If Red Faction doesn't take place on Mars...
... then is it really Red Faction?
I guess the "Red" in Red Faction this time comes from the obvious Communist era tones in the artwork and "for the people" storyline. Red Faction 2 doesn't take place on Mars. It doesn't have a whole lot to do with the first game at all, really, and that's okay with me. I love/hate Red Faction. I hate it because the AI was awful, the geo-mod was not entirely impressive or overly useful, and the levels were linear and sparsely decorated. It felt like a crap Half-Life. I did, however, enjoy the couple of vehicle sequences and, for some reason, feel compelled to play through the game every now and then, if just to remind myself how much it sucks.
Here's what Red Faction 2 does right; more vehicle sequences (the battle mech is particularly fun), better graphics and effects (like rain), and a more interesting story with love and betrayal. The AI still amounts to running around or standing stark still while being shot in the face. The levels are still super linear, and particularly short. Geo-mod provides some neat effects sometimes but I don't think I tore down a single building.
The biggest flaws Red Faction 2 has are one particularly painful boss fight, and the game is very short. The one boss fight takes place in a cathedral, where snipers respawn in the balconies, and zombies respawn on the ground floor, and between those two you have to find time to whittle down a human size boss's lifebar from halfway across a large room. It is not fun. And the whole game, respawns and all, took me less than three hours to complete. That's Kane & Lynch 2 short.
But, it is an improvement over Red Faction, even if that's not saying much because Red Faction is pretty awful.
