Vietnam 2 is an improvement over the original, but that really isn't much of a feat...
First, the positive elements: in addition to the creators’ attempts to spice up the gameplay, V2:SA throws in a few more of the creepy, misty caves and Buddhist temple ruins that I enjoyed in the original. Early versions of the LithTech engine simply weren’t powerful enough to render eye-catching outdoor scenes (in my opinion, few assemblers before the CryEngine were sufficient for presenting nature as anything more than a hedge maze with the occasional free-standing tree), so the game works fairly well whenever the action moves indoors.
A decent corridor crawl just doesn’t stack up against V2:SA’s moronic dialogue and muted sound effects. The promise of a few team skirmishes never really happened; a pair of cloned friendlies might appear on occasion, fire a few rounds, and then stand perfectly still. An experiment with an on-rails sequence during the river raft ride wasn’t bad, but was frustratingly hard in parts. And speaking of unbalanced levels of difficulty, the area spent wreathed in a thick fog, with bullets and bombs flying unerringly from the depths of the cloudy soup, was simply a mistake. The enemy AI was unaffected by the severely limited visibility, so the only workable solution was to barge full-force through the mist, rendering what I suppose was an attempt at some entertaining surprises or a few Rambo-style stealthy kills utterly pointless.
I can’t really fault the efforts of a group of designers whose love of shooters in general and the daunting quagmire that was the Vietnam War in particular lead them to invest their limited resources into an unpolished but modestly entertaining product. There is no denying, however, that the end result simply fails to impress, and entire sections of the brief game slip from the player’s memory shortly after they are completed. Vietnam 2 is an improvement over its predecessor, but still doesn’t make much of a case for budget titles.