I have fond memories of playing Red Faction II with friends when I was a teenager but strangely enough couldn’t remember anything beyond the first five minutes of the first level. I thought I’d play the game through to the end to see if any memories would come back to me. All I ended up doing was wasting my time playing a boring game for 3 and a half hours.

One of the unique selling points of Red Faction II was its destructible environments, something, at the time, was very new and mind blowing. Sometimes you forget you can destroy the walls and you’ll be running around for ages trying to find the exit. You then start to waste explosive rounds shooting random walls hoping to find the one that will open up the exit path.

Apart from the destructible environments it’s a very standard FPS affair. The enemies though are complete and utter bullet sponges, even on easy mode. This makes it very unsatisfying and frustrating to kill enemies. There are some levels where you are in vehicles with big guns that allow you to easily mow through enemies, these are fun and satisfying at first but get boring quite quickly.

I found the main menu to be very confusing to load a saved game. I needed to change profile as it seemed to put me on a random one then start the single player as if I was starting a new game then select the level I was on. So strange and unintuitive.

I was surprised to see how well this game still runs on modern PCs (Windows 11). Only thing players would need to do is download the widescreen fix to stop the graphics from being stretched from their native 4:3 ratio. Unfortunately though, the character models have not aged well at all.

I honestly couldn’t keep up with the storyline in this game so I cannot rightfully talk about it here without having to copy paste stuff from Google.

The first Red Faction game is loved by many people, I thought it was okay. Red Faction II is loved even less so. Red Faction II was released in 2002 and alongside other FPS games from that year (Halo: Combat Evolved, Medal of Honor: Allied Assault and Return to Castle Wolfenstein) comparatively, this game is nothing special.

I’m glad Red Faction II was under 4 hours in length. It’s definitely not up there in the best games of all time. If you’re someone who perhaps has nostalgia for this game then it’s still easy enough to play on modern PCs without much user intervention. If you’re someone who is working their way through video game history for the first time, this isn’t the game you’re looking for.

Red Faction was a game with some interesting ideas and fun gameplay that ended up mediocre thanks to a lack of focus and bad writing. Red Faction 2 doubles down on that in the worst possible way - more destructible environments and more guns, sure, but with even more lazy, uninspired world building and terrible writing in general. Some of these characters, man. Calling them cartoonish would be unfair to cartoons.
Could've been a great game if they focused on improving RF's biggest weaknesses, but instead it was a huge missed opportunity.

I found the first half of Red Faction II to be pretty awful; most of it was set indoors which made the destructible environment feel very scripted and kinda unnecessary. As well as this, the characters were quite corny and not very likeable. However, in the second half of the game, I found a lot more charm in it. There were more outdoor settings which made the demolition aspects way more fun and intuitive, the characters started to grow on me, especially Repta who is easily my favourite character in the game, and there were some really cool boss fights towards the end, although the final one was a bit disappointing.

There's something about the gunplay in this game that I really like, I can't really put my finger on what it is because I think on paper it's extremely basic. I love the variety of different weapons you can find throughout the game, at first it felt like they were throwing a lot at me in terms of weapons, especially after coming straight from the first Red Faction game which didn't have too much variety, but by the end I found it so fun to switch between weapons and learning which weapons were effective against each enemy.

The story was very weak in this game. Honestly, I couldn't even tell you what was going on 90% of the time, it felt quite messy while simultaneously feeling very lacklustre. While some characters grew on me by the end, there were still some like Echo and Molov who I just didn't really care about at all.