Red Faction 2 - ReviewFocus

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	Red Faction 2
	List Price: $19.99 Your Price: $19.99

Product Info

Reviews

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Rating: 1 stars

Summary: A disappointing sequel
Review: I own the first Red Faction and really enjoyed it. One of the best features of the ORIGINAL Red Faction was that you could play multiplayer games online. The biggest problem with the original Red Faction was that some creative gamers invented "cheats" which would allow them to gain serious advantages while playing multiplayer. The designers, although they released two separate patches, were never able to fix this problem. Fast forward to Red Faction 2... they fixed it! The designers decided to solve this problem by... eliminating the multiplayer feature entirely! Woo hoo, great solution guys. As a result, Red Faction 2 is half the game that the original was. THQ should hire some real programmers that can SOLVE problems, not run away from them. Do yourself a favor and buy the original Red Faction for PC. You can still play fun multiplayer games with friends that don't cheat.

Rating: 1 stars

Summary: Really Phenomenal
Review: I played this game and it is completely UNBELIEVABLE! I played the first Red Faction as well. HUGE fan of both. If you love shooters as much as I do, then you would be smart and buy this game. Stunning graphics, solid gameplay, hours of fun. I highly recommend it. And if you are new to the series, buy the first Red Faction as well...

Rating: 2 stars

Summary: This is a disappointment.
Review: I'd really enjoyed Red Faction ("RF"). Not as much as other FPS games, perhaps: the storyline had felt a bit fragmented in trying to hold together both the basic idea of a miners' revolt and your archetypical evil-scientist must be stopped plot. The game engine, including the highly touted GeoMod, was particularly slick work. The music score for the game really made my day on many an occasion, just to add to the goodness. All-together, I'd say the original RF got a 4 out of 5. (Reluctantly -- I could almost give it a 5 out of 5, and really wanted to praise Volition that far -- but not quite. I'm a stickler for storytelling being an essential element of any such game.) The sequel ("RF2"), once I'd seen the promo trailer, gave me hope for a much less fragmented storyline. And I'd expected that in a few years Volition would have enhanced the graphics engine of the game with a few new tricks I'd surely like to see.

Well, okay, the story _is_ less fragmented. It fact, it's even a _better_ story. But it's a _shorter_ story, by far. Which, of course, means that the game's life for a solo player is much shorter. RF could have filled a novella, maybe, with its story. RF2, by comparison, was barely a short-story.

The graphics _are_ a bit richer than the original -- although on my "aging" 1.5GHz P4 / 64MB MX440 nVidia the video got choppy. I can forgive any game that needs more recent hardware to run, but I'd bought my machine not more than a year beforehand, which means it probably hit the market all of two years before the game's release. I can forgive it, but it seemed a bit of a needless narrowing of the target audience. That, and ... well, I'll get to that point at the end.

The music score was a great disappointment, however. I'm all for more remixes of my favorite tunes, but I like good original music more than I like more of the same. There was, _maybe_ one or two original pieces for the game beyond the background score for the attract-mode of the game.

And something seemed to have happened to GeoMod between its implementation in the original and the sequel. GeoMod was a great feature in RF. Ever play around in the Glass House that comes with RF? Ever used the RPG launcher to dig a tunnel up above the ceiling and then rain down explosives on the house? Great cathartic fun for a wannabe pyromaniac like me after a long frustrating day at work. The Glass House also makes a great demonstration of how dynamic GeoMod was in the game engine. However, in RF2, I noticed that if I repeatedly went through sections of the same sequence, regardless of where I landed a grenade or detonation pack, the same section of wall or rock would open up in the exact same way. (I'm not _that_ consistent a shot to land a grenade in the same position every time.) It didn't feel like GeoMod any more, it felt like there were removable sections of wall that disappeared if their damage count rose above a threshold. I'll give the developers the benefit of the doubt if they insist that GeoMod really did go into the game, but it did really make me wonder. Regardless of the source of the problem, it did detract from gameplay, more for the disappointment and loss of previous fun than anything inherent, but did none-the-less.

Now, back to that point I was going to make. Above all else, one thing stands out more than anything about this game. I can't blame them for trying to be efficient about managing production costs and time by trying to create a product that's cross-platform from the get-go. It _is_ a gaining trend in game development. If you ever look at the cheat codes you're given (and the game _does_ reveal them over time), they're all encoded in ... game-pad button letters? Oh, my, yes: an alphabet of A, B, C, D, W, X, Y, , and Z. The save-points are restricted to transition points between "levels". And, well ... there's just a bunch of other dead give-aways that if the console version is that different from what you're seeing in the PC version then there was some truly weird goings-on in the development process.

OTOH, the original release price was merely $30, compared to games which have been PC-first releases averaging about $50. I'd say that, proportionately, I got about 60% of the game I normally expect from a large commercial release. That sounds abysmal, really, but it at least had _some_ fun to it.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Sequel follows the pattern of ... most other sequels.
Review: I'd really enjoyed Red Faction ("RF"). Not as much as other FPS games, perhaps: the storyline had felt a bit fragmented in trying to hold together both the basic idea of a miners' revolt and your archetypical evil-scientist must be stopped plot. The game engine, including the highly touted GeoMod, was particularly slick work. The music score for the game really made my day on many an occasion, just to add to the goodness. All-together, I'd say the original RF got a 4 out of 5. (Reluctantly -- I could almost give it a 5 out of 5, and really wanted to praise Volition that far -- but not quite. I'm a stickler for storytelling being an essential element of any such game.) The sequel ("RF2"), once I'd seen the promo trailer, gave me hope for a much less fragmented storyline. And I'd expected that in a few years Volition would have enhanced the graphics engine of the game with a few new tricks I'd surely like to see.

1. The graphics were terrible (blocky, repeated textures, looked like it was running the Quake 2 engine). The weapons look like they are made of 20 polygons and 1 texture.
2. the enemy AI didn't even exist. They just stood there and kept shooting at you even though you're shooting back.
3. Terrible computer interface. It's not hard to use, it's just really basic, and designed like it was a PS2 or Xbox game.
4. Even though you can save your game at any point, when you die, you restart at the beginning of the level! What in the world? And you only have 1 save game slot! Excuse me, my 60 gig hard drive can fit more on one game at a time. This isn't a 8mb memory card.
5. The geo-mod engine which allows you to destroy the environment only works on about 20% of the time. Only certain walls or floors can be destroyed. Most of the time, you just leave a black burnt mark on the object you're trying to blow up with your giant rocket launcher!
6. No multiplayer - instead you get to play with a bunch of bots. Great...

Overall this is weak game in a very crowded market of first person shooters. There are literally dozens of alternatives that play, look, run, and feel better than this pitiful excuse for a game. Try unreal 2, castle wolfenstein, battlefield 1942, tribes 2, unreal tournament 2003, ravenshield, etc. instead of wasting $... on this game.

The only redeeming feature is that you get to kill alot of people with a variety of guns. But after a day or two this game gets boring really fast.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: S.D.H.
Review: I've really enjoyed this one so far. Most the other reviews aren't very good. Frame rate seems to suffer some but from what I've found it's still very playable. Lots of destroying bots and property. Game play in deathmatch is at a breakneck pace and you must move or die quickly. I like the graphics also even though I can't run them up at where I'd like.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: I really wish I'd read the reviews first...
Review: News Flash! The Original Is Better Than The Sequel!

I won't bother to go through a diatribe. Simply search for "red faction ii review" in google.com to get as many as you like. Let's just hit the high (or as it may be, LOW) points of this game:

1) No thought required - just shoot. No puzzles, no intrigue, no story to speak of. Just kill, kill, kill. Yawn.

2) Short - very short. I paid money for this?

3) No saving your game. The game only saves at the "transistion" point between levels. If you're in a tough spot and die, you're going to have to go through the entire level again to get to that spot - at which point if you die again, you have go through the entire level again...repeat ad nauseum. Who thought this was a good idea? Having to repeat long stretches of "easy" parts to get back to where you died...but I said no diatribe, didn't I?

4) No real thought required...but I said that already didn't I? It bears repeating.

5) No saving your game - yes, I know I just said that too, but it REALLY IS ANNOYING. I think this just sucks all the joy (what there was, anyway) right out of the game.

6) THQ, the publishers of this disappointing sequel have no support section for this game on their site! Their website simply says "We have not yet posted any Knowledge Base articles for this product." What, they thought no one would have questions? Or maybe they figured there was no point, since no one was going to buy the game after the reviews came out. You can contact their support section through email, though. Presumeably they will answer.

7) Volition, the developers of this game, have no support and no way to contact them that I could find. That's your first clue to the quality of the product, folks. Their website just loops you back into the redfaction2.com site, which has no useful information on it - just a sales pitch. BTW - Volition is a wholly owned subsidiary of THQ, Inc. Hmmm - like father, like son.

One gets the impression that this was a rush job to take advantage of the fond memory that we all had of the original Red Faction.

In conclusion, pass on this one. Maybe if enough people DON'T buy this, the next game will be better. I'm pretty sure that enough people have already complained about it. I really wish I'd read the reviews before I bought this turkey - it would have saved me some bucks, and a lot of dissapointment.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Some amazing parallels to Iraq war. Runs great on old PCs
Review: One of the first things you do in this game is blow up a statue of the main bad guy that looks a lot like a cross between Saddam Hussein and Stalin. While I thought that was rather prescient of the developers, what really baked my noodle happens later when you attack a TV studio. A reporter hiding in a back room keeps publicly broadcasting what cowards you are and how badly you're losing the war--all while you're blasting the hell out of the place! I was actually surprised to see he looked nothing like the Iraqi information minister.

With my dinosaur 550 mhz machine I nearly didn't bother loading up this game thinking the geomod stuff would bring my computer to its knees. I'm glad I did because this game absolutely screams for some reason (probably that low polygon count others are complaining about). And it's a ton of fun. Sure it's an EXTREMELY linear, kill everything kind of game, but it does this very well. There's a lot of good variation in gameplay as the game places you in some different vehicles along the way. While these segments are a little too easy, they had me grinning from ear to ear at the mahyem possible when heavy weapons meets geomod.

And about that geomod...don't expect anything revolutionary. The developers made a big mistake overselling this feature as some kind of breakthrough. They should of just billed it for what it is-- more parts of the environment blasting apart than usual. This is a really cool feature if you don't expect the game to revolve around it. Does it change the way you play this game? Nope. Is it pretty cool when you miss a baddie but the wall behind him shatters? Yep.

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