Red Faction

The Good
PRESENTATION: The game's menu were well presented, easy to read and pretty funky with the mars landscape scrolling at the back.

STORY: You are Parker, that's it for a name, you thought working with Ultor would be cool, how wrong are you. In fact the opening dialouge is spoken with surprise. Anyhow the conditons are bad, and the miners revolt. The story kinda trails off from there but remains through the game, in one way or another. It's ok but....you'll have to play to see what I mean. In a way it's just recycled from other story lines.

CONTROLS: All of them can be remapped, thank god, the default key configuration is too far paced across the keyboard for one hand, so remapping the enter key for operating doors is must.

GRAPHICS: Fairly good, the people/things in the game are well done, not perfect but enough to get things rolling. The GeoMod engine is lacking when it comes to curvy walls so some corners looks a little rough and jagged. The textures are also a bit lacking, the game WAS taken from the PS2, so that's one problem. The set pieces (desks clocks) are well done as well, there is even a little pencil on a desk, and the clock hands move, nice touch of details there. Lighting is fairly well done as well with a few ok shadow effects thrown in, and the light glare from flying craft is well done as well. Underwater is well animated as well with little particles (fish food?) floating about, and bubbles from gun shots are also included. The animations are fairly well done, keep an eye out for the shotgun death animation.

SOUND: All the gun effects work just perfect, the reload effects for the Persision rifle and the Sub Macheine gun are really fun. The game also notices little things like crunching glass when you walk over it. Foot steps are a little off set and the voice is not really that good. But it works.

GEO-MOD This has been given a section because it is different from GAMEPLAY. Firstly you all know what GEOMOD is? For the people who don't know, GEOMOD, is the first gaming engine to utilise a realtime world destruction engine. In other words, you can make a level swiss cheese with time and a rocket launcher. This also means you can make a cieling collapse by taking out the support struts, or make APCs plummet into a abyss by taking out the bridge. And if you have time, carve out large sections of the cieling and watch them fall onto people. All the effects that I have mentioned are possible. Glass is well done as well. Fire at a pane from a distance with a pistol and you will only get a little bullet hole. From close range with a rifle, and the glass will shatter from where it is hit. And the pieces fall down every where as well as get thrown about with an explosion. Perfect.

GAMEPLAY: Ok a mixed bag. Firstly the A.I in this game is GOOD. The enemy run to cover to reload as well as call in others and dodge their way around you. The weapons are wonderful to play with. The pistol has a nice silencer screw on animation and the heavy machiene gun has a really cool reload action. The only bad bit about the weapons is the uselessness of the close combat weapons. The riot shield only deflects so much in terms of bullets. The rail driver on the other hand is a weapon of mass fear, even in the hands of the enemy. Firstly it can drive a charge through the wall into somebody, or you. The levels are interesting, a bit boring at some points, mainly with the missions in the mines, but it really shines in the space station mission, with low gravity and interesting recol effects.

Multiplayer is interesting as well as chaotic. People try their best to terraform the enviroment to their advantage and other's disadvatage. In this game the floor can vanish below your feet with no warning. Fun.

The Bad
Ok time to dish out the diss.

Firstly the GEO MOD engine. The programmers offered us this new technology and do not let us use it fully. For examples all doors cannot be destroyed and the wall around them cannot be carved into with a rocket launcher. On top of all that the office levels walls are stronger than mars rock.

Apart from that major niggle, the game is a well thought out game.

The Bottom Line
Yes it is worth your $89.00 (Aus). The multiplayer levels are a dream and the single player, while lacking still is a good challenge. It may not be the next Half-Life, but it is very close.

The Good
Red Faction is pretty much a standard FPS game. Grab guns, kill bad guys, pick up ammo, kill more bad guys, grab more guns, kill harder guys, get bigger guns, so on and so forth until the end. This could be a good or bad thing. Personally, I like this, so I think it's a good thing.

