Red Faction

Moby ID: 4194
PlayStation 2 Specs
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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

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Credits (PlayStation 2 version)

127 People (103 developers, 24 thanks) · View all

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 80% (based on 58 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.5 out of 5 (based on 146 ratings with 17 reviews)

Tastes good, but you'll be hungry again in 15 minutes.

The Good
The setting. Mars. I loved the switches between hightech Ultor buildings to old abandoned mines which are prone to collapse.

I also loved the weapons (they aren't anything special, but they are very cool). The secondary modes are also good.

The so called GeoMod engine. This engine allows the player to "mangle" the levels with his/her weapons. You can blow everything to tiny little bits.

The multiplayer mode is fairly balanced. Not that many levels, but they do differ a lot. Shame though that there isn't a capture the flag mode.

The Bad
This game is to normal. The weapons are fun, but they arent revolutional. The Martian surroundings do offer a variety, but it just doesn't feel that special. The story is almost identical to the 1990 blockbuster movie "Total Recall" which adds nothing new to the story aspect either.

The AI of the opponenents is terrible! And i mean terrible! If a guard decides to attack you, he'll just run into you and when he notices that you are crouching, he'll flee and starts screaming. In the 'infiltration" level the guards have "super acute" hearing. You are disguised as a diplomat, but the guard will recognize you from quite a distance.

The potentially great GeoMod engine is severely underused. Blowing walls away isn't required to complete the game (oh all right, except for that one moment). I think that this problem has been taken care of in Red Faction 2. And let's be honest, the GeoMod engine is the only thing that is actually new in this game. It's an enormous dissappointment that this was disregarded by the developers.

The Bottom Line
This game isn't bad, but it sure isn't good either. This is just one of these games that just loses it's "taste" once you've played it for about 15 minutes. Multiplayer can be fun, but your going to have to do with deathmatch only. If you are looking for a basic shooter than this is the game for you. If you are looking for a shooter that has a lot of new things to offer, then upgrade your PC and wait for Doom III.

PlayStation 2 · by Goteki45 (323) · 2003

A day late and a dollar short. Extremely disappointed.

The Good
Red Faction promises a much more diverse experience than typical first-person shooters inspired by Half-Life, and that promise is worth half the purchase price alone: Many weapons new to the FPS genre; drivable vehicles, some with weapons; and geo-mod technology, which allows explosives to deform the game world and affect gameplay.

On these particular hopes, Red Faction delivers. Some of the weapons are inspired: An "accurate rifle" allows you to zoom in and deliver several shots as fast as you can pull them off. The sniper rifle has a crazy zoom that can traverse a kilometer. Your melee weapon can be used to either bludgeon or shock. The best weapon is unarguably the "rail gun": One-shot kills, deadly accurate, and the viewfinder can see people through walls (which is good because the rail gun can kill them through walls).

The vehicles, while used sparsely, are effective. A truck can be used to get past enemies quickly (or mow them down). The submarine makes it possible to get past some enemies in the water. The flyer providers hot metal death from above. And so on.

Geo-Mod, the most distinctive aspect of the 3-D engine truly does make many surfaces deformable. And the deformations are legitimate, not just texture decals: Ground that has been peppered with craters is hard to navigate in a vehicle, for example, and some areas of the game require blowing the crap out of walls to get past doors that won't open.

The Bad
It is with a heavy heart that I write this section. I didn't want to do it. Red Faction is a new effort from Volition, half of the team that made the original Descent series the awesome landmark that it was. They tried to introduce new features to the genre -- heck, they created a new title in an already-crowded genre. That takes some pretty big cajones.

That being said, there are just simply way, way too many things wrong with the game for me to recommend it. One of the most major issues is that the story is overlooked. Granted, FPS games don't need a deep involving story, and the absence of one isn't a crime. But when an involving storyline is hinted at and then later neglected, it is a crime. Too many times there were "significant emotional events" in the voice messages and cutscenes, but without any proper setup or explanation they all sounded cliched.

