Red Faction

The Good
PRESENTATION: The game's menu were well presented, easy to read and pretty funky with the mars landscape scrolling at the back.

STORY: You are Parker, that's it for a name, you thought working with Ultor would be cool, how wrong are you. In fact the opening dialouge is spoken with surprise. Anyhow the conditons are bad, and the miners revolt. The story kinda trails off from there but remains through the game, in one way or another. It's ok but....you'll have to play to see what I mean. In a way it's just recycled from other story lines.

CONTROLS: All of them can be remapped, thank god, the default key configuration is too far paced across the keyboard for one hand, so remapping the enter key for operating doors is must.

GRAPHICS: Fairly good, the people/things in the game are well done, not perfect but enough to get things rolling. The GeoMod engine is lacking when it comes to curvy walls so some corners looks a little rough and jagged. The textures are also a bit lacking, the game WAS taken from the PS2, so that's one problem. The set pieces (desks clocks) are well done as well, there is even a little pencil on a desk, and the clock hands move, nice touch of details there. Lighting is fairly well done as well with a few ok shadow effects thrown in, and the light glare from flying craft is well done as well. Underwater is well animated as well with little particles (fish food?) floating about, and bubbles from gun shots are also included. The animations are fairly well done, keep an eye out for the shotgun death animation.

SOUND: All the gun effects work just perfect, the reload effects for the Persision rifle and the Sub Macheine gun are really fun. The game also notices little things like crunching glass when you walk over it. Foot steps are a little off set and the voice is not really that good. But it works.

GEO-MOD This has been given a section because it is different from GAMEPLAY. Firstly you all know what GEOMOD is? For the people who don't know, GEOMOD, is the first gaming engine to utilise a realtime world destruction engine. In other words, you can make a level swiss cheese with time and a rocket launcher. This also means you can make a cieling collapse by taking out the support struts, or make APCs plummet into a abyss by taking out the bridge. And if you have time, carve out large sections of the cieling and watch them fall onto people. All the effects that I have mentioned are possible. Glass is well done as well. Fire at a pane from a distance with a pistol and you will only get a little bullet hole. From close range with a rifle, and the glass will shatter from where it is hit. And the pieces fall down every where as well as get thrown about with an explosion. Perfect.

GAMEPLAY: Ok a mixed bag. Firstly the A.I in this game is GOOD. The enemy run to cover to reload as well as call in others and dodge their way around you. The weapons are wonderful to play with. The pistol has a nice silencer screw on animation and the heavy machiene gun has a really cool reload action. The only bad bit about the weapons is the uselessness of the close combat weapons. The riot shield only deflects so much in terms of bullets. The rail driver on the other hand is a weapon of mass fear, even in the hands of the enemy. Firstly it can drive a charge through the wall into somebody, or you. The levels are interesting, a bit boring at some points, mainly with the missions in the mines, but it really shines in the space station mission, with low gravity and interesting recol effects.

Multiplayer is interesting as well as chaotic. People try their best to terraform the enviroment to their advantage and other's disadvatage. In this game the floor can vanish below your feet with no warning. Fun.

The Bad
Ok time to dish out the diss.

Firstly the GEO MOD engine. The programmers offered us this new technology and do not let us use it fully. For examples all doors cannot be destroyed and the wall around them cannot be carved into with a rocket launcher. On top of all that the office levels walls are stronger than mars rock.

Apart from that major niggle, the game is a well thought out game.

The Bottom Line
Yes it is worth your $89.00 (Aus). The multiplayer levels are a dream and the single player, while lacking still is a good challenge. It may not be the next Half-Life, but it is very close.

The Good
Volition circa 2001, despite their relatively small name in the business at the time, were by no means an unaccomplished development house, existing as one half of the now defunct Parallax Software, creators of the Descent games. Volition already had the fantastic Freespace titles under their belt, but Red Faction represented their first attempt at the first person shooter genre.

Interestingly, Red Faction began life as Descent 4, a game I would much rather see, and there is evidence of this in numerous places; the proprietary GeoMod ‘blow-up-anything’ engine was originally slated for D4. When RF came out I was particularly ecstatic with it; the ability to arbitrarily blast the hell out of anything was (in the places the game allowed it) a ton of fun and something nobody had ever tried at the time, and the game’s overall presentation was really quite impressive. Stylistically, Red Faction comprises of a thick mix of Half-Life gameplay, with a thick topping of Total Recall and some very light peppering of Deus Ex.

With all of these elements being taken from cult classics, surely Red Faction contained the makings of a truly classic game? Well, I’d suppose the thing that makes a classic a classic in the first place, is typically the ability of a piece to try and succeed at something that has never been done before; a million dollar idea multiplied by a million dollar production and a ton of spit and polish. Red Faction, by comparison, doesn’t really have an original polygon in its body, so the best you can hope for, really, is a solid first person shooter with some great technology to back it up.

