Arnold’s back, and for the first time you get to play as him – but you don’t get to govern California. But you do get to visit California – Los Angeles to be exact. Once again, it’s up to you to protect John Connor in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines.

T3 is just another first person shooter. It’s not a bad game, but it’s not a great game either. As far as first-person shooters go, this one seems to be a bit lackluster. There’s no multiplayer and the game seems to be very linear without many places to explore outside where the storyline would take you. Ammo and life are plentiful, but so are the enemies. There are some rooms where the enemies are literally non-stop so it is best to just find the quickest way out. Going anywhere fast can sometimes be an issue as Arnold doesn’t run and he he turns very slowly. This can be frustrating when you have 15 seconds to escape from a room and aren’t really sure where to go.

Taking out enemies can be as easy or hard as you would like in that you can manually aim or you can target enemies and Arnold will automatically track them as long as they stay within reasonable view. I particularly liked the auto-target feature because fine movements with those PS2 sticks can require a pretty steady thumb. While you have your standard stock of FPS type weapons, you also can mix in a little Mortal Kombat style fighting and perform some combo moves with your fists if you’re feeling fancy. The graphics and sounds seemed pretty standard for a PS2 game these days, although I’m not a graphics snob so take that as you will. I did almost miss a phone call or two due to the loud and constant explosions rocking my living room. I would like to point out that the artists did do a nice job with Arnold’s likeness.

I found this game not to be too difficult which means that the hard core FPS players out there will probably hate it for being too easy. If you’re more of the casual player that just wants to blast things, this could be the game for you. The lack of multiplayer and linear gameplay don’t allow for much replay value. I would probably only recommend this game to either a hard core Terminator fan or to someone that complains about other FPS games being too difficult. If nothing else, this game is at least leaps and bounds better than Atari’s previous effort with Terminator: Dawn of Fate.