Forums → Games → Raze 2 Review

First off, I do not hate the game. I rated it 10/10 after playing for about half an hour, but in all honesty, I should've played it more before rating, since now I'd probably give it a 5 or 6 out of 10.

Let's get some generic review stuff out of the way first: Graphics and sound are exactly what I expected. No qualms there. Let's skip right to the gameplay, which is what makes and breaks this game IMO.

First thing you'll notice: Out of all the default weapons only three are pick-up-and-own weapons (shotgun, minigun ,and rocket launcher) and the rocket launcher is the only one of them that can consistently OHKO. Contrast this with POS games like Combat Hero Adventures, which from my experience only had like 2 weapons that DIDN'T OHKO. This basically means there's much less cheap **** flying around than there would be otherwise. That's GOOD.

The credit thing is very reminiscent of CoD Points, which is not surprising seeing as how Raze has always come across to me as a fusion of CoD and Halo leaning towards CoD (Contrast Armor Mayhem, which is the same thing only leaning towards Halo). The credit packs were a good idea; people who want everything unlocked from the start can pay IRL money for it, and people who like unlocking things themselves can save a couple bucks. I don't have any issues with the price of any abilities or anything; playing deathmatches to 100 kills is quite fun because, simply put, playing Raze 2 is quite fun.

So why a 5/10? All I have to say is that the alien campaign totally killed it for me. I first noticed the pattern where every alien mission was basically the corresponding human mission from the aliens' perspective. This works well in theory, but suddenly stops making sense when you barely squeak by with a victory only to have the story say "oops we failed." That's exactly where the execution falls flat.

Second, the alien campaign totally REEKS of artificial difficulty. There are a bunch of ways I see to fix the problem, but first, I'm going to elaborate. More obvious are the AI and their perfect reflexes and uncanny ability to show up at the powerup RIGHT when it spawns. Slightly less obvious is the part where YOUR TEAMMATES ARE BRAINDEAD. Case in point is mission 14, where your teammates serve as cannon fodder while you're stuck trying to cover for their constant dying and even BETRAYING you. All I have to say here is that this mission was terribly designed from the start. 3v2 in a mode where the smaller team has the advantage. You can't use rocket launchers because you're stuck with this ice turd gun while the AI get to spawn with free rocket launchers. Your teammates both go 1 and 15 every game. I caught one of them shooting their starter pistol at the ceiling for crying out loud... you might say "Oh but it's hard so it's a good mission," but I say "Cheap difficulty doesn't make things fun." Granted, in a game where quick reflexes are everything, it's hard to make a difficult-to-beat AI without having it rely on AI superpower reflexes. I'm OK with that part. I'm also OK with the 3v2 and the part where you get a gimpy rocket launcher. Even giving the humans free rocket launchers wouldn't be that bad if they didn't spawn on top of me 5 or 6 times a game. The part I'm NOT OK with is where my teammates help the humans more than me. At the very least, their ability should be tied to mine, meaning if I'm going 20 and 3, they should be too, and if I'm going 3 and 20, they should be too.

Let's contrast all that to mission 15, where you get 4 minutes to finish a 25-life elimination match. On the surface it seems fairly straightforward for a final mission, until you get to the part where Razey has his superpower health from human mission 15... That's another case of artificial difficulty: jacking the enemy's health up to an absurd level. That's also BAD, especially considering how he's got lackeys running around with powerups and rocket launchers coming out the wazoo, and as soon as you get rid of them he flat-out disappears until the time runs out. Get rid of Razey, and the mission becomes kind of lame, but keep him and the mission reeks of the same artificial difficulty the rest of the campaign reeked of. My suggestion is to add a pointer to elimination mode only that shows up if someone hasn't died for over, say, 30 seconds that points their enemies to their location until they do die. This both makes it easier to hunt down Razey when he's playing wild goose chase with you and it makes it harder to survive long because after 30 seconds the AI will be allowed to actually use that thing where they always know where you're at anyways against you.

Long story short, Raze 2 is a good game, but as long as the alien campaign's story is dumb and it stays difficult for all the WRONG reasons, it's not going to score much better than a 5 from me. Thanks for reading.