Fighting Force 2

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