Red Faction 2

While the first Red Faction was a classic of sorts, Red Faction 2 unfortunately left a lot of the good parts of the first game behind. Much of the interesting world and story setup for the game has been ditched in favour of a much more generic "resist the pseudo-Soviet regime" plot, and the game is full of characters that, while fully voice-acted, receive absolutely no development and thus all the drama falls flat. Level design has taken a major hit, which much smaller, more limited and scripted environments which lack some of the open-ended qualities in the first game. The game is criminally short, clocking in around 4-5 hours, and non-existent enemy AI and banal, highly-scripted sequences mean that those hours are not especially fun either. Even the GeoMod tech, under-utilized in the first game, took a backseat in Red Faction 2, with only the barest handful of situations where it's ever needed or used creatively. Instead its use is merely cosmetic in what is otherwise a totally generic and uninteresting shooter. Red Faction 2 is not a complete train wreck, merely completely mediocre in every way, but seeing as how there are so many shooters out there, you should probably just skip this one and stick to the original Red Faction.

I played this when it first came out years ago on the Gamecube and recently re-bought it out of nostalgia. This entry into the Red Faction series feels off story wise and seems slightly influenced by the original Deus Ex. Graphics are/were ok for the time, although I'm kind of fond of the art style, and direction which reminds me of UT '03. My main issues stem from how short and bare the story is despite have an interesting setting that is dystopian science fiction, and it has nothing to do with the rest of the series almost as if the developers wanted a different game, but were forced to make a sequel to the original. This game also has a cemented legacy that despite having geomod 2.0 it's hardly used beyond finding secret caches of ammo. So if you're fishing for a retro FPS to burn maybe 4 or 5 hours with virtually no story enjoy but if you're looking for more look somewhere else.

I used to have original copy that I bought in my teen years. It's not as signature as RF1, but it's still overall a good game.

Red Faction 2 improves on the first one in almost every way. While it's not the best game in the series in my opinion, it's still worth playing through.

Keep in mind that I don't play multiplayer, so I don't care about it one bit; that might change how useful this review is to you. If the first game wanted to be Half-Life, this wanted to be Turok, so it's already more fun. The vehicle sections are surprisingly good, and the weapons, while not on Turok's level, are a pretty good bunch, even if many of them become immediately obsolete. It also doesn't throw nearly as much bullshit at you as the first game does; no more instant kills at full health. Your ability to blow up your environment is scaled back quite a bit, but since the first game forgot about it pretty early on, it's no big loss. Maybe not mind-blowing, but definitely an improvement.