Red Faction II

"Red Faction 2 is the best thing since diced dead"

Red Faction was a game that promised many things, but lost its direction somewhere in development and drew away from exploiting the real power of its technology. It remained an atmospheric and mostly entertaining shooter, but the impressive real-time level wrecking of Geo-Mod was reduced to little more than a gimmick. The gripping possibilities of the tech demo - redirecting flows of liquid by destroying their channels, vaporizing bridges from beneath the feet of your enemies, blocking corridors with steam from shattered pipes - branched off into a dark alternate future unreachable from here. Our Red Faction became a shooter much like any other. But now this sequel is here to put it all right.

In looks, feel and excitement, RF2 blows its predecessor to smithereens. From the very beginning, Geo-Mod technology is at the forefront of your activities, rather than providing momentarily interesting holes in the background. You find things, you blow them all to hell. In Americo-speak, this ''rocks''. And to translate that into English, it's ''really rather spiffing, old chap. Pip pip''.

Once you gain control after the introductions you're faced with the unscalable wall of a fortress. The doors are locked. There's no bell. In any other game you'd wander off in search of a key, maybe stopping to talk to a man who's standing stock still in the middle of a path for no reason at all. In this game you go through the wall. Then you blow out the foundations of the guard towers, letting the collapse kill the aggressors that top them. And then once you've cleared the place out and demolished everything the local artisans had worked so hard to build, your squadmate blasts in with an enormous gunship. The next door might be too tough even for your rocket launcher, but it can't withstand the ship, and the new 'squad' dynamic means it's your job to secure the area so it can go to work.
This kind of thing is pretty much the limit of your responsibilities to the group - taking an objective so another member can operate, or to fight alongside them - as you're never directly in control of anyone but Alias. Other games, such as Project Eden and Ghost Recon, give you a real squad to control, but are far slower and more complex to play. Anyone who knows either title (or another one in that gameplay are) will appreciate the simplicity and focus Red Faction embodies. You feel like you're fighting within a team, but you're always free to concentrate on the important things. You know, like blowing stuff up.

So you're Alias, the demolitions expert. Naturally you get to play with all the fun stuff, the explosives and heavy weaponry that'll cut a man clean in two, leaving just his legs to slowly topple to the rubble-strewn floor. The five other members turn up at various junctures to unleash their skills and help you through. Shrike, for instance, is the transportation man, and deals with all your vehicular needs. Shrike is something of a headcase, as you'll find out during the sections where you let him drive in order to carry on shooting all the things you haven't shot so far. For instance, when in the tank, Mr Shrike clearly thinks it'll fit down alleyways and through walls much better than it'll go down the road. It's just another of the ways in which Geo-Mod is brought to the fore, and it's more than just eye candy, presenting a challenge that otherwise wouldn't occur - you never really know where the next enemy is going to appear from, because up until two seconds ago that was a wall.

OK psychos, you can't kill your teammates, so don't even try. They don't like it. They work pretty intelligently anyway, so it won't be frustration that makes you want to. The AI of your enemies and teammates alike is vastly improved from the first game. There, the cracks showed particularly badly in the stealth section, where your weapons were gone or useless - enemies would react with telepathic speed to a gun fifty feet away, but ignore running thudsteps just behind their hip pocket. It's not like that now. For starters, Volition has learnt not to take the player's weapons away in the first place: feedback revealed that we hate that, especially after taking so long to build the collection. The tricky and pace-denting stealth levels are gone anyway, and the AI is simply far stronger (and brighter) in the first place. If you run into a room alone, for example, right into a pack of fighters, they'll launch at you without hesitation. But if you and your team outnumber them they'll turn and run. Like ladies. Like ladies in difficult shoes.

Voice prompts make their feelings even more obvious, as they'll jeer or wail, depending on the circumstance. It all makes it just that little bit more satisfying when you vaporize their torsos; gives it that personal touch. As you progress you realize enemy behavior is more influenced by more than just this, too. 'Cannon fodder' security staff are far more likely to leg it than the elite nightmares encountered later in the game, and can stand less of the pain you're dishing out before they dribble into the afterlife piece by piece. The gabbling, the taunting, the screams for mercy, the howls of pain...large battles create a cacophony of suffering akin to an American chat show audience. But don't worry, it's not as bad. It's a proper war. Add this to the sound of collapsing walls and colossal explosions and you've got screams + bangs + gibs x rubble, which equals...fun. If you hold the calculator upside down these numbers spell fun. They do. Look.

In fact, there's so much going on in this game it's hard to know where to start. Fortunately I've already started, so it doesn't matter. But now would be a good time why you and your troops are Red Faction fighters, when this is occurring on Earth (blue and green) rather than Mars (mostly red) and why you're a soldier in the dictator's army (not exactly anti-establishment).
This game is set a few years after the uprising on Mars and the Faction's success has inspired rebellion further afield. A cell arises on Earth, fighting the Stalin-esque dictator Victor Sopot, for whom you were once a soldier. In fact, for the first mission of the game you still are in his army. But then it all goes wrong. Sopot attempts to create unbeatable warriors using nano-augmentation, but finds he can't control you (Deus Ex anyone?). He tries to wipe you all out, generating instead zombified, unthinking drones. But you and your super soldier team don't want to be wiped out. So, just a few years after the initial mission, you end up allied with the rebellion and fighting your own forces.

