Red Faction

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.