Red Faction II (2002)

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.