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A Little Disappointing

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: July 06, 2007
Author: Amazon User

The first Red Faction was truly fascinating. I loved the idea of blowing a hole in the floor then going around an obstacle. This was less so. It was far more cartoon-y and less plot-driven. From reading the other reviews, I expected that much, but still wanted to play around in the geomod universe some more, which was the primary reason I bought it. had it not been dirt cheap, I'd have given it a miss.

Computer Cheats but still fun

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 0 / 1
Date: May 06, 2007
Author: Amazon User

The computer cheats on this game but it is still a fun action game and even more fun with multiple players.

Expectations...

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: May 14, 2006
Author: Amazon User

If you have any expectations about this game from the first, AVOID IT AT ALL COSTS! You WILL be disappointed. They completely ruined the geomod system that made the first one what it was, and the gameplay flops as well. Boo!

What the...?

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 0 / 2
Date: May 03, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I was walking though a store one day and saw this game. Since I LOVED the first Red Faction I figured this game would be right up my alley. So I bought it... brought it home... installed it. NO MULTIPLAYER!? NOT EVEN LAN!? Lemme tell you... a FPS without a multiplayer option is like a bathroom without a toilet. If you are a person that plays FPSs for the multiplayer (as I do), do yourself a favor and skip this game. With so many better games out there including Counter Strike 1.6/Condition Zero/Source, Day of Defeat, Half Life 1 & 2, Far Cry, Battlefield Vietnam/1942, and Unreal (and I'm sure you'll be able to think of TONS more) you should just save your money and just keep playing the first Red Faction. Heck... even the original DOOM/DOOM 2/Final DOOM for PC had at least a multiplayer LAN option. THQ... what we're you thinking when you made this game?

This is a disappointment.

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 1 / 3
Date: May 09, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Found this game in a store today, was exicted, since it's hard to find this game in stores now. So I just grabbed it off the shelf and bought it, without reading the back or anything (which doesn't help), get home, install it, load it up, and notice theres NO multiplayer option, not even LAN, unlike the original Red Faction, it supported Mutliplayer/LAN which made the game, since the single player mode was pretty boring after beating it once. THQ, Violation, you need to come up with a patch/update for this game if you don't want your reputation smashed. This is horrible guys, come on. The engine is too slow, it's like a cheap Quake III: Arena engine in slow motion. Skip this game people, if you don't have Red Faction, get that. If you do have Red Faction, some other games you might like is RTCW (Return to Castle Wolfenstein), Quake III: Arena, or Far Cry.

Sequel follows the pattern of ... most other sequels.

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 4 / 4
Date: December 04, 2003
Author: Amazon User

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.

A disappointing sequel

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 5 / 5
Date: October 02, 2003
Author: Amazon User

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.

Flawed in some ways great in others

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: July 28, 2003
Author: Amazon User

Straying from the formula of the first red faction other than the geomod, this is a first person blow it all to bits, with action around every corner (literally) sure its short but its also only 20 bucks and the bot mode can keep you busy if needed. IT is unfortunaly lacdking a mjultiplayer option, but if they are smart they will release a patch allowing the bot mode to allow other people to connect, but thats not announced. The weapons are fun and varried, and ther is plenty to blow up in sp compared to the first.
Reccommend to people wh like NONstop action.

I really wish I'd read the reviews first...

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: July 15, 2003
Author: Amazon User

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.

S.D.H.

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 0 / 2
Date: June 21, 2003
Author: Amazon User

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.

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