Red Faction 2

Monday, October 27th, 2003 at 12:00 AM

You are a super soldier, smarter, stronger, and faster because you have been
enhanced with nano-technology. Once a great hero you are now an enemy of the
state. At one point there were 2000 nano-enhanced soldiers, now there are only
a handful. Chancellor Sopot is the man responsible and will be your ultimate
target, you are now in the world of Red Faction 2. Originally released on the
Playstation 2 console, the Xbox version has increased texture resolution, exclusive
multiplayer maps, and character models. Red Faction 2 utilizes an enhanced GeoMod
engine that allows players to alter and destroy the game environments in real
time, and with over 60 multiplayer maps there is plenty to destroy. So let’s
take a look at what THQ’s Red Faction 2 has to offer the first person shooter
genre.

Red Faction 2 is a linear based first person shooter that places you among a
squad of six, each with their own military specialty. You take control of Alias,
an explosives expert, but you will be helped by your squad-mates throughout
the game; Shrike, Quill, Tangier, Repta, and Molov.
Shrike is a veteran of the Air Corps and specializes in transportation, Quill
excells in long range combat such as sniper fire, Tangier’s specialty is stealth
and electronics, Repta has violent tendencies and specializes in heavy weapons,
and Molov excells in all forms or armed combat and is also the squad leader.
You and your squad have the main objective of eliminating Chancelor Sopot for
his crimes against humanity (mainly killing alot of people and being a faschist
leader, to put it simply).

Set out to destroy the tyranical disctator you will have access to an arsenal
of weaponry and machinery. The controls are straight forward and should come
with ease to most gamers. A nice touch is being able to shoot double fisted
weapons independantly from one another. So while you reload the weapon in your
right hand you can continue blowing things apart with your left hand.

Besides running around you get to play in vehicles like a gunship, mini-submarine,
tank, and battle armor. All of the vehicles operate in a manner that feels as
if they are simply an extension of yourself, making hopping on and heading out
come naturally.

While the single player quests in the game are a blast, Red Faction 2 really
shines in it’s multiplayer mayhem. Offering the familiar multiplayer game types
such as Deatmatch, Team Deathmatch, Capture the Flag, and also boasting some
not so common game types such as Bagman and Team Bagman and Arena. You and your
friends will be gunning each other down for hours.

Don’t have any friends? It’s OK, don’t cry. Red Faction has you covered there
too by allowing you to manage bots for your multiplayer sessions. Not only can
you set a number of bots to join the map with you, but you also set their traits,
such as Health, Accuracy, Agility, Damage Multipliers, Aggressiveness, and their
tendency to Camp. There’s much more, but you get the point.

The dreary environments lend themselves well to the feel of the game, character
animations are well done, and the geo-mod feature allowing you to destroy parts
of the environment helps add more interaction with your surroundings, especially
needed due to the linear fashion of the single player campaign modes. Explosions
are always cool and the AI seems a bit schizophrenic, sometimes acting smarter
than you, other times not knowing what to do when faced with a ticking grenade.

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The music definitely fits the game well, nice rockin’ tunes throughout, while
the stale voice-overs could have used a bit more enthusiasm. Overall, the audio
does it’s part to make the title work.

While most single player games, depending on the person, are not to high on
replay value, the multiplayer section of Red Faction 2 will keep you going for
days with plenty of maps, a great variety of weaponry, and even bot friends
for you lonesome folk.