Red Faction II

This game was everything I expected and more from the first. I was interested to find that Jason Statham was the voice of my favorite character, Shrike. The weapons and game play in RF2 are a huge step up from the first. The environments were incredible, the best I've seen since Bond. The only thing that bothered me about the game was the Stalinesque propaganda that is being constantly yelled at you at the beginning of the game. ****1\2

When I heard that THQ and Volition were making a sequel to perhaps the best first person shooter available for the Playstation 2, my heart jumped with joy (for we all knew that Time Splitters wasn't giving me my needed dose of mayhem). I couldn't wait to try out Red Faction II.

And, then, the game sucked so hard my controller got a hickey.

Simply not as enthralling as the first for several reasons.

The modeling (people, guns in your hands, cars) is better, but the environment (buildings, the ground, the sky) is pretty bad. The geomod is worse (i.e. how you interact with the rest of the game). You see, the GEOmod works with rock structures, and there's simply more structures made of out rocks on Mars than on Earth, especially 22nd century Earth. There's no connection to the first game whatsoever. It's almost as if they said "we'll throw away everything good about the first game, but use its name to create a game in which you can kill people holding two weapons at once!! Awesome!!" They should have just called it something else, not Red Faction II. The LEAST they could have done is kept ONE character from the first game.

What did they keep? They kept the hardest to use, least fun weapons. I just wanted a simple rocket launcher. But no. No simple rocket launchers. They kept the W.A.S.P. rocket launcher, which, as first I was pleased because that thing destroyed like 5 city blocks. They wussified it. Now it does as much damage as your grandmother with a toaster. They also kept the rail gun, but they got rid of the zoom, the heat sensor, the beech reload, and made it virtually impossible to use.

But there were some upsides. The only improvement is the ability to hold one gun in each hand and then have each gun operate independently of the other [one side of the controller controls one gun, the other side, the other gun]. And if you're holding only ONE gun, you don't have to switch to a grenade to throw it, you just simply take one hand away from balancing the gun and toss the grenade. The only problem is there's like 5 different kinds of grenades and you can't switch between them. You just use them until you run out. Which is annoying because if you REALLY need a close range shock grenade and the top priority grenade is incendiary, you're toast [literally].

Overall, it seems that this game was based on the gameplay and styling of Unreal Tournament (jump pads, power-ups, etc) not of the original Red Faction. So if you like UT, play RF II. If you like RF, stick with it my brothers and sisters and hope something better comes along.

Two Clydesdales out of Five.

I love the first red faction game. it had fun weapons, lots of destructive environments, fun vehicle sequences and lots of actions. Red faction 2, on the other hand, fails to live up to the qualities of the first game.

the gunplay here feels really bland and fails to pack a punch. shooting the enemies just doesn't feel satisfying and a lot of the weapons feel under-powered.

the level design is much more linear than that of the first game, and what was so impressive about the first game was that if you threw a grenade or fired a rocket at a wall, or the ground, it would leave a huge hole or literally destroy a piece of the environment, it was a such a groundbreaking feature. however, in this game, destructive environments are much rarer and only certain parts of the game have it.

overall, I don't recommend this sequel the first game was much better.

OK well there I was with no good games to play. I just had to get my hands on a good FPS. Red Faction sure didn't disappoint This is a superb game. Lots of weapons, lots of enemies, lots of explosions and a few more enemies thrown in for good measure. When i first bought the game I was worried that it was going to be a game that wasn't going to go anywhere. How wrong was I. It has an engaging storyline (OK not that imaginative but it will do) and the gameplay is near perfect. The only problems that I had were that I don't think you can have enough Bots on multiplayer and after playing it for ages there isn't much replay value (you know you cant go back to a level just for the fun of it). I was disappointed with the presentation of some weapons such as the Shotgun (weird) and the Silenced Machine Gun (too quiet for my liking). Anyway this has to be one of the best first person shooters I have ever played. Buy it...buy it now!!!!

I enjoyed the first red faction so I was eager to play the sequel and when I did the game was very different but this in no way is a bad thing. There are no stealth levels in this sequel, it is pure action and it can be very fun since there are loads of enemies to kill and loads of weapons to kill them with.

In the first one you could drive many vehicles but in this sequel you can only drive a submarine and a battle armour (sort of a robot which has 2 mini guns and 2 rocket launchers) which is slightly disappointing but you can control the guns on a tank and a plane while Shrike (voiced by the great Jason Statham) does the driving. The storyline is okay but nothing special and the twists are predictable and there is no real character development and length of the game is only about 6-8 hours but there is a cool botmatch with hundreds of maps.

The graphics and sound are improvement over the first one but the geomod is once again becomes a wasted opportunity

Overall red faction 2 is a fun game but not a brilliant one