Alright, I was expecting a lot out of this, since the first one was so creative and unique in many ways. I gave it too many chances, I should’ve known it was going to be godawful as soon as the game started and it took me twenty minutes to figure out that you’re supposed to blow up a staircase or something (the wall is invincible). The back of the Red Faction II case boasts that it has the Geo-Mod technology that RF1 had so I was pretty pumped up. I was very dissapointed. It’s more of a team game, except the thing is your teammates can’t die. You can simply stand back and let them do all the work for you. The back of the case also brags about the ability to control vehicles, I saw at least 30 vehicles that are completely unable to be interacted with. The enemies have clever scripted lines everytime you do a specific task such as “GRENADE!” and “I have a few bullets saved for you!” Please take note that they say these things even when there’s no possible way they can see you or what you’re doing. The weapons are plentiful at the least: you start out with grenades and some kind of assault rifle, next thing you know you’re packed with about half a trillion rockets and a launcher. Why anyone would ever EVER want to switch from the rocket launcher to some other weapon is beyond me. It’s one of those situations where you wonder “Should I shoot them with a rifle for three hours or just shoot a shitload of rockets and blow them all to hell in a max time of six seconds?” Unlike RF1, it involves absolutely NO strategic effort whatsoever, you just run around shooting people with a rocket launcher. That is until you get to the helicopter part, this stage is quite different. You are now shooting people with rockets IN A HELICOPTER!! The designers of this masterpiece have really stretched their imagination limits on this one. So after you kill 3/4 of the city’s population, the helicopter gets shot down (despite the fact that I had well over 50% “heli-health” at the time that it happened) And thus comes the exciting sewer adventure. After you wonder around for countless hours looking for pipes to swim in you end up in a subway station. Dodging the train was bad enough, but they had to invent an enemy that challenges even the Cliff Racer from Morrowind in pure annoyance. A small bug robot thing which I like to call “fucking bastard” comes up to you and simply explodes on you for no reason. Sure that isn’t that bad, but they had to put about 400 of them in every three feet of the station. I’d like to take a small time out to add the fact that in no parts of these stages are any walls able to be blown up, some floors can be holed, but is there any hidden wall items? Of course not, because there’s no such thing as “paths that can be used as a shortcut instead of wondering around a scripted path like an idiot.” This really makes me sick, and they shouldn’t have even named it Red Faction II if it had nothing to do with the system used in RF1. But let’s slow down here for a second…what DOES it have to do with RF1? Well your team is called the Red Faction, that is it. They are not dressed or organized like the Red Faction at all. Now if you haven’t already noticed, this game is completely pointless and is just like every other ordinary FPS out there (including ones made years ago). Well anyway, a few years later you get to take control of a giant suit of armor and…you’ll never believe this…shoot rockets at people. I was shooting things hoping for a path to open up for thirty straight minutes. I kept shooting rockets at some kind of stumps sticking out of the ground, then I figured out that you have to shoot right in the middle of them. Gone are the days of shooting near it and watching part of it blow away, or just simply walking over them. Also, the whole time this is happening some army cliche kept shouting “GOOD SHOT!” This game sucks. You end up having to protect some guys on the street and jumping across buildings, some guys were shooting at me from below so I jumped down adn immediately died in the undodgable fire wall circling the building. I really didn’t give a shit and I quickly turned the game off. It was by far the best part of the entire game. In conclusion, this is NOT an RF game, it’s more like a Doom meets Unreal Tournament kind of shindig. I’m just glad I only rented it and didn’t go out and buy it first thing like some suckers. I got way more pleasure off playing Terminator 2: Judgement Day for the SNES, pretty bad huh? Stay away from RF2 unless you like blowing your money on pointless piles of crap. Graphics: 9 Sound: 7 Replayabilty: 0 Fun Factor: -5 Controls: 7 Overall: 18 out of 50 stars (basically a 4/10)

MULTIPLAYER:

This one’s going to be short due to there’s absolutely nothing new in Multiplayer. There’s a few maps and you choose bots to play against, nothing special. What IS special however is the gameplay when you fire up a map. I’ve never seen a better deathmatch on any FPS game than RF1, all the walls that are able to be blown up, the awesome flamethrowers that you can throw the gas canister from, and Geo-Mod secrets. Well they’ve somehow screwed up that up in RF2, they include a few weapons and enable 2 whole walls in all maps combined to be blown up. I even saw that there’s a map from RF1 available, “There’s no possible way they can screw THIS up!” I shouted to myself for no apparent reason…..I was wrong. Imagine this, you’re transported to the good ol’ two-base map of RF1, but you noticed something’s changed…The weapons on the ground no longer look at all like weapons, they’re now cardboard cut-outs colored blue and red. But they act as if they were real weapons if you walk over them. I can see how some would like this but I find it just annoying that the whole map is covered in large blue and red icons, I guess it’s because I’m “sane.” Anyway, I immediately ran up the top of my base and got the huge rocket launcher (which now isn’t near as big) and shot it…I almost puked. 1. The rocket hit the wall, blowing up about 1/8 as big as the rocket from RF1, I mean that rocket was fucking huge and hurt you from miles away. Now that was firepower. 2. The only thing it did to the wall was make a big black spot. Seeing as RF1 was able to make every square inch of wall blastable, why the hell can’t RF2?? This made my stomach cringe in pain. The most memorable moment I’d say was when I was in a deathmatch with two people with idiotic names and I tried to shoot the bridge out from under them. It made a big black mark, then about three seconds the mark dissapeared. Thank you THQ! There’s other multiplayer modes but I was too sick to try them out. Bagman: You grab a bag and try to hold it for the longest time without getting killed. O_o Capture the Flag: Get the other team’s flag and bring it to your base. o_O Arena: Like deathmatch except everyone has the same weapon. o_o Team Arena: Same as above, with teams. This game sucks, there’s no way around it. Whoever finds this game even remotely fun should be injected with the same shit the designing team of RF2 was, only eight hundred times more. (I’m looking at you Mark) Go get Bloodrayne instead.