Syphon Filter 2 has been injected with a huge dosage of plot this time around, though unfortunately it does not do a good job of explaining the events that took place in the previous game. If you’re interested in fully understanding the story completely and haven’t tried Syphon Filter 1, I’d suggest picking it up. Regardless, our story begins with our heroes, Gabe Logan and Lian Xing, fleeing from the organizations that are attempting to kill them. In a moment of weakness, Lian is captured by the Agency, the corporation that Lian and Gabe used to work for, and the Syphon Filter virus is then planted within her. Meanwhile, the plane that Gabe happens to be riding in is shot down and crash lands on some snow-filled mountains. From here Syphon Filter 2’s plot thickens, expands, and goes on a crash course of twists and turns before arriving at its final destination.

There have not been a large amount of changes made to the graphics for the sequel, but it didn’t really need much. The frame rate is usually consistent, and I never noticed any moments where the occasional slowdown and frame rate loss began to hinder gameplay itself. The game environments have been well designed, and each level provides an entirely new experience. You’re constantly switching from playing as Gabe and Lian, and this means working together to get the job done in any number of places, from the harsh outside to the confines of a corporate building. In the case of character models, everything looks to be in fine order, though the animation is a bit awkward. Most characters look fine, but whenever Gabe is running to a location his animations look as if he has a stick up his butt. Besides that, Syphon Filter 2 has an impressive game engine that can handle a nice variety of situations without showing signs of poor design.

One graphical feature that I have to mention is the night vision. Most games have the screen go green and the enemies will glow a brighter green and white color, but Syphon Filter 2 has a really cool visual effect implemented. It’s a bit hard to describe (you really need to see it in action), but all the characters are a bright color, but will leave trails of blue color as they move around, resulting in being able to easily identify when a character is walking around from their blue trail. A subtle touch, but extremely slick.

The amount of stealth-based games that have hit the PlayStation in the past year has risen (likely due to the popularity of games like Tenchu and Metal Gear Solid), and instead of sticking to the pure action route like the original Syphon Filter did, the sequel incorporates numerous missions where being detected provides disastrous results. Games like Tenchu and Metal Gear Solid, however, allowed the player to escape a situation where they are found by their enemy and flee, but Syphon Filter 2 does something completely different: it gives you a failed screen and makes you do it again. There are quite a few checkpoints scattered throughout the levels, but many of the game’s missions soon become a frustrating game of trial-and-error. You will simply have to keep repeating an area over and over until you find out which is the correct way to go without being caught. Depending on the difficulty of the mission, these had me either cursing at the screen in agony or having fun taking out guards with the ever trusty tazer weapon. Sadly, more times the missions happen to fall into the former rather than the latter category.

These stealth missions are rampant throughout Syphon Filter 2’s extensive two-disc adventure, and if it weren’t for them I would likely have enjoyed the game much more. Not being able to escape a spotted situation, and having to start over again at the previous checkpoint provides too much frustration, and stripped away a lot of the fun that can be found with the game. The action-oriented missions are a blast, and I wished that developer Eidetic had made the decision to include more of those. Nice idea, but poor in execution.

You have quite the arsenal available this time around, and boy are they a whole ton of fun to utilize. When there is nothing explosive to use, I always find that pulling the trusty combat knife or tazer are great to use. The combat knife will take a quick slit to the enemy’s throat, while the hand tazer provides a nice shock of electricity to whoever gets the unfortunate fate of being whacked by it. On the more interesting side, Syphon Filter 2 features some powerful weaponry ranging from a powerful shotgun that’ll knock anything hit by it more than a couple feet , to a sniper rifle and grenade launcher. Both Gabe and Lian have similar arsenals, but at times one or the other will have a weapon that the other is unable to obtain. Usually every couple of missions the game will introduce a new weapon for usage, and this always provides a fresh feeling.

Because of the success of the original, Eidetic was given the chance to create a more epic plot, and with this comes more cinematics, and in turn, more characters with voices. Given the high quality of the rest of the game, it’s fairly unexpected to see that both the rendered full motion video and voice acting are both subpar. The characters featured in the cinematics look like they’re the normal game models with some texture changes, and their animation is rather odd. The actual environments are nicely done in the FMV, but was boggled in regards to the poor quality of the characters themselves. As far as the voice acting goes, the accents given to some of the characters are just terrible, though Gabe’s voice is probably the worst offender of them all. Whenever he is trying to sound serious, yell or anything remotely close to what we would be needed for real voice acting, it sounds pretty bad. I couldn’t help but chuckle once or twice while listening.

There is a multiplayer mode that has been included in Syphon Filter 2, but the game always came down to people attempting to snipe or hit each other through the use of a head shot. The game provides a huge amount of characters to use, and the multiplayer levels available provide the right balance of cover and openness most of the time, but I always came out of the experience with the feeling of constant camping. Depending on who you play, your experience might differ, but even when I was in the occasional all out fire fight it never had that exhilarating and addictive feeling that made me want to go back to the multiplayer options again.

Overall, Syphon Filter 2 is not a whole lot different from the original, but in my opinion, there’s nothing wrong with that at all. The missions that center themselves around stealth are a pain, but for every one of those there is often an all out action level to make up for it. No matter how frustrated I became with the game over its difficulty, I pressed on because the game has that quality of actually being “fun” and enjoyable. Here’s to hoping the series continues onto the PlayStation 2.