Red Faction II

TGAM managed to secure an exclusive hands on with Red Faction 2 on the PS2-due out November 15th four years ago. Here is a review.

Red Faction was a good game, a half life for the consoles before half life went to the consoles. Red Faction 2 takes a slightly different tact on the FPS story driven game but you'll recognise some of the elements from the first one.

The game looks nice, it's a bit blocky in places but generally it's ok. The most immediate thing you'll notice is that there is no melee. More often than not you'll run up to a baddie firing until you run out of ammo. You then have to jump, backpeddle or strafe around until you reload. All the while the badguy will be doing the same. The game has some on-rail levels that see you in a tank or a jet fightery thing. These sections are okay but, on the whole, a bit too easy.

The blood in this game is weird. If you shoot someone standing near a wall a spot of blood will splatter behind them. This means that after some intense firefights the levels look like the bedsheets from an all-girls boarding school dorm during that mgical time of the month.

Also this game is one of the first to let you dual wield. This feature is great and I'm sure you'll be seeing it in more FPS as time goes by. It makes sense really, you end up picking up hundreds of pistols dropped by enemies so why not wield two! Of course you can't throw grenades if you are using two guns. A nice touch of reality!

RF2 also has the Geo-mod of the first one so in certain sections you'll be able to blow up sections of wall to find secret areas. This feature only really comes in useful when you least want to use it. You'll find that most walls cannot be damaged more than a few inches. However, it does make for some nice set pieces. Another feature maintained from the first game is the ability to attach explosive satchels to enemies and civilians. They will then run around screaming for a bit until the satchel explodes. Unfortunately, the satchels are now on a timer and not remotely controlled but to compensate for this when we attached a satchel to a woman hiding in a cupboard with a man (the man quibbles on for a moment "I know what this looks like....") she will scream "Mommy, Daddy?" before exploding into pieces which is sick but I'm glad it's in there.

Overall this game rocks. It won't take you too long to bust on medium, checkpoints are in useful places and it is rare to get irritated by the game because you have respawned miles away from the point you died. You may be better off starting on hard mode if you consider yourself to be a FPS veteran. The game has a myriad of extras to unlock; movies, character summaries, enemy summaries and concept art. The best of the movies is an entertaining Summoner Geeks retrospective on the original red faction by some of the characters from Summoner which is the kind of crossover feature that makes us videogame girlz at That Guy's go all gooey inside (and outside!). Unfortunately, I can't find the video from Red Faction 2.

Final Score: T-Virus but no G-virus!