Red Faction
Description official descriptions
The Ultor Corporation of Mars is successful because of the mineral wealth of that planet. It employs a number of miners and scientists to mine the Noachite ores far underground. The miners are constantly pressured by the guards to work harder and faster, while at the same time being forced to share their meager resources. While the mines itself are dangerous, so too is the mysterious plague that has broken out among the ranks of miners, killing many. Into this low morale situation, propaganda against Ultor has begun appearing, signed only by "Eos". These pamphlets and posters urge the miners to rise up against their oppressors and take a stand, also recruiting members into their secretive "Red Faction". As a result of Eos' efforts, tensions are rising high between the Ultor corporation and its workers, any little incident could ignite...
Red Faction is a first-person shooter. Players take the role of Parker, a miner working underground for the Ultor Corporation. Equipped in an environment suit, Parker is protected from various hazards and able to breathe deep in the mines and in airless locations. At times, Parker also needs to travel undercover in a less protective disguise. Parker defends himself with a variety of weapons, most of which feature a primary and secondary firing mode. The weapons are divided into: hand weapons such as riot shields and flamethrowers, light arms which include pistols and shotguns, heavy arms featuring rocket launchers and sub-machine guns and finally weapons that are thrown or placed such as grenades and explosives. The game features a variety of vehicles to drive in first-person; including jeeps, drillers, flying craft and submarines. In order to survive, Parker must link up and aid his fellow miners, receiving direction and objectives via com-link messages.
Red Faction features a game engine called Geo-Mod. It allows holes to be blasted into all manner of terrain including floors, walls and ceilings. While limited to certain surfaces, such as rock, ice and concrete, this nonetheless results in a more destructible environment where deviation from the level design is encouraged. Players are able to at multiple points, create their own paths, tunneling past obstacles and into new environments. Only heavy explosives; such as missiles, torpedoes, grenades and plastique will allow the terrain destruction of this sort.
Spellings
- Red Faction :สงครามแดงเดือด - Thai spelling
- 红色派系 - Simplified Chinese spelling
Groups +
- BPjS / BPjM indexed games
- Console Generation Exclusives: PlayStation 2
- Gameplay feature: Body dragging
- Gameplay feature: Freely destructible terrain
- Games with Dopefish
- Middleware: Bink Video
- PlayStation 2 Greatest Hits releases
- PlayStation 2 Platinum Range releases
- Red Faction series
- Setting: Mars
- Setting: Space station / Spaceship
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Credits (PlayStation 2 version)
127 People (103 developers, 24 thanks) · View all
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Reviews
Critics
Average score: 80% (based on 58 ratings)
Players
Average score: 3.5 out of 5 (based on 151 ratings with 17 reviews)
The Good
What you get in this game, you'll get a lot of joy out of playing it. There's variety of enemies and the arsenal you carry is just enough to take them out. The length of the game brings absolute hours of thrill, with a fair number of bosses and encounters along the way, not to mention plenty of Martian atmosphere, amplified by the superb soundtrack. The characters in the game are 3-dimensional, both graphically and design-wise.
The stealth missions make for nice change of action in the gameplay. Better still the vehicular driving sequences have free movement and none of that overused rail-shooting feature (except for one mission). No matter the difficulty you choose, the challenge is going to spike up when you meet the mercenaries, who pose a worthy challenge when you've played far in the game.
The Bad
The game isn't perfect with some issues present taking for example the lack of an autosave feature and lack of checkpoints, meaning death forces you to start the game from the beginning. Then there's the tight time limits in missions like "Space Station", which kind of pushes you a bit too hard as you play. What really stinks in the game is the final Master Mind puzzle sequence and you can only use the mouse to click the buttons when the arrow keys would have saved you precious seconds of time.
Weapon selection interface is a little strange with 1 being the basic weapons, 2 being the semi-automatic weapons, 3 being the full-automatic weapons and 4 being the explosive weapons. It can be awkward when you need to do a quick change of weapon in the middle of combat. Nothing truly intolerable present in the game. To be fair Volition had to start somewhere.
The Bottom Line
I cannot pretend that this game isn't unique from other shooters that took place in space and future such as Doom, Alien Trilogy and Star Wars: Dark Forces. It truly rivals the precursor Half-Life. This is not your ordinary, typical, mediocre FPS, Volition really went for something original and one of a kind. You'd be very lucky if this happened to be your very first video game. While not up to date, it may always remain a must play and find a place in your collection of shooter video games.
