*****THERE MAY BE SOME SPOILERS*******
If you look at it from the perspective of a hardcore gamer, its a fine addition to the series. If you look at it from the perspective of a normal or casual type gamer so you're taking your typical person who doesn't review games for a living then the game is actually a reversal on the success of the first.
Story: The RFOM 2 is a disjointed storyline, its difficult to make heads or tails of whats going on at many points in the game. Comparatively RFOM 1s storyline is much more straightforward and delivered in a consistant manner even if told from a 2nd person perspective.
RFOM 2 finishes the whole game in a dissatisfactory manner, if this was a WW2 game you'd be playing as the Nazis and you'd finish the game watching Soviet tanks rolling into Berlin. Maybe thats cool for some people, but on average its not something people are going to like. RFOM 1 on the other hand, whilst it finishes with a similar phyrric type victory it gives the player some satisfaction as it actually feels like you've achieved something.
Gameplay:
RFOM 2 lacks design quality of great FPS games. To put it simply, they failed to understand what makes games like Halo, Half-Life, Call of Duty, Gears of War great or even if they understood, they failed to implement their design properly. Their big monsters didn't engage the player like a game like Gears of War, which they were obviously attempting to emulate. Theres no danger, no sense that the big thing is anything other than a sitting duck to you and they overused them as gameplay elements so after the first it was no longer interesting or exciting to fight them. Their sense of escalatation was to add more of them.
Many of their gameplay elements did a better job at annoying rather than entertaining the player. Theres a difference between a fair and consistant game like Half-Life 2 and RFOM 2. In Half-Life 2 if you died it was generally because you screwed up, in RFOM 2 its a different story. Being killed because you're looking the wrong way is not a friendly game mechanic. Being killed because you walked around the corner into one of those shield carrying big guys is not a friendly game mechanic. Being killed because theres a combination of Auger soldiers and bots on the other side of the river in not a friendly game mechanic because you cannot find cover.
Sales:
There are 4 shooters which are selling better than RFOM 2 on consoles at the moment. These are:
Call of Duty WAW, Gears of War, Left 4 Dead, Farcry 2 over 5 SKUs. So in the overall list its the 5th or 6th best selling SKU on the charts at the moment in the FPS genre. Its also not significantly ahead of a game which was released more than a year ago, Halo 3. There must be something in the appeal of the game as its not facing significant competition which is keeping it from selling as well as it should.
Conclusion:
Aside from the multi-player and visuals, I cannot help but feel they have gone backwards with the game compared to the first. The first game had a simpler gameplay mechanic and storyline and it was implemented better. In this game they overcomplicated things, perhaps they were over-ambitious relative to their timetable for delivery. I believe if anything, its the sales which are the real testament to how they went wrong with the game, not the reviews.
Tease.
