Terminator: SkyNET is the 1996 sequel to Terminator: Future Shock and was again developed by Bethesda and co-published by Virgin Interactive.

There are a couple of major enhancements in SkyNET – compared to Future Shock. For starters: the display resolution can be set to 640×480 (SVGA) rather than the standard 320×200 VGA resolution of Future Shock, and this enhancement can also be applied to Future Shock if it’s been detected during the install process.

The second major enhancement is the addition of a multiplayer deathmatch game. Either one-on-one over IPX or up to eight players in the same game over a LAN (Local Area Network). You can even choose to be a Terminator in deathmatch games and go after the humans…

SkyNET has more new enemies and a variety of new weapons to try out, plus more vehicle-driving sections, and later on you again get to pilot and use a Hunter-Killer against those bad, bad robots. Also: Resistance briefings and some cut scenes are depicted as FMV (Full-Motion Video), with real actors playing the characters, which wasn’t a feature in the first Bethesda Terminator game, and the acting isn’t too bad overall.

Like Future Shock before it, SkyNET does suffer from a few inadequacies, like 2D art floating around 3D sets, simplistic 3D models, limited exterior atmospherics, and relatively basic settings, but overall the pluses outweigh the minuses in these early Bethesda Terminator games. Playing them is still fun even now, even though they weren’t quite the best in their class at the time of their release, and look pretty shonky by today’s standards.

More: Terminator: SkyNET on Wikipedia