Red Faction 2

The signposting absolutely fails about halfway through the game, in many parts. Forcing us to mash E on doors or blast areas of a single room to progress. Kills the flow. Then there's the accuracy of the weapons, awful. Whatever reason that made game designers think an assault rifle had to have the spread of a sneeze and for shotguns to have the damage of one, whatever reason there was for that. I'm glad it's largely gone. Game is fine, but nothing special. Destruction is minimal, less so than the first game. You can skip it, or watch a Let's Play, it'd be the same either way. The trajectory of your life won't change one bit.

With none of the depth of intrigue or rawness of the first offering, this is a straight up military shootfest. The "plot" is thin and doesn't have the depth of the first, the "plot twist" comes as no surprise at all and from an initial offering where weaponry was very limited, you feel pretty inundated with choices early on. Distinctly mediocre.

Folks, that's the best example of a great start and pathetic finish. Level design is simplified judging of today but gives you good kicks at the beginning... ...but it simply degrades towards the end. Final levels are a bunch of blunt, mediocre technical installations with surrounding fogs, intense steam, falling metallic bridges, coming from nowhere hard-to-kill enemies, radio screams and other pseudo stimulus of fast acting... You don't have this great destructible environment starting from somehow middle of the game. You don't find bonus missions to complete. There is nothing to discover, just to follow predefined linear path to complete the level. Properly started story line becomes flat and unacceptably predictable once you complete first third of the game. It looks like the team working on the game either was completely replaced at some point or got extremely demotivated, so much for a drastic difference you see after 1/3 of the game is complete. The game has overall good balance towards length of the level and general length of the game, but definitely has '0' replay value. Difficulty curve is extreme sharp and once you are half of the game through it becomes simply annoying. Life System with regeneration is fine solution, but it doesn't help much later on. Saving system is per checkpoint/level. Just like on console. Very inconvenient. Bottom line: frustrating and disappointing experience. What's good: I experienced no single technical issue, moving and physics in general are good and it still looks OK for an old game. What's bad: second half of the game is extremely dull/flat/cliche/etc,,. and the game has '0' replay value (not considering the unlocking different models, pictures etc.). Check some longplays and other people feedback prior to purchase to make sure the game fits you. P.S. There was some botmatch option... maybe this will fix it? But I even didn't bother to try when I've completed the game. It was insta-uninstall case.

A lot of this game seems strangely crummy compared to the first Red Faction, and the developers of this sequel completely gave up on the most interesting gimmicks of the first game, like the geo mod. It's not a bad shooter on its own - it can be quite fun too. But compared to the first game it seems a lot less polished, the shooting feels floaty and feedback from hitting the enemies is very minimal. Pretty much the only enemies that are fun to shoot are those zombies that look like out of a Time Splitters game, because their heads fall apart if you score a headshot. The story is also this generic yarn about disgruntled military super soldiers overthrowing a dictator, and then turning coat and betraying the player, and bla bla bla bla... It's completely dull and forgettable, which is disappointing because, again, the original's story and setting was actually one of the standouts of that game (for the time, at least). Even having some good actors for voice talents doesn't help to salvage it. It feels like a quickly slapped together sequel, made by a B studio on a lower budget and shorter deadline, and it just ended up being this black sheep of the series (that is, until Red Faction Armageddon came out).

Pretty much constant shooting. Enemies appear to respawn at certain spots until you cross an invisible barrier which stops them. The story is nothing special, just a reason to shoot some bad guys. No relation to the first game. Not a big deal to me but some people seem upset about it. Seems to have more destruction then the first game to me. Mostly you can blow holes in some walls to proceed. Boss fights are rather asinine. Prepare to die. I resorted to cheat codes for the last 3 bosses. Really only 4 bosses.