Disappointing
After the fantastic "ReArmed", I had hoped for a follow up that had similarly tight level design, interesting bosses, and memorable characters. ReArmed 2 disappointed me in each of those categories.
First of all - the levels. Uninspired, sprawling areas with not much in the way to even slow you down. In the original ReArmed, each level felt like a series of puzzles to be solved, requiring careful thought and increasingly masterful use of your grapple to get through. Nothing of the sort in ReArmed 2. It's extremely easy to run past 90% of the enemies. It's the equivalent of a Mario game where you start every level with an infinite feather and plenty of room to run. What is the point?
The new weapons are also a serious downgrade. Limited ammo means most of your weapons will go unused (not that you need them to finish the levels anyway), unlike the original, where every single weapon had a unique, interesting use, and you were encouraged to switch between them to solve various puzzles and take down enemies.
On the other hand, the bosses are incredibly frustrating. Defeating them is a simple matter of pattern recognition, but it rarely feels like you get a fair chance to evade attacks your first time through. So it takes several nearly inevitable deaths and a tedious process of trial and error to get the pattern down. Even then, the game forces you to repeat the pattern way more times than should be necessary to prove you can follow a pattern. In particular there's a gorilla boss that takes an agonizingly long time to fight, even assuming you know how to beat him and execute perfectly.
To top it all off, you have... the story. Fucking. Terrible. The first ReArmed had a great sense of humor and style. It had a few serious-ish moments, but in the end, it knew it was a game about blasting Hitler in the face with a rocket launcher. ReArmed 2 suffers from taking itself WAY too seriously. The supporting cast of other Bionics bring nothing to the table. Rad Spencer, a character who *should* be a badass, indomitable hero spends much of the game whining that society no longer appreciates him. He's intensely unlikable. Also, his redesign is fucked. I prefer the goddamn dreadlocks to his dorky old-man smile and sex-predator mustache combo. Just look at his picture in the title art:
Does this man look like a badass to you? To me, he looks more like a bad high school gym teacher. The WORST kind of high school gym teacher.
Are there any good things about the game? Sure. The soundtrack is still pretty kickass. I think it's a nice looking game. But that is not nearly enough to salvage an otherwise mediocre game. Buy the soundtrack and save the rest of your money for something else.