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
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
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.