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Whenever you see a sequel to a title that showed promise but just didn’t quite put everything together the first time there’s a mix of excitement and dread. Will lessons have been learned? Will old problems get replaced with new ones? What I don’t typically expect is for a sequel to roughly be stuck in time, repeating pretty well every mistake from before while failing to deliver anything of tangible substance in return, yet that’s how this RICO sequel plays for me. OK, so it’s a first-person door-busting shooter that will have you breaking in, shooting every bad guy in sight, and perhaps taking names later… but now it’s in a location where people have different accents and you can pick up more customized named guns? I guess it’s counting on people wanting to play co-op locally or online to somehow save everything, that feeling of working together giving some sort of rush, but much like the first time it takes very little time for you to start looking at your watch when you’ve repeated the same room layout for the fifth time in the same run. Worse, the original at least provided a bit of instruction to introduce you to the controls and mechanics but this one seems to be banking on everyone having played the first one or inherently assuming there’ll be a slide mechanic or just play with the buttons to work it out on their own. If you want to check the series, save some bucks and play the original, this feels more like a re-skin than a sequel.
Justin Nation, Score:Bad [5.1]