So these opposing forces are far more intelligent than before. And you may be a demolitions expert, that doesn't mean they're lacking heavy explosives of their own. Take cover behind a pillar or wall and like as not you'll find it rapidly disappearing, exposing you to fire once again. You're always encouraged to fight, not to the exclusion of thinking about thinking (a little lateral thinking is often rewarded), but certainly enough to keep the pace high. Think on your feet and you'll be OK.

The Earth location and urban settings provide far more possibilities than the unavoidably unchanging mines of Mars. You fight right through the grandiose Public Information Bureau - a rich place full of impressively reflective marble floors, built to shower the populace with heroic lies while they starve in squalor - to mangled streets, bombed-out houses and desperate-looking bases. You can blow right through walls to find sneakier routes, climb buildings for a better view of snipers or unrushing forces, and take out structures such as upper floors or telegraph poles to expose or crush your enemies. And this where the lateral thinking comes in - all enemies can be taken head on, but sometimes there might be a better way, and that way can reward you with more than just the immediate tactical advantage.
Each mission has hidden objectives, and completing them unlocks further goodies such as multiplayer maps and skins. Blow down a bridge to escape a room in one case, for instance, and you'll meet the hidden objective. Some involve more random things such as smashing every computer in a control room, but you'll find many from just considering your environment and using it to your advantage. And from blowing the hell out of it.

While the first game looked pretty good, its frame rate was sometimes disappointing and the whole thing could chug somewhat. Two-player, frankly, was awful. This time the single player game is greatly improved, not just in speed, but in level of detail, and multiplayer is now usable. Four-player matches, unavailable in the first game, run significantly better even than the old two-player.
40 maps, 41 player models and a good solid frame rate are all massive improvements in this one. Having no fewer than eight modes also helps, as alongside the standard Deathmatch you'll find Arena and Bagman, plus Team versions of all three. Then there's Capture The Flag and the hidden Regime mode (a bag-holding variant involving the dictator's hat). Kill for this outsized chapeau and wear it as long as possible. But once it's on, you're unarmed.

Interestingly, you've also got the ability to create bots. Up to five AI bots are associated with your profile and you can design and train these guys to act as your squad. Initially you have 100 points to distribute among such abilities as damage, health, accuracy, camping tendency and aggressiveness, but all stats can be improved by fighting. Max them all out and you have super-bots, ultra hard teammates to memory card into your friend's game with a nuclear powered tin opener for the whup-ass. They really are nails.


As with seemingly everything in this game, there's more of it and better. The levels are filled with clutter and debris, giving them an authentically grungy feel - especially under the fantastic new rain - and of course, they're not just rock tunnels. Much of the game takes place in streets and buildings, although you will head underground from time to time to visit the sewers. It's a video game law. At least they look good: shoot into water and you're rewarded with a suitably noisy splash, while on the roof mottled reflections and shadows shimmy in the half-darkness. Areas such as these have less human presence, believably, but that doesn't mean there's less action. here you'll find spider bots that leap towards you on sickly metal legs before exploding on your head. Damn this future.

Although the ultra powerful, see-through-walls Rail Driver is back, those annoying sudden deaths are gone. So even when it gets tougher it doesn't get irritating. Alias has three 'lives', replenished by health packs, and will heal a large percentage of his health bar after avoiding damage for ten seconds. This makes the sections held down by snipers far more of the entertaining puzzle they should be, rather than the attempt/fail/reload patience tests of before. It also means the checkpoint save system replacing the save-anywhere style of before is not a problem, as you're far less likely to die in the first place.

You should have realized by now that there's plenty to shoot, blow up and knock down. You're not going to run out of bad guys, but that doesn't mean you can go round offing civilians willy-nilly and expect no comebacks. RF2 runs a 'karma' system because, after all, you're supposed to be a hero (not a chameleon or a deluded GF board member). Heroic deeds, such as protecting civilians from Sopot's forces and absolutely not shooting them in the head and necks, sees your karma rating shooting up. Slaughter everyone you meet, such as the reporter broadcasting on live TV, and it goes down. ''So what?'', you might ask. Well, your karma rating affects the ending. Without giving too much away, there are 'four or five' different endings, ranging from good to bad. Alternate endings always give extra replay value, and when all you've got to do is go back and execute absolutely everybody to see a different one...is very tempting. To describe it as the thinking man's shooting game would be pushing it, but mindless it's certainly not.

The original Red Faction may have caught the fear, backing away from its own destiny, but for this sequel, only Sopot's super-charged fighting forces need to be scared. Of you. Geo-Mod is now part of the main game, and it's a treat. It's also better looking, more fun and far more action-oriented than before. And unlike Timesplitters 2, it's even got a story.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 12/24/02, Updated 12/24/02