To be fair, there are some good ideas here. I loved the idea of being able to go tunnelling with my rocket launcher and skewering people through walls with the rail gun – but not one to paint itself into a corner, Red Faction also features some extensive ‘undercover’ sections where you travel through some high-security areas in disguise, watching out for security cameras and guards at every turn. There’s some interesting set pieces, such as the first time you see a shuttle get blown up through the window. The graphics are pretty good; on the PC, the visuals are much more polished and sharper to boot; the game’s many explosions, slow shattering of glass and empty shell casings flying all over the place are fantastic to behold. Sound effects are pretty good as well, all the weapons provide some nice aural feedback with chunky firing sounds and a satisfying click-clack of swapping magazines. Throwing sticky bombs at enemies and watching them running around screaming like girls as they flailed their arms spastically above their heads was endlessly hilarious to boot (although retarded).

The game’s central characters exhibited a great amount of potential. Eos was an enigma of a woman, with her strange appearance and unusual drive in the face of oppression; Parker, the player’s character, was not quite a silent protagonist either and had plenty to say during the game’s occasional cutscenes.

In all honesty that’s about the most praise I can offer for the game. Now for the sweet, sweet catharsis…

The Bad
Good ideas are multipliers. A fresh, original concept coupled with a great production will make for an instant classic, whether it gets the recognition it deserves or not – Red Faction is a great example of lots and lots of ideas that have been done before, and throwing them all together into a half-arsed mishmash that tries everything but succeeds at nothing. My most significant criticisms of the game come from three pillars:

Firstly, though it’s strong on a visual front, the game engine strangely feels very much like it was made to be… well, a Descent game. Player physics feel very floaty when you’re jumping and running feels like you’re gliding on air. Bullet impacts come out as puffy little explosions, as if they were from lasers. Character animations are stiff and wooden and the AI is similarly robotic. Many sections of the game involve you running down very long tunnels with very little else to do, and feedback from shooting your enemies feels very clean and subdued. The length stealth section in the middle of the game drives home how deliberate and clumsy some sections have been implemented; all the time you’re running away from the telepathic guards that spotted you from across the room and behind that pillar, you’re just thinking about how easily you’d have smashed the meagre resistance here if you’d just kept all the weapons and armour that you supposedly gave away to make your job easier.

Secondly, the level design underscores the developer’s failure to construct a game world that plays the strengths of the design of the game and its underlying technology. When I heard of Red Faction’s revolutionary GeoMod technology, I envisioned epic firefights with destruction on a huge scale, with towers collapsing, blasting away peoples’ cover, glass windows getting blasted out left and right, vehicles mowing down foes all and sundry, shooting out false walls to plunder secret areas for goodies… and while at one or two points the game does almost achieve this, for the rest of this longer-than-average journey you’re running down empty corridors, creaming faceless guards shouting ‘mine scum!’, tasering civilians out of sheer boredom and shooting screechy mutant creatures with pistols.

It’s absurd that after giving you this wondrous new technology of arbitrary destruction, the game almost immediately takes it away again by putting you in cramped corridors of indestructible scenery. For a supposed full-scale planetary revolt, once you see your miner buddies trying to help you out, you begin to piece together how everyone got so oppressed in the first place; your friends in Red Faction are utterly incompetent every step of the way, prancing gleefully into every gun battle with heavily armed guards, who then ice them with a single shot. Every time a miner supposedly tries to help you, they either flee for their lives or are immediately killed after performing their intended function. This becomes even more hilariously frustrating towards the end once the mercs roll in – tough as nails and armed to the teeth, your Red Faction buddies boldly run up against them with their pop guns at the ready, half the time getting turned to vapour before they even enter the room.

Even if the gameplay wasn’t all that gripping however, the game could still coast on its setting and characters alone. Which brings me to my most scathing criticism – Red Faction is a game with no soul. Every element is ripped off of something else; the Martian rebellion comes straight from Total Recall, the set pieces are ripped straight from Half-Life, the ‘mysterious plague!’ was already done much better in Deus Ex, etc etc… truly, Red Faction cleans out the cliché closet and then comes back for more. Character development is pretty much non-existent; while the manual features some extensive character bios, none of what it mentions actually impacts or is even mentioned in the game proper and basically all you’re left with is some very cardboard cut-out people. Perhaps the worst offender of all is Parker himself, who apparently is supposed to take on the nonchalant, sarcastic anti-hero type of vibe but just ends up coming off as a total wanker. Even during cutscenes other characters seem to be aware of this, frequently brushing the player off or leaving him alone as soon as they are able.

The Bottom Line
In the end, Red Faction is simply not a game that even came close to living up to its fantastic potential and will certainly not be remembered fondly in the same way as some classics of its time will be. I’d quite highly recommend avoiding it, and especially its god-awful sequel.

The Good
I will try to keep this review short since FPS aren’t my preferred genre…

I believe that a good fps should be as a good action movie and this title have a strong developed plot. Player takes command of a rebel miner that is part of the Red Faction in the Mars mines against the Ultor Corporation.

The best point in my opinion is the need to play vehicles in order to beat the game, submarines, helicopters, jeeps and tanks.

The personal guns are great also; I specially liked the two-function feature for each item.

I know that many of this features are already an standard on FPS but since I have low-expectations when playing FPS I had a good-time playing Red Faction.

The Bad
Just 2 Points:

1) Too easy, well I like easy FPS but not too much.

2) Too short, finishing a game in a weekend isn’t especially long…

The Bottom Line
Good game that represent high entertainment but not a challenge.