Part 1: Episode 1: TV Station

Red Faction 2, Episode 1: TV Station

Our inaugural episode of Red Faction II sees Alias capture the one thing tying this game to the last: The Nano Cell and then promptly turned into a super soldier with it and then betrayed by the government, joining the Red Faction and planning the downfall of Sopot. Only one of those things happens on screen. We're also introduced to all the players in the game: Our Squad of "Nanotech" soldiers, Echo; the leader of the Red Faction and Sopot (fleetingly, he's running from us most of this episode) the dictator we are attempting to overthrow. That's it, there are seriously no other characters in this game that are ever named or whom we interact with beyond shooting or scaring the hell out of. I've updated the RF II post with the loading screens featuring most of the characters (Echo doesn't seem to have one) instead of cluttering this post up more.

The thing that gets me about the game is that the ties to the first game are so tenuous you could remove a few words from Molov's monologue and change the Red Faction to "The Resistance" and now you just have a game made by the same studio and using their Geo Mod engine. EA did this a few years ago using Frostbite 2 in Medal of Honor after DICE put the thing into use in Bad Company 2, so I don't understand why they had to make this a Red Faction game when the art style, music, combat and oh yes, the setting (We're on Earth. The Red Faction must be dirty commies or something) are so wildly different from the last game. Volition has shown they can bring two games to market in the same year, look at Red Faction: Armageddon and Saints Row 3. Or they can release two games year after year, as they did with the previous iterations of both those franchises. All that and the quick turn around from the first game to the second suggests to me that after the first game was successful another Volition product was made into a sequel to Red Faction. I'm sure other people see it differently, but it makes the most sense to me.

Second; I try to explain this (poorly) in the video, but Molov and the rest of the squad don't consider themselves part of the Red Faction. They've made common cause against Sopot, but they are closer to soldiers for hire for the Red Faction rather than HIGHSPEEDLOWDRAGTIERONEOPERATORS for the rebels. You can tell that most of the squad actively hates Echo, with Tangier being supportive and Alias being silent, as he will be for most of the game. This is kind of fun because Molov tells Echo to shut the fuck up nearly every time his stupid hippie face appears on screen, and I love that because Echo is an insufferable flower child.