izigame.me

Of all the titles in the Red Faction series, 2 is the only one I never even considered replaying until now. I remembered being miserable while playing the game back when it was just released and didn’t want to experience that again. But curiosity got the best of me and since I’ve gone through Red Faction, I decided that I might as well play the sequel too. My memories weren’t wrong – it’s an infuriatingly terrible title.
Red Faction II is a much simplified, much more linear and “dumbed down” version of Red Faction with a plot that reminded me of C&C Renegade. It retains the destructibility of the first game, but now it’s even more simplified, ditches a lot of the niche mechanics and ideas (like stealth, carrying bodies or most of the fully controllable vehicles) and tells an even more primitive story than the original title.
It starts with a couple of intriguing levels, where the game focuses a lot on giving you enough grenades and letting you blow up enemies and parts of the level, but very quickly descends into forcing you to use very crappy feeling non-explosive weapons and exploring horribly designed levels. The game is full of “now what?” moments and about as many “are enemies infinitely respawning?” moments where you have no idea what the game expects you to do. Enemies do spawn out of thin air and often behind your back a lot (sometimes indeed infinitely). About halfway through most of the enemy types switch to incredibly tedious and annoying bullet sponges that are simply not fun to fight. And then you also get lots of obnoxiously extended and unfun boss fights where the best way to win is to cheese the boss AI somehow.
The game looks and feels worse in every way too. Unlike the original, the sequel does look like a PS2 game from 2003. There are no saves and no checkpoints inside levels. Weapon selection is horrible, whenever you try to scroll through the weapons, or if you try to use the hotkeys. Ammo to weapon dependency is also extremely unintuitive and most weapons suck anyway. As there is no comprehensive mod like Dash Faction for the sequel, it also feels worse on modern systems and the best modified solutions are very hacky and annoying to use. But they’re still better than not using them. And the only cute new idea this title has is the “Heroics” score, which increases for bonus objectives and minimizing civilian damage, and decreases if you just kill everyone and don’t help your allies. Which is neat, but barely important and at times feels poorly implemented.
This game is shorter than the original, but it felt much longer because of how frustrating and unenjoyable most of it is. If Red Faction is among the best examples of the FPS titles of the early 00s, Red Faction II is certainly among the worst I’ve played. It’s boring at best, infuriating at worst and absolutely not worth 4-5 hours it takes to finish. Just avoid it even if you’re curious about the franchise.