Moving on from the first game to the second back to back gives me the chance to see what they did right and wrong with the game more clearly then when I was little playing them. Good: *More enemy types *Gives you more chances to use the insanity meter without consequences *More options for weapons than you had before including dual wielding smaller weapons *A bit more variety in level design Bad *Story isn't as engaging (or coherent in some places) *Can only carry two weapons compared to a weapon wheel before *Can't carry healing items on person, only find on ground *Spawns large groups in tight areas making it difficult to fight in 1st person I still had fun playing it but I kept getting the feeling that I'd rather be playing the first one. Still worth buying at full price but maybe keep the expectations lower.
I played this over a decade ago on the PS2 and am glad to say alot of the game still holds up pretty well. The story is well told and the voice acting is a step above average in most areas. The gameplay is reletively simple and although I'm usually a console player I found the mouse and keyboard controls pretty easy to pick up. It has the usual affair of weapons (Pistol, shotgun, knife, etc) that all serve some purpose or another but I really just ran through the game using a weapon until I ran out and it auto switched me. My only complaint about combat is how difficult it seemed to change throwables like grenades and flares. Enemy types are varied and you still havce new ones even into late game. The bosses are all variations of a puzzle fight which I actually enjoyed doing. Now with the game portion out of the way I need to bring up why I only gave a game I really like a 4 instead of a 5. On my Windows 10 laptop it crashed alot, often times making me restart my laptop to get around the freeze it was causing. I probably had this happen a total of 14 times from the first mission to the last. These would unfortunatly happen whenever a new level was loading. Worst still if you are not diligent in your manual saves you would lose up to 30 minutes of gameplay depending on how long the level was. I powered through but it might be something some can't just look past. I'm also not sure if this was my laptop or the current build of the game but I think the npcs you are supposed to protect are very bugged out or just don't do what they are supposed to. For example one of the very first guys you are supposed to escort for me kept getting locked behind a gate when I had a fight with the prison warden. It wasnt until I walked into him to force him in front of me that the game registered where he was supposed to be. This happened a few more times asside from this. Aside from these issues I would say it is well worth picking up and trying for yourself. $10 being a great price.