Obviously, the main attraction to this game is the Geo-mod technology, which allows you to blow away just about everything you see, including walls, floors, bridges, etc. Some of the levels provided some of the funnest battles due to the Geo-mod. Imagine barely dodging a rocket that would have blown the ground out right from under you? Or blowing away a bridge causing a small squad of enemies and a vehicle to fall into a chasm? It's awesome.

The graphics are good. Even close-up on the people, the faces look more realistic than most FPS games I've played.

The story is cool. A rebellion on Mars, you have to help the Red Faction escape.

Some people complained this game was short. Short? I didn't think so! I thought it was the perfect length. You travel through the mines under Mars, through underground rivers, into ice caverns, on the surface of Mars, through enemy bases and labs, offices, even go into space! You get to see quite a lot in this game.

You get to drive some vehicles in the game, including a jeep a lot of people seemed to like.

The Bad
Allright, aside from a few moments in this game (blowing away the bridge in the first level and the shuttle blowing up around the middle of the game...that's about it) the game was just awful.

First, the Geo-mod. This is a really, really cool thing. But it's almost completely unused! The only time I remember in which it was ever put to use was the very first level! After that, it was all enemy bases and stuff which had walls you couldn't destroy, and the few times you were in an area where you COULD destroy the walls, it was just eye candy and nothing more. I mean, sure, it was pretty cool to see the wall blast apart with a stray rocket, but there was almost never another opprotunity to USE it to your advantage. You couldn't really blow a hole in the ground to take cover in, and you couldn't knock down a tower onto unsuspecting enemies...you couldn't tunnel through anything. I mean, these things would all be "extra" stuff, but when the main feature of the game IS the Geo-mod, one would think they would feature it all throughout the game and not just the very first level.

The vehicles suck. The submarine was kind of cool, but you only really used it twice and really, you wouldn't want to use it more than that. It's "cool" factor wore off pretty quick. The jeep a lot of people seem to like, but I thought it was too slow and, like most other vehicles in the game, too hard to control. Flying the jet thing was okay, but it was short.

The dialogue - mostly just the main character - is THE worst I've ever heard! I remember one scene in which one of the "big bad bosses" puts up a shield and you shoot him, and it proves ineffective. Then the cutscenes goes on to show your character wasting away all his damn ammo on the shield like an idiot, even though he knows it's not working! Well, you'd have to see it, but it is really funny...unless until that point you were really taking the game seriously, in which it probably will just piss you off.

The ending was disappointing, but expected.

The final boss was stupid.

The two other bosses were stupid. Well, the giant robot was kind of cool, until the bad AI got him stuck in the wall and you couldn't kill him!

Argh...bad, bad game. Didn't live up to the hype at all.

The Bottom Line
Skip it.

The Good
I dunno why there is so much tense in the air whenever talking about this game, and why I got the impression that many people don't like this game, but I've only one word for them - crazy! Lol! From the moment I saw this game on PC, couple of years ago, I knew I must get this game. Of course, at the time, I had not idea I'll get a PS2 version since I had no PS2 console nor was in my slightest idea of getting one, but man, does this game looks great on PS2, I had no idea something like this is possible.

First of all, the controls are great, and once you get use to them you can quite alright play throughout the game... with autoaiming cursor, that is, 'cos c'mon, let's get real, this ain't no mouse+keyboard combination we all got used to when it comes to FPS games. I guess I gained some experience on PSX game MOHU which I don't recall having autoaiming feature. Still, graphically Red Faction looks brilliant, I couldn't tell the difference between this one and the PC version from what I remembered it.

Okay, the big breakout about this game was the fact you can destroy the terrain, thus making the whole in the wall deep enough to be a hideout or to bypass some heavy metal doors that won't open, but that wasn't what got me hooked. Sure, it's a great feature, and I salute them for making that, but what got me was the graphics. Now now, don't start joking with me saying this game doesn't have any special graphics. I didn't mean any extraordinary quality, but the textures they chose are rather perfectly balanced and create a real atmosphere and great feeling to game.

