FINALLY the Syphon Filter series comes to the PS2. It's been years in the making, and the last 3 games, although the got progressively worse and worse, were all enjoyable.
This game IS better than the 3rd one, although I was expecting a lot more. There's a lot of good ideas in this game I just would have liked to see them utilized better.

Story 6/10
In the previous games, you played as Gabe Logan, secret agent extraordinaire. There was always that pesky Syphon Filter virus, and Gabe always had to destroy it. In this one, you find out that after 3 attempts....it's still at large. Except this time, Gabe isn't going to stop it. YOU are. Gabe is now the head of a group of secret agents, and you have been chosen to stop the virus. This game can also go online, where you and up to 3 people can do missions together.

Gameplay 6/10
The game is pretty much just like any other Syphon Filter game in the past, which means that to kill any enemy later on in the game, you pretty much have to aim manually and give them a head shot. When you begin, you create an agent, there are many options and I liked the whole idea of being able to create the person I'm going to play as during the whole game. When you go online you use the same person you created for single player. The controls are pretty much the same as the other games in the series as well. This means that every button on the controller is used for something, and my biggest grip is that the select button is used to change weapons, which makes it very hard to switch weapons in the middle of running around and killing people. Also I don't like how many missions are timed, but yet whenever I go to check the map screen to see where to go next, the game won't pause for me. It makes it a lot harder, another problem with the game not pausing during the map screen is that enemies seem to constantly respawn. Sure there's plenty of people to shoot, but sometimes I found myself dying or running out of time because of that one little flaw. The missions, once again, are standard Syphon Filter objectives. Find 5 of these, destroy 3 of these, get this, destroy that. The one really cool addition is that you do the same missions online that you do offline...alright, that doesn't sound really cool, BUT some objectives in these missions can only be done with other people. You can lift people to higher ledges to get something you couldn't before, and sometimes there's just not enough time to do it all by yourself. You can still pass the mission in single player, but the only way to finish EVERYTHING is to go online. I found that pretty neat. All in all however, the multiplayer doesn't really save the game from being mediocre.

Graphics/Sound 7/10
The graphics are nice, nice in the sense that they're smooth and clean, nice textures on mostly everything and the animation is smooth. However, it seems like a lot of the animations were just taken from the first three games, and new graphics were put on the characters. With years between the last game and this one, you'd think Sony would come up with something new. And the environments also look like a PS one game...they're smooth, but there doesn't seem to be much more polygons or geometry in the levels. It just looks....recycled.

The sound is sweet.... I like it. While the graphics seem outdated in a new kinda way, the sound is the game's highest point. Explosions are loud the way they should be, all the weapons sound powerful, and the voice acting is well done. Gabe has the same voice actor from the other games, but some other characters seem to have different actors voicing them. No biggie though, Gabe was the only one who counts really anyways. The music is movie quality, it really got me involved in the gameplay.

I would suggest buying this game if you have the online kit for your PS2 (broadband only) it's a rental at best without it, for the same price you can go out and buy the first 3 games. While the graphics may be worse, you'll get a lot more gameplay out of them. I was being a bit hard on this game because I suppose I expected a bit more out of it, hopefully the next one will retain the online gimmick (which is really cool) and make it look and control a lot better.

Recommended: Yes