Another big problem was the sometimes-repetitive level design. It is unavoidable that a game that takes place in the mines of Mars is going to look mostly the same (brown rock tunnels, brown rock caverns, etc.), and the designers try to alleviate that with a kidnapping mission inside the mining administrative offices, battling company guards in the armory, and even sabotaging a space station in orbit above Mars. But barring appearance, the repetitive level design itself cannot be excused:

  • Progression throughout the game was extremely linear. A typical level had a tunnel open up into a cavern with a door on the other side, which would lead to another tunnel, ad infinitum. Even inside complexes, corridors would lead to rooms with a single door on the other side; lather, rinse, repeat. Only on the orbiting space station were there a significant number of paths to explore.
  • There were some "detours" sprinkled along the way in the linear parts, but they almost always ended up with "rewards" in the form of extra weapons or ammo. Only once or twice did a detour end in a plot point, story device, or otherwise interesting story element. If you were loaded up on ammo, there was no reason to take the detours, which shortened the length of the game considerably.
  • Too many times there were manned turrets in the middle of large rushes of enemy forces. You know the drill: Take out the turret, then jump on it to mow down the massive forces of enemy soldiers running at you from multiple directions. This is always fun, and some could argue that you could never get tired of it. But after the fifth time, it loses its appeal. (I would imagine that anything would lose its appeal after five repetitions.)

More overall problems that affect gameplay lie with the enhancements (weapons, Geo-Mod) themselves:

  • Weapons: While some weapons are cool, others are redundant and overkill. Why are there two types of rocket launchers when neither are guidable or homing? Why are there two types of sniper rifles when one can easily do the job? Why are there no less than three types of machine guns when any two of them would have sufficed? And what is the point of including a riot shield in the game if you can't fire weapons while wielding it?
  • Geo-Mod: Some blow-the-wall-to-get-past-unopenable-door puzzles require blowing away a certain part of the wall. Shouldn't any part of the wall be deformable enough to get past the door?

Even the cutscenes had problems: The beginning and end cutscenes are rendered. For rendered cutscenes, they look terrible; polygons are blocky, for the most part. This isn't really that significant until you realize that they were rendered with the output from the game engine itself. If they used the game engine for rendering the beginning and end cutscenes, why didn't they just use the game engine itself? Why waste 200MB of disk space in video files that could have been just played with the in-game engine just like all the other cutscenes?

But the most irritating thing about the game was its inconsistency and general lack of polish. This is expected for what is inevitably a clone of Half-Life, but it is inexcusable for a clone that came out nearly four years after Half-Life did! What follows is a list of some of the things that really, really irked me during the entire course of the game (this is long, get a cup of coffee):

  • The cutscenes, both in-game and rendered, lack any significant cinematic feel. Also, the dramatic timing is off in certain places, blowing any sense of tension out the window.
  • If you fell a great distance, you died. But if you fell a great distance onto an item you could pick up (health, ammo, etc.), you didn't die. Silly game bug.
  • The voice acting is not very good. It's not laughably horrible like some minor bit players in Deus Ex (which were voiced by some Ion Storm staff members), but it never reaches a non-irritating level of quality.
  • There are security monitors that you can view throughout the game. I found many of these useless, because they showed you areas that you had already fought through and cleared.
  • The voice messages you receive throughout the game are quite often cut off as a new level loads. They do not continue after the load, nor is the subtitling for the voice message displayed, nor are they replayed if you go back to the section you just left (prompting another load).
  • The music is sub-par. Nothing is really inspired or stands out. This isn't bad, but the poor instrument choices (some sound like 1980's synth-piano) don't help matters any.
  • Most puzzles in the game (overload the water pump, blow the reactor, get to the vent, etc.) are as simple as pushing a single button. Not exactly a challenge.
  • The level-of-detail (LOD) engine doesn't scale gracefully at all, which is irritating at resolutions like 1024x768 and up. LOD, you'll remember, is the process of displaying simple 3-D models for objects that are farther away (where high detail simply isn't noticable) to more complex models and geometry the closer the camera gets (where high detail is noticable). The idea is to improve performance without affecting display quality. But since the LOD doesn't scale gracefully, it has the effect of people and objects quite noticably "popping" into greater detail the closer you get to them.
  • The guards say no more than about 12 different things, including hurt grunts and screams. This gets repetitive very quickly.
  • Light halos shine through objects, pure and simple.



The Bottom Line
I really wanted to like Red Faction, honest! It had the potential to be reminiscent of the current FPS bar of excellence Half-Life by infusing new elements into the genre. But the multitude of nagging problems noted above detracted from the overall experience so much that I just couldn't enjoy it. I was really disappointed.

The 100% user-mod-gone-retail Gunman Chronicles is worth buying for $9... but I cannot recommend even that much for Red Faction.

Windows · by Trixter (8952) · 2002

Is 'Red Faction' the revolutionary FPS the critics make it out to be?

The Good
The answer to that question is a complicated one. Truth be told, THQ's 'Red Faction' did not revolutionize first-person shooters (FPS) or games in general. But, having said that, this game is also not the "disappointment" and the "soulless clone" many disgruntled user reviewers have described it, either.

