Red Faction.
Over the years, this series has taken on many different forms.
It's been a third person shooter, an open world action adventure game.
But today, let's take a look back at where it all began, as a first person shooter.
Mars.
The home of the Ultor mining facility, providing work and accommodation for thousands of miners
trying to earn an honest wage and make a new life for themselves.
The only problem is, it turns out they're treated like shit.
Beatings, harsh conditions and on top of that, a mysterious plague to worry about- all normal
things for a Mars miner.
One day, the tension reaches boiling point as a riot breaks out between the miners and
the guards and our lead character Parker is caught right in the middle of things, in a
life or death struggle to survive.
He joins up with the revolutionary group Red Faction, who is led by the mysterious figure
Eos, who is sick of being treated like a slave.
The game is then one continuous flow of first person action.
From shoot-outs, to vehicle fights, to undercover stealth sections...
It's an old school shooter in every sense of the term.
Now I should point out that for this review, I played through this game in it's hardest
difficulty- impossible mode.
A name that is very nearly accurate.
I played it this way partly because I like a challenge and partly because I like gold
trophies.
However, this difficulty did slow the pace of the game right down, as I basically had
to manually save after every single enemy encounter.
Death was a constant threat.
Kill a guy.
Save.
Kill some guys.
Save.
The old school controls didn't help much, which I'll get to in a bit, but my advice
for anyone trying to play the game this way is to have some patience, learn when to be
super aggressive and when to play it cautious.
Oh and save.
All the frickin time.
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Now, back to the review...
One thing that became a staple of the Red Faction games is destructible environments.
Back in 2001, it really made the game unique and it fitted in perfectly with the mining
setting.
I didn't go mad trying to find all of the different secrets, but occasionally I would
stumble across a hidden route, that I had accidentally blown open by the odd stray rocket.
Eventually, the focus of the game switches from miner revolution, to stopping an evil
mad scientist who has began experimenting on human test subjects to create some very
Resident Evil like monsters.
Unfortunately this plot didn't really go anywhere, and it swiftly returns back