If you get a hundred points in any category, your car's chassis automatically upgrades. Each time you destroy a vehicle, you can collect an icon that adds a few points to one of several areas (speed, armor, and so on).
#VIGILANTE 8 2ND OFFENSE DREAMCAST REVOEW SERIES#
One addition to the series that has no drawback is that you can improve the performance of your car. You can check over your objectives at any time in the game, but they offer scant instruction, and they don't check off once they have been accomplished. This mission requires you to blast open a building, trigger a computer control to move the rocket to the launch platform, and trigger the control again once the rocket is in place. In another level, you must launch a rocket. To gather all the toolboxes, you must shoot the train, something you'd assume you'd want to avoid doing to accomplish the other objective. For instance, on one level, you must protect a train and collect several toolboxes. The mission objectives are now more elaborate than before, which should be good but isn't, because they aren't always as clear as they should be. As a good guy, you might have to gather stolen cash and return it to its owners, while the baddies must actually steal it. As in the last game, you can play either on the good side or the bad side, each of which has its own mission requirements for each level, before all the other vehicles must be eliminated. The second game in the series (which is of course entirely new to the Dreamcast) features a time-travel storyline, which of course introduces the weapon-laden flying vehicles that everyone's driving in the future, as well as other bits of advanced technology that lets cars skim along on ski slopes and water. That's almost all the plot description you need, save for that the setting is the 1970s, and the game recycles the only things anyone would ever want to salvage from that era: muscle cars, funk music, Afros, and fat sideburns. The console cousin to Activision's Interstate 76 line, the Vigilante 8 series, focuses on a group of good people who drive cars tricked out with weapons and fight against a group of bad people who drive cars tricked out with weapons.