Players : 1
Fighting Force 2
is the sequel to the 1997 original which was set a few years into the new
millennium (which doesn't start until next year anyway), but some madman
thought the world would end on January 1st, 2000. It didn't - a shame
otherwise another madman, or group of madmen and women, wouldn't have had
chance to think the game was worthy of a sequel.
The manual tells a tale of State Intelligence Police (SI-COPS) that were
created to stem the rising tide of crime. The Knackamiche Corporation have
illegally created a perfection of biotechnology, a cloned soldier that can
survive in any war situation. You have to "seek out and erase sensitive
project data and eliminate key personnel", or instead just shoot and kick
the crap out of anything with a heartbeat and only controlling one character
from the original game this time round - Hawk Manson.
Graphics, Sound and Playability
The problem starts with the graphics. Although they have the odd nice touch
of a sparking door-code security lock after you've smashed it to pieces and
the explosions, it's just one room after another of computers upon which a hit
will disable a piece of vital equipment which, when working, would keep the
bad guy's plant ticking along nicely, boxes which may or may not have a knife
or more ammo inside, or electrical wall fittings that are just waiting to be
picked on. Smash it up, kill the odd bloke, move on to the next room. Turn around and the jagged edges of the pop-up graphics stick out like a sore
thumb. Don't get too close to the screen - you'll probably cut yourself. Oh,
and of course there's health pick-ups too.
The sound effects conspire to be little more, no make that just the same as,
small explosions, weedy gunfire or alarms bells ringing after you hit something
resulting in absolutely no-one coming in at all to kick your butt and haul
you off to hell.
Whereas the original was a copy of Target: Renegade, this game tries
to appeal to the Lara Croft brigade of being a first-person
running-through-rooms affair but at least that series of games had some variety.
There's a handful of different enemies to fight here but it doesn't take more
than a whip of your knife to kill them but it's occasionally fun to get out
the big guns or a grenade.
The game is also a very linear one. Smash a room up, kill everyone and move
on and it won't let you leave unti you've done your duty and collected the
pass key. It features a "rage bar" which increases the more you kill things or
get mad from being hit and increases the damage to your enemies, but by the
time you've actually FOUND someone else to kill, it's usually depleted back
to zero.
The playability also takes a nosedive when you get quite far over part of a
level, get killed and have to continue from one of the three "continues" you
get which are sparsely placed and always miles back from where you were killed!
Overall
Overall, take
Fighting Force
and
Ninja: Shadow of Darkness,
put them together and you have Fighting Force 2. You knock someone to
the ground, they get up, you knock them down again and they flash to point out
that they've died. It took me 2-3 hours to get through to the end of the first
level and after that I couldn't carry on much into the next one.
As I said in my Ninja review, I'd like to say that if you like the sort of
game that dates back to Double Dragon in the arcades and Target:
Renegade on the ZX Spectrum and haven't had your fill from the two Eidos
releases above that I mentioned, then you'll like this, but for all it copies
from earlier games, it's all been done better before so you'd be better off
downloading an arcade or Speccy emulator and playing those older games on your
PC.
Eidos' shares have been on the slump as I write this, despite a lucrative
Christmas from the sale of
Tomb Raider 4,
but this new game won't change their fortunes. However, I shall be looking
forward to the releases of Resident Evil 3 and Final Fantasy 8
on the Playstation and PC respectively.
If you're after some more info on Eidos Interactive's games, you can check
out their official Website at
www.eidosinteractive.com
GRAPHICS : **
SOUND EFFECTS AND MUSIC : *
PLAYABILITY : **
ORIGINALITY : 0
ENJOYMENT : *
-------------------------------
OVERALL : *
Review copyright © Dominic Robinson, 2000.
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DVDs reviewed by the editor are watched on a Panasonic TXW32R4 32" widescreen TV
connected to either a Creative Dxr2 DVD-ROM player or Microsoft Xbox and
played through a Sony STR-DB930 amplifier.
PC games reviewed by the editor are on:
