Red Faction II

Red Faction II, released in 2002, is a first-person shooter developed by Volition and published by THQ. It came out on PlayStation 2, GameCube, Windows, and Xbox. As the sequel to the original Red Faction and the second game in the series, it shifted focus from the first title by putting more weight on action and moving the setting from Mars to Earth.

In multiplayer, the game offers local play. Modes include Deathmatch, Bagman, Arena (all playable solo or in teams), Capture the Flag, and an unlockable mode called Regime, which works like Bagman. These modes take place across roughly 40 levels, all featuring destructible walls. Capture the Flag uses its own set of stages, while the other modes share a common pool. Players can design custom bots, which track gameplay statistics just like human players do. As bots fight matches, they earn statistic points that let players upgrade their abilities. The tracked stats are Health, Damage, Agility, and Accuracy, plus two behavioral traits: Camping Tendency and Aggressiveness.

The story is set in 2080, five years after the first game. The nanotechnology created by Axel Capek, the former head scientist of the Ultor Corporation, has been taken over by the Earth Defense Force (EDF). Using this tech, the EDF rebuilds Ultor, focusing on enhanced supersoldiers and weapons. But Capek’s research has been stolen by militant groups and terrorist organizations, changing hands in the criminal underworld for years. The player takes the role of an explosives expert codenamed Alias, who goes on a special ops mission to retrieve the data for the Republic of the Commonwealth. The research is eventually secured by the elite forces of Victor Sopot, Chancellor of the dystopian military state called the Commonwealth. Sopot uses the nanotechnology to create supersoldiers, but then fears their power and orders them all killed, replacing them with less intelligent, mutated beings known as "The Processed." Betrayed, the player’s squad goes underground and allies with the Red Faction, now a resistance movement opposing Sopot and the Commonwealth. The squad and Red Faction work together, sabotaging propaganda and other targets, until they trap and execute Sopot in his missile silo. Afterward, Alias returns to base to find all Red Faction members there slaughtered.