Red Faction

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.

The Good
In Red Faction, you are a miner on Mars thrust into the heart of a revolution. That's basically the story. There are a few twists involving a mysterious disease and mercenary troops, but for the most part you follow a linear path shooting people and things while oohing and aahing over the GeoMod engine.

The GeoMod engine allows you to deform terrain, meaning that you can create craters with explosives, "tunnel" through certain areas and shoot through walls. Red Faction comes with a demo level titled "Glass House" where you can experiment with the GeoMod engine and shoot-up a glass house. This gets a bit old after a while.

There are a several weapons available under four different categories, including two sniper rifles and two rocket launchers. Apparently the mine owners knew they were dealing with a tough crowd. There are also several vehicles. Surprisingly only one can drill through walls. You only encounter this once in the game, early on. Sadly, the vehicles are only good to get from one section to another. Expanded use of the vehicles would have been much more fun.

The AI is fair. Enemy units try to kill you and respond to gunfire with scripted phrases (perhaps three scripted phrases). They try convince you that they are either unarmed or on your side while shooting at you. You also have some fellow miners and revolutionaries who either contact you in a style reminiscent of Deus Ex or serve as cannon fodder. I was actually confused by the cannon fodder bit, because I thought it might possible to save them. Nope.

Let's see the sound and music was not egregious. The graphics were quite good. And the game was very stable.

The Bad
Red Faction is neither very good nor very bad. It is actually quite average and unremarkable. Most of the ads focus on the GeoMod technology, but that is such a small portion of the game and so tied in to puzzle-solving that it becomes unimpressive.

Some people have commented that the story in Red Faction is good. It isn't bad and would probably make a good movie (starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sharon Stone). My complaint is that your character doesn't experience the story so much as he is told it from fellow revolutionaries. I prefer games like Deus Ex where you create the story, ones where your character's activities have impact. At no time in Red Faction does the story branch or even hint at branching.

This game seems unbalanced as well. The first two-thirds are pretty easy and the final third is extraordinarily difficult. The game actually ends with a puzzle that reveals the game's platform origins.

The Bottom Line
Red Faction is your typical FPS. No more, no less.

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.