There is a story surrounding all that Hawk Manson is battling for, but most of it has no bearing on what actually goes on in-game. Essentially, Dr. Zeng had begun development on a super cyborg during the time that Hawk and friends were battling him in the first game. After getting Dr. Zeng out of the way, development continued on the cyborg secretly without anyone being aware of it. Now, Hawk Manson has been enlisted by the government to sneak into the laboratories of the now deceased Dr. Zeng and see what's up.

Instead of the four slightly varied characters that could be picked from in Fighting Force, Fighting Force 2 does not allow that kind of variety and instead forces you to use only one: Hawk Manson. To balance things out, Hawk now has a wide assortment of moves at his disposal, numerous weapons that can be used to blow a few holes in the enemy and more that make him a well-rounded fighting machine.

There is not a whole world of difference between the Dreamcast and PlayStation versions of Fighting Force 2 when you compare them visually. All that was done with the Dreamcast game was that the filters to help clean up pixelation, etc. were implemented to give everything a cleaner look. Then the resolution was bumped on up (as it is with most Dreamcast titles) to give everything a nicer, sharper look. It isn't an incredibly substantial improvement that will take your brain and boggle it around a couple times, but it all looks very nice in-game, especially some of the better special effects with the enemies' weapons and the environment. The frame rate also keeps up at a steady pace and I was hard pressed to find the game slowing down when there was an immense amount of action and characters all on screen at once. It would have been nice to have seen a bit more effort put into taking advantage of the Dreamcast's advantageous graphical capabilities (as they are doing with LoK: Soul Reaver); right now it's hovering at around above average.

Even though there are quite a few weak areas in Fighting Force 2, I must commend the developers for the extensive amount of interactivity with the environments that they have given the player access to. At first I thought it was limited to the blowing up of computer monitors and the massive amounts of brown boxes, but as I continued to look around I found an great amount of detail had been put into the surroundings. A couple of the cooler examples include a sequence where there is a large piece of metal going up and down on a moving rail. The player has to go leap onto this rail to reach the other side, but it'd be impossible to make it through without being squished. What's a big, handsome guy like Hawk Manson to do? Blow stuff up, that's what! Smashing up the monitors and computer terminals near the moving rail will eventually make the rail stop and completely passable. I must admit it was very cool seeing that happening, along with other smaller touches, such as hitting a copying machine will spit out one or two papers and eventually it'll blow up completely, spitting papers all over the room.

Near everything in the rooms in the game can be bashed, punched and kicked in order to reveal new passageways or items that can aid in the completion of the level. Now, had Core Design put as much effort into the rest of the game as they did with sprucing up the environment, we'd have a much better game on our hands!

If you have read my PlayStation review of Fighting Force 2, you have a basic idea of what to expect when it comes to the artificial intelligence. It's weak, it's dumb and it isn't much fun to fight with. The enemies are prone to standing there and looking at me for several moments before even coming up with the notion of attacking me. If you are being attacked by multiple enemies and need a bit of a breather before continuing on, just jump up onto a nearby crate of boxes and watch the attackers sit there and shake their fists. When they get tired of that, they'll end up standing there like idiots waiting for you to instigate a fight. The only way they ever attacked me when I was standing on higher ground was with grenades, but that was a rather rare occurrence. Things are not helped by the fact that a punch or two (or a gun shot, for that matter) can take out most any given enemy, making things even easier.

A few inconstancies I discovered while playing force me to nit pick at the game a little bit. For one, since when does kicking a chair make it magically produce a gun pop out of nowhere? I can see that with the boxes sitting around, but a chair? Secondly, falling from the height of a ladder down to the ground will take off a significant chunk of health, but a grenade thrown directly at your chest will take off very little. I know this game is not exactly about realism, though this is sort of common sense. Neither of these problems have any real effect on gameplay, but I thought I'd point them out, nonetheless.