Windows · by Kayburt (31521) · 2020
The Good
I will try to keep this review short since FPS aren’t my preferred genre…
I believe that a good fps should be as a good action movie and this title have a strong developed plot. Player takes command of a rebel miner that is part of the Red Faction in the Mars mines against the Ultor Corporation.
The best point in my opinion is the need to play vehicles in order to beat the game, submarines, helicopters, jeeps and tanks.
The personal guns are great also; I specially liked the two-function feature for each item.
I know that many of this features are already an standard on FPS but since I have low-expectations when playing FPS I had a good-time playing Red Faction.
The Bad
Just 2 Points:
1) Too easy, well I like easy FPS but not too much.
2) Too short, finishing a game in a weekend isn’t especially long…
The Bottom Line
Good game that represent high entertainment but not a challenge.
Windows · by Cabeza2000 (689) · 2003
Minor problems, but an overall good package for PS2 shooter fans
The Good
All 1st person shooters try to out do the previous standard. Take Half-Life or Counterstrike. When they were released, very few games had the same amount of action and playability to them. But have a look at today, and see how many games have tried to emulate both titles. The only game, to my mind, that has tried something different, not just in looks but in gameplay, is Red Faction. And the reason why is simple: Geo-Mod.
The inclusion of this graphical beast has allowed not just a new way to design the graphics engine and to include more detailed terrain, but to allow a more interactive environment, which in turn changes the style of the gameplay into a more tactical style then just run shoot (as in Quake 3). For example, instead of taking out the many guards waiting in your path on a bridge, just take out the bridge. Of course, some limitations had to be made, otherwise you could blow up Mars itself, but just having that ability is a major step in the development of first person shooters.
The other major task that I believe has been captured well is the mix of serious combat and laugh out load moments. There are plenty of moments with the guards that will get you laughing (at times, the guards will shout out "I don't want to die" just as shoot them). This adds a bit of fun to the serious nature of the storyline.
The Bad
Put simply, multiplayer support. These days, you can't have a shooter without a 4 player mode. Quake 3 and Timesplitters accomplished this well on the PS2, but the lack of 4 player support here hurts the the overall package. I can, however, understand why. It would have been very difficult to have 4 on together, as well as having a smooth game, Geo-Mod and all.
Some may also have problems with the control system. I have this down to a fine art, but others will hate the lack of Keyboard and Mouse support (especially when the PS2 sports two USB ports).
The Bottom Line
For those who have a PC and PS2, I would suggest the PC version mainly because of better multiplayer support.
But besides what I have mentioned, Red Faction is still a worth while purchase for the PS2. Two player multiplayer games are still plenty of fun, and the single player game will take a lot out of you. The Geo-Mod technology is a reason in itself to take a chance on this.
PlayStation 2 · by Kartanym (12418) · 2006
Trivia
Game engine
Although hailed as its main feature, the GEOMOD engine is really the SECOND 3-D engine to allow deformable realtime terrain. The first engine was part of an independent game, Tread Marks
German PC version
On March 29, 2003, Red Faction (PS2) was put on the infamous German index by the BPjS. For more information about what this means and to see a list of games sharing the same fate, take a look here: BPjS/BPjM indexed games. The German PC version of Red Faction is heavily cut. The flame thrower is missing and there is no blood at all. The game still got an "Age 18+" rating.
Hidden movie
There's a hidden movie in the game's data\movies\ folder. It's a executable file named technochunk.exe,and running it gives you a short movie of various game characters dancing to techno music.
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Related Sites +
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Red Faction Section at Levels 4 You
The biggest map and mod database for Red Faction containing thousands of files some of which are real gems. -
redtechnologies
Everything you need to know about the RED level editor for Red Faction. This site also has a forum for RF mappers and mod-makers.
Identifiers +
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Contributors to this Entry
Game added by Kartanym.
PlayStation 4 added by Charly2.0. PlayStation 3 added by Sciere. Macintosh added by Kabushi. Windows added by MAT.
Additional contributors: Unicorn Lynx, phlux, Alaka, Lumpi, Abhisit Chanmana.
Game added May 29, 2001. Last modified March 30, 2024.