(by special request of
@MonaWare )
Vigilante 8: 2nd Offense is the sequel to Vigilante 8, an attempt to make MechWarrior 2-cousin Interstaee '76 more pallatable to the console crowd. Set in an alternate 70's where a greedy oil conglomerate attempts to monpolize's the world's energy production, two factions, the heroic Vigilantes and the eeeevil Coyotes battle for the oil reserves of the US.
I only briefly played the first V8 in emulators almost a decade ago, and it didn't leave much of a lasting impression positive or negative. Due to the series enduring popularity, I figured I might as well give its sequel a try. V8: 2nd Offense makes a very good first impression, what's with its beevy of content, large maps filled with secrets, cool and fun characters, and great presentation. The game has several neat details, like how all of the character's ending FMVs actually form a continuous storyline and the ability to unlock all of the maps from the original V8 (in the PS1 version, this is accomplish by inserting the original game's disc and then inserting the sequel for bonus weird points)
Where 2nd Offense stumbles hard is the Mission mechanic. The first V8 had this thing where you could progress through each characters storyline by killing every enemies in a level, but to truly "win" and unlock a new character, you had to accomplish a side goal, which was either to defend a specific structure (if playing as one of the good) or destroy it (bad guys). 2nd Offense expands on this in a deeply unpleasant way: the protect/defend objective is still there, but in addition, each character has a third mission, which most often consist of picking up a number of items and sometimes deliver them to a specific location. This sucks for many reasons:
-It's boring.
-The item locations are random.
-When you pick a mission item, it takes up a spot in your inventory of weapon. You can only hold a maximum of three weapons normally and picking up an item reduces that to two. It's not possible to discard them.
-Enemies can pick up items and there's no way to know that until killing them.
-In missions where you need to deliver the items, if you pick up even just one, the mission will not end until you deliver it (which is often irritatingly vague).
So yeah, missions sucks and make unlocking new characters a pain in the arse. In the end I just used the cheat code to unlock everything.
Life is too short.
So yeah, Vigilante 8 2nd Offense. (Mostly) good presentation and mechanics marred by baffling design decisions that makes you wonder if the development team had the collective IQ to spell its own name. Still worth a play - I just hope you don't have an idealogical opposition to using cheat codes..