The 'Playstation 2 Official Magazine UK' praised 'Red Faction' as the "Playstation 2's deadliest game" upon its first release in 2001. It wasn't kidding. 'Red Faction' is a really challenging game, which gets more difficult as you progress. It is not the puzzles that are tough, usually they are pretty straightforward. 'Blow a hole there to get to there', 'push that switch to open that gate', that kind of stuff. It is learning how to survive from one gunfight to another that is the real trick here. Even on the lower difficult settings, this game is relentless. One wrong move, one unnecessary encounter, one careless mistake, and you are dead. 'Red Faction' provides a real challenge for the most veteran of FPS players out there. This forces the player to find all the available strategies available to him before engaging an enemy, such as finding an armored vehicle or an alternate route in the game's expansive environments.

'Red Faction' is obviously inspired by such videogame classics as 'Half-Life' and 'Deux Ex' (not to mention the obvious, like 'Doom'). However, to its credit, it does feel like its own unique game. And for its time, it was certainly avant-garde as well. 'Red Faction''s so-called 'Geo-Mod technology' was an innovative feature in 2001, even though there are a lot of limitations imposed upon the player in this regard. But I find these limitations to be justified. The game tries to make you think outside the box, at least occasionally, and there is no other way but to strategize accordingly if you want to make it out of Mars in one piece.

The story is also pretty satisfying, especially for an FPS. Ultor, a mining corporation operating in Mars, maltreats its employees to the point of enslavement. Eos, Orion (named after gods from Greek mythology: Eos being the goddess of dawn and Orion the legendary huntsman) and a couple of other miners organize what starts to be known as the Red Faction. As Eos explains:

"It was Orion who came up with the name of Red Faction for our team. He thought the political sense of 'faction' would have meaning only for us. And the 'Red' symbolised that we represented all of Mars. The name clicked with everyone..." (from the instruction Manual).

Sure, the story is nothing more than a quest of retribution against an unethical and oppressive company, so don't expect anything Shakespearean. What makes matters more interesting is that there is a 'plague' reaping death among the miners; although, most mysteriously of all, it does not seem to affect Ultor's security guards. While it is revealed that a scientist called Capek had something to do with it, the 'how' and 'why' are never really explained. Still, it is decently intriguing stuff, and the ideas and concepts explored in this game were eventually actualized in the newer generation 'Red Faction' games.

What is probably the game's most redeeming feature is how ambitious it is, even if its budget and the technical limitations of its time may have prevented it from achieving more of a classical status. By 'ambitious' I mean what the game was trying to do even if it is arguable whether it has succeeded or not. From the in-game selection of five vehicles, including a submarine and an aerial fighter craft (the Aesir Fighter), the number of paths the player can occasionally choose to the 'rail driver' weapon, which allows you to shoot through walls and so on, there is no end to the game's innovative and ambitious vein. Even if you do not like the game per se, you have got to admit that it is really impressive what the game had attempted to do.

The Bad
However hard the game tried to be innovative, which it was and still is, not everything turned out the way they should have. The 'Geo-Mod technology', for example, despite being fun, is gimmicky. There are only a few places where you can use it to a good purpose, and I rarely used it in my playthrough. The graphics, although for their time they weren't atrocious, could have been better. Even the lighting could have been improved. At one point I could not find a switch I need to open a door because I could barely see it.

I have already mentioned the game's difficulty, but some parts are so relentless that they are ridiculous.You will be loading your last save file a lot of times, because the game does not have any checkpoints. So having multiple save slots and saving often is a must. Even then the game is frustratingly tough. Later on in the game, heavily armored mercenaries can kill you in almost one shot. The stealth sections did not facilitate anything as well. I almost had an easier time finishing Killzone 2 on elite difficulty than beating this game on Medium, no joke, because I am not someone who is accustomed to saving every few paces. Good luck finishing this game if you haven't already, and I dare anyone who thinks he is a veteran of FPS games to try to beat 'Red Faction' on impossible mode!

Another thing that could have been improved is the artistic direction. Although there are sections that take place in the grand canyons of Mars, underwater caverns and even one level on a space station orbiting Mars, the majority of the game takes place in industrial complexes or drab environments. They did try to create a sort of Flora and Fauna for Mars, but there are only a handful of examples, such as fern-like trees and small bat-like creatures. Nothing special.



The Bottom Line
I have the impression that 'Red Faction' tried to be for PS2 what 'Doom' was for PCs. In that respect, it has arguably failed. But it did show what could be done, and there lies the true success of any revolution.

PlayStation 2 · by Carmelo Lia (42) · 2016

[ View all 17 player reviews ]

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 +

  • 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.

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  • MobyGames ID: 4194
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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 January 21, 2024.