On other side, there was a promissing and intriguing story behind all the concept. You're playing Parker, one of the miners on Mars, who are just as mistreated as the rest of the miners. You soon learned that word 'miner' is no more than meaning 'looser', being exploited to the max and not caring wether you live or die. And for some obscure reason, there seemed to be 30 guards to one miner, or maybe more. Aside from being mistreated, there was a misterious plague that started spreading and seemed as there was no cure for it. And to be a little bit more complicated, there is a rebellious organization against all the Ulthor corporation and its guards. Yup, those you'll have to whack a bunch per screen.

This game offers a little bit more than just our daily first-person shooter, and that is to drive several different types of vehicles, including submarine in which you can fire torpedos and destroy the underground caverns as much as enemy subs, ATV (All Terrain Vehicle) which resembles standard Hum-Vee but has really nice physics programmed to it. You can enter two sides in that vehicle, either backside and control its mounted heavy caliber gun, or drive it (now there's a fun). Driller is a regular type of what the name implies, heavily armored and capable of digging holes in pretty much anything. And another one worth mentioning is Aesir Fighter so you don't think you never get to control some aircraft, that's what this is, having regular mounted machine gun and rockets.

Nice thing is that you can break the ice, destroy walls, but that I already mentioned sort-of, but what was really surprising and unexpected to see is that I drove off the bridge and into the water, and my ATV was left sank throughout the whole game. Is that kewl or what? Music isn't that plenty, but at least bit more than the game has cinematics which is almost none (there are some, but very few, if you don't count an opening), but it is really terrific beat and it usually indicated you're about to either get ambushed or confront a whole batallion, lol.

The puzzles in the game are on the level, nothing too tough (though sometimes it can seem like they tried to hide something making you harder to just find it), but let's get straight that this is a first-person shooter and not a first-person puzzler, and when I think of all the weapons used in the game, I must say these guys were creative. You have regular pistol which adds a great effect that you can add or remove a silencer to it, several types of machine guns, a shotgun (with a very intriguing alternate fire), several bigger launchers that can destroy more than you could want, a few snipers, and what else not. The ammo may not be as handful, though, even on easy level.

And a word about multiplayer (didn't know I'll ever use this word for some console game), it rocks! It has very nicely designed levels and you can even play the skirmish with computer only. Set up 5 enemy players and see them all fight against each other. Can become confusing sometimes, but sure can be fun once you meddle with the settings and find something interesting.

The Bad
This game has many lights throughout the game, and you can only guess that they too can be destroyed. However, what I noticed on a PC, I couldn't notice here, and that is, once the light is destroyed, there's no darkness coming. It's just as if it's still lit on the same place, only you don't see any. I dunno if I was doing something wrong, but that's the impression I got it. And I definitely rememer this working fine in PC version.

A word about enemy guards a little. Usually one shot in the head may spare you of wasting entire magazine on less vital spot to achieve the same thing. However, later in the game with more armored guards, I got the impression that except with my sniper, no head shot can be effective within a single shot. And no, they didn't seem to have twice as better helmets for that matter. That became frustrating when I needed to waste so many bullets, which I had little on a regular bases, on someone which will leave me even less then I spent.

Animals on Mars were kinda... crappy to say the least. Those low-poly not-like-anything with claws you could usually encounter in certain caverns were really unnecessary. Okay, these can even be accepted, but fished that attack with sonic waves or whatever, c'mon, don't make Doom outta this game. Let it be felt in a Half-Life sense of the way, and so far, it's going good at it.

And a major bug - there should be more music, or should be playing all the time and not just whenever some showdown is at hand.

The Bottom Line
An overly nice first-person shooter which should've gained more fame then it seemed to do. Aside from nothing-but-shooting strategy, for those players who prefer sneaking a bit, like in Splinter Cell, there are a few moment when you disguise and usually carry only your gun (blah!), and ammo isn't to waste. Though even these situations can be handled brutally, just with a bit more luck than skill.

For PC or PS2, this is a fine game that should give you a proper amount of amusement, and when all the light of the story shut down and you reach then end, think of multiplayer and go crazy.