Red Faction

The Good
Geo-mod really, REALLY made this game what it is. Puzzles can be solved or simply skipped by blowing the crap out of... well... just about anything! The storyline really helps motivate you to start cracking skulls when the Miner Control group screams for mercy, then start shooting again. Plenty of weapons to keep me happy, and of course, the vehicles just sweeten the deal. Just so damn fun...

The Bad
Well, limitations on how much you can blow up for starters. I built a really, really long tunnel into the ground only to find that nothing blows up anymore. It took me 3 minutes to crawl back out, but I wanted to go deeper. Load times really ticked me off as well. It seems like almost every minute or so you'd have to wait a good 15-20 seconds to continue on your mission. The graphics also kind of annoyed me, but graphics arent what make the game great. Those aside, the game is just pretty good.

The Bottom Line
I'd say an equal match, or possibly even BETTER than Half-Life for the PS2. Realistic destructible environments, a very pretty sounding and destructive arsenal, and a good storyline to back it up. Rent first, most likely buy.

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 bought Red Faction for the same reason as anybody else: because of the "Geo-Mod Engine". This piece of software allows you to alter the game's environment by shooting holes into walls and rock structures and letting glass break with the most detailed splinter-effects you've ever seen. The feature is just as amazing as it sounds and everyone ends up spending hours digging tunnels through the martian underground simply because it's so much fun.

You could now expect the game to only concentrate on the geo-modding without any attention to other aspects of gameplay but it's totally the other way round! In fact you badly miss the Geo-Mod in single player missions while you will find enough other features most of which you hardly ever see in other games. There are many drivable vehicles including a stylish sub-marine, a driller and an APC. Infra-red devices let you see people through walls. Bullets ricochet from metal surfaces and riot shields can be used to fend off enemy fire.

Unlike many others I even liked the enemy AI in single player. The guards will take cover, wait for you around a corner and and even try to shoot remote charges from a save distance instead of running into them blindly.

I didn't expect this game to have full Geo-Mod support in multiplayer but, well... I was wrong. Sooo wrong. In fact multiplayer makes much better use of Geo-Mod than single player. The 27 maps, including 7 CTF ones are all very well designed and deliver some of the best multiplayer-gameplay I know and I've played quite a few FPS games.

Last but not least Volition also was smart enough to put the RED level editor on the disk. RED is very easy to use and there is a huge mapping and modding community that is keeping RF fresh and alive.

The Bad
The single player of RF is simply not that good. There are some nice ideas including stealth-gameplay and underwater-fights but you never really feel like being involved in the crude "martian miner-revolt" story. I love secret-agent style gameplay (Goldeneye/PefectDark-veteran :D ) but there was a map in RF where I had to sneak through an office-complex without using a gun and at some point I felt like "what am I doing here? Give me a rocket launcher and I'll shoot my way right into Mr Gryphon's office..." For reasons I do not understand there are only very few places in single player were the Geo-Mod engine is actually used!

Also some rather edgy maps, repetitive fights and stiff animations didn't add anything to the atmosphere.

The Bottom Line
There is a great game hiding behind some ideas that simply didn't turn out that well. Honestly, the Geo-Mod engine alone is reason enough to get this game. I would also recommend to take a look at the RF section over at www.levels4you.com to get an overview of the RF mapping and modding community which is surprisingly big. This game has it's flaws but the RF-bashing like you hear it from some gamers that were disappointed with the single player (just like me) simply isn't fair.

This game shortened my waiting time for Half-Life 2 and if you give it a try I'm sure you will learn to like it as much as I do.