Gabe Logan and Liam Xing are branded as traitors and must blast through the Agency to prove their innocence.
What Is It? Syphon Filter 2 is a third person shooter released on the original PlayStation in 2000. Alternating between levels as Gabe and Liam, you will experience a mix of stealth and all-out gun-blasting action.
Released only a few months before the PlayStation 2 arrived in the US, Syphon Filter 2 is a late-era PlayStation 1 game and uses that to its advantage by pulling from prior examples of the genres it features. You can feel certain pieces of earlier PS1 titles woven into Syphon Filter 2’s DNA. A decent amount of Tomb Raider’s movement and platforming, a dose of Metal Gear Solid or Tenchu’s stealth, and a heavy heaping of Duke Nukem: Time to Kill, Die Hard Trilogy, and MDK’s third person shooting.
The game is primarily a third person shooter. Gabe and Liam will utilize a wide array of military grade weapons to take out Agency enemies across 20+ levels. As a third person shooter, the game works fine but definitely features many of-the-era quirks. You’ll be hiding at corners and using the camera to peek to see if anyone is waiting. You will also need to use the game’s zoom and lean systems to line up a perfect headshot on annoying enemies with flack jackets who can’t be torn through with normal body shots. The game features a target lock system which works really well when there is one enemy on screen and they are in front of you, but often falls apart when that situation expands.
The stealth sections are less frequent but still a major part of the game. You will often find yourself without a gun, needing to knock out enemies instead of killing them, or not wanting to sound an alarm. These work just fine. Enemies will move around in set patterns so you can plan your moves, or they will stay stationary and force you to solve the puzzle of how to get around them how the game wants you to.
Most of this is all pretty standard fare for the genres, but the game does rise above it on more than a few occasions. There are sections where shooting out lights is your only reasonable way through, unless you can land long distance head shots at ridiculous speeds with these controls. There is a stealth section where you actually blend in but can’t get too close to guards without being noticed. There are other cases as well, the game does not simply stick to the lowest bar for the genres it features, it layers some legitimately interesting things on top of them along the way.
The game looks like a PlayStation 1 game, not a particularly good or bad one, just a late-era PS1 game. The voice acting is comically all over the map. Gabe, the main character, is particularly bad but many of the other characters are well done. There is a multiplayer mode which is just a deathmatch but has a surprising amount of options, many of which are unlocked through the campaign mode.
The Best Part: How successfully this game pulls from its influences. I briefly played the original game as a kid but don’t remember a whole lot, and never touched this sequel. Having no ties to this game, and little to the series overall, I was surprised at how familiar everything felt. The first level will have you running through snow, mowing down bad guys with machine guns, climbing up ledges, and sniping foes from a distance. This brought back so many different PS1 memories for me within the first 30 minutes. One those faux instant nostalgia situations for me, a sort of greatest hits of PlayStation third person games.
The Worst Part: The aiming/targeting. There are many enemies in this game which will lock onto you for a headshot no matter how you run, roll, or otherwise move around. You can hide behind things to reset the “Danger” meter, but you’ll almost always need to poke your head out to get them in your sights for a headshot before they shoot you. One head shot kills you, or an enemy, in this game. That’s fun, but you end up spending a lot of time peeking around corners and back trying to line up your headshot before they get theirs off. Elsewhere, the auto-target button is weird. You hold R1 to target somebody, but if there are multiple enemies on screen it will, I think, target the closest instead of the one you are facing. This leads to a frustrating mess on a few of the most hectic sections of action. The first level of the game gets this almost perfectly correct with the spacing and location of the enemies, it is funny they fumble this later on.
The Verdict: Syphon Filter 2 is significantly better than I expected. In my head, this series was a Metal Gear Solid rip off. While there are aspects of that here, the game does its own thing alongside the obvious stealth-action portions. Mixing in a bit of ledge-holding and more pure action segments, the game manages to forge its own identity despite copying so much homework from other sources.
Who is Syphon Filter 2 for in 2025? That’s tough to say. I wouldn’t recommend it over Metal Gear Solid, Tomb Raider, or MDK if you are looking for unique PS1 experiences. There are also countless post-PS1 games which deliver a better experience than what Syphon Filter 2 offered in 2000.
Despite all of that, I had a very fun ten or so hours playing through Syphon Filter 2. The action and stealth were a good time, the story was interesting enough to follow along, and I enjoyed most of the PS1-ness of it all.
Syphon Filter 2 wears its influences on its sleeves, but does them justice and comes together to create a fun action experience.
How to Play: PlayStation 1
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