Red Faction II Review (SOBE)
Wow, just wow. How did they manage to make the second game even worse than the first? Somehow the graphics look worse in this game despite this being the second installment. The game play feels like it tries to improve but it just doesn't matter with how the game is just set up. The pacing is just awful and the characters and story line are horrendous. It seems only one voice actor in this game took their job somewhat serious. I tried playing without cheats on normal and got as far as the sewers before I realized how bad this game really was and just didn't want to continue on normal game play terms. I turned on the cheats just so I could run through this and see how this story line relates to Red Faction Guerrilla. At least with the first game you get a sense of where the sector names came from for RFG. In this game it just seems to focus on the nano tech and that is about it, and it doesn't really relate at all. Maybe there was more, but I found the game so God awful that it was just hard to pay attention to anything. Although the first game fell flat on its face, at least they did a better job with the story as well as just about everything else. Mind, that game dragged out and was horrible, too. Another weird thing is the cheats in this game. No invincibility for this one. Instead, they give you super health. Which is that replenishing health if you don't get hit, but just speed up a bunch. But of all the most annoying things about this game, I would say the overall look of the game is really annoying. In the first game, the doors and places to go to where a bit easier to locate. In this game it's just bad. Everything just seems to blend in. It's very difficult to tell where the hell you are getting shot at from the very get go. Not to mention the very lack of a tutorial in this game. I know many people hate them, but they have their uses. Plus in the first game, you could skip it if you wanted to. It's just a big s hit show that feels like it was rushed together like no other. I looked online and saw that this game came out only a year after the first one and boy does it show.
As always, avoid the older games on steam unless they come in some sort of bundle. Most will have relentless bugs and rely on mods or a decent amount of research just to get the dam n thing running. This one actually ran okay all the way through aside from two glaring issues.
1 - I run on dual monitors and this game always wanted to run on the wrong screen. Turns out in the launcher there were two options for my graphics card, I selected the other one and it fixed it. This through me off because the first game had the same, but doing so would just not allow the game to run.
2 - The game was just THAT bad.