should you expect anything more from it? This doesn't make any bones about what it's setting out to do, and what it sets out to do it succeeds at exceptionally well. If the idea of the game appeals to you at all, see a psychiatrist, but the execution of it won't leave you disappointed.

GRAPHICS 9

SOUND 8

GAMEPLAY 6

GAME SIZE 7

ADDICTION 8

A great conversion of the coin-op, and a great example of the Operation Wolf genre. Still lacks lastability, but it couldn't really be any other way.

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