More of a step backward in the Vietcong series.
Vietcong 2 also doesn't seem as immersive as the other Vietcongs. The game just kind of throws you into things and you spend your first five minutes in the bedroom of a brothel with a Vietnamese prostitute. You then baby sit a journalist at the city hall when all hell breaks loose and the siege of Hue begins as well as the Tet offensive. You then fight through waves of Vietcong until you eventually get back to the base where again you fight through MANY waves of Vietcong until reinforcements arrive. Things happen so fast its kind of hard to get into, especially since the original game had you go through a full boot camp training, base tour, and patrol before you even got to shoot your first Vietcong which felt special since you actually had to go through all this training to get you prepared for the war.
Vietcong 2 also uses a new squad command system similar to that in the "Brothers in Arms" series. You push a button, an indicator comes up and you move that indicator to where you want your squad to move or where you want them to focus their fire. This sounds great and works great in the "Brothers in Arms" series but their is one thing that seperates Vietcong 2 from "Brothers in Arms", Vietcong 2's command system sucks. You can go head and tell your guys to move to one area, and maybe 1 guy will listen and go there. You may tell your squad to suppress the enemy MG and they might glance at it then go back to engaging whatever it was before. I never used the system except for the "Follow me" and "Hold" commands which actually work.
There are still plenty of authentic weapons from the time period except unlike the original game, you don't get to choose what weapon you want for each mission. The game will just give you a random weapon and hopefully its effective for that mission type. More then likely you'll get pissed off with the weapon and drop it to pick up a good enemy weapon instead like the AK47 which works surprisingly better then any other weapon a mission might give you.
Vietcong 2 also allows you to unlock a very brief Vietcong Campaign. This is probably the only time when you will fight in the jungle and it is actually setup very well. It does a goodjob on showing the other side of the war and their reasons for fighting. While it certainly felt kind of weird shooting American soldiers, most of the time you will be fighting the ARVN (South Vietnamese Army) and not actually US soldiers but you will have to kill a few towards the end. I do think its kind of weird that this is the most enjoyable part of the game and even though its still not up to par with Vietcong it comes close and really just makes you want to uninstall vietcong 2 and go back to playing the Origninal Vietcong again.
Graphics: Graphics are pretty average, maybe even lower then Vietcong 1. I did have some weird graphical problems where the text would get kinda blury and textures seemed unfinished. To fix that you have to just restart the game.
AI also seem more stiff then the previous version. When you shoot an AI, more then likely if it doesn't kill them then they won't move or seem effected by the bullet at all. And when they do die, they just repeat the same death animations over and over again. Compared to the original Vietcong where everytime an AI got shot they reacted to it very realistically and when they died they went limp and crumbled instead of stiffening up and following over like a board.
The city looks pretty crappy, building textures are low-res, foliage looks awful (cept in the jungle during the VC campaign) and overall it just looks like crap. There's also some weird cutscene video editing where they make the cutscene look all fuzzy and use weird lighting. Kinda works well during the news broadcasts but everything else it just makes it look weird and arcadish.
Audio: Weapons sounds all sound good and each weapon has its own distinctive sound. After awhile you will be able to pick out each individual weapon that is firing and know what it is.
Dialogue is kind of bland. With the exception of the Vietnamese prostitutes (whose dialogue is kind of funny) most lines are just repeated over and over again in different dialects like: Aussie, American, Vietnamese, etc. It gets old really fast.
Conclusion: If your looking for a Vietnam game, I HIGHLY recomend Vietcong and Vietcong Fist Alpha. You should also check out Men of Valor. This game just does not give the Vietnam war much justice and should really be avoided unless your really hardcore on the battle of Hue or you want to try the 4 quick-mission VC campaign.