It has to be mentioned here first that the video game that is a better adaptation of the Terminator 2 film is a 2D-platformer title of the same name, which was never made for the arcades. T2: The Arcade Game is a light-gun shooter that originated in the arcades with the same name as the film, but was renamed when it was ported over to the home console platforms of its time to avoid copyright issues – and to exploit the popularity of the film some more.
Whereas the aforementioned platformer game treated the fans of the Terminator franchise to some canonical events not seen in the film (namely the capture of a certain T-800 model robot), the light-gun shooter title was little more than a shooting fest (as to be expected) that barely reflect the canonical events in the Terminator universe.
Anyway, the game places the player in the role of a player character whose identity is hardly clear at all. Presumably, it is the unique T-800 in the movies, but the events in this game just doesn't gel with the canon behind the movies, nor that of the platformer games.
The player character is armed with two weapons: a machinegun that never runs out of bullets and a missile launcher with a limited supply of ammunition (but which can go into the hundreds anyway, implausibly enough). Much like other competently made light-gun shooters at the time, the game does not allow the player to continuously fire with abandon; a bar of sorts on the bottom right of the screen denotes the rate of fire of the player's gun, and it will reduce to a trickle of bursts as the player fires away carelessly.
This would have encouraged the player to make shots count, but the controls – namely the GameBoy's D-pad –are just too flighty to make such controlled shots. Often, the player will have to fire a sustained burst of a couple of seconds to catch anything in the line of fire. The worst consequences of such difficult targeting can be realized when one considers how enemies appear on-screen and subsequently attack.
Most enemies usually come running sideways into the screen. Such simplistic introduction of enemies into the screen would not have been an issue, if not for the fact that the arcade versions were a lot more impressive at doing so, e.g. having enemies run up towards the player from deep within the background before shooting. Of course, the GameBoy version could be somewhat forgiven for having been made for a machine that has less graphical and technical prowess than arcade machines at the time, but it is how the game handles the game design that any enemy that appears on-screen can immediately start shooting at the player can be a problem.
Any enemy on-screen that fires any weapon that does not create another on-screen sprite that isn't a projectile immediately hits the player character, reducing his "Energy" bar, which is of course his health meter. To prevent such enemies (called "hit-scan enemies" from now on, for convenience) from simply starting to shoot at the player as soon as they appear on-screen, the game implements some probability-dependent scripts that will decide if and when they start firing.
If the player is unlucky, hit-scan enemies that stride into the screen would immediately start firing. If the player is lucky, some of them may even walk past the entirety of the screen without firing a shot. While it can be argued that such designs would make every playthrough feel a bit different, some measure of predictability would have been appreciated by players who do not appreciate luck-based mechanics.
Of course, one can argue that one can prevent these enemies from firing by gunning them down in the first place. Unfortunately, as mentioned earlier, the controls falter at helping the player do this; the D-pad was just too clunky for a light gun game, and for the GameBoy, the D-pad was the only way to target things with. Getting the cursor to land on an enemy target was practically a very difficult skill to master, and one that takes a lot of time – time spent playing on this very difficult and unrewarding game.
The game could have been made easier with the inclusion of the power-ups, which are denoted on-screen with square icons such as a shield which renders the player temporarily invincible and a crude rune resembling a missile that acts as replenishment for missiles. Unfortunately, the player has to shoot them to pick them up, so the same issues with the controls would hamper their retrieval. Moreover, the "Gun" bar is depleted too when the player shoots at them to pick them up, so there is the risk of expending gunfire rate that could have been better spent shooting on-screen enemies.
And there would be a lot of enemies appearing on-screen, especially in the later levels. In addition to footsoldiers striding into the screen from either vertical edge, there would be gunships appearing from the background and turrets that slowly go on-screen as the viewpoint of the player goes from right to left. It makes for hectic gameplay, but considering the issues with the clumsy controls, this would be more agony than entertainment. Add to these bosses with a lot of parts that need to be individually shot down (and which have weapons of their own), and it would be doubtful that any player can succeed at finishing the game.
The GameBoy version was not pretty either. Of course, its 8-bit technical limitations can be a good excuse for the muddy visuals and image-crops that are some enemies that simply slide into the screen, but that there are so much clipping, pixel obliteration, and even disappearing of sprites that shooting things down is made all the harder.
What is even more annoying and frustrating than the graphics of the game is its audio designs. Granted, again, the GameBoy was not exactly the best platform to present the pizzazz of the Terminator franchise with, but the sound effects of the game can become a very disconcerting din to those who are not used to a barrage of 8-bit noises. Gunfire can sound like wood-milling, missile-fire is akin to techno-versions of belching, etc.
There are the soundtracks, which includes an ominous tune and a forlorn one that was rather stirring for 8-bit tracks at the time, but these only play at the intro and the game-over screen (respectively); there is no music to accompany actual gameplay, though they would have been quite pointless considering the din of 8-bit gunfire as had been mentioned.
To summarize this review, as far as movie tie-ins go, the GameBoy version of T2: The Arcade Game is one of the worst thought-out, and would be a rude reminder to fans of popular film franchises that they should be wary of entertainment products that attempt to exploit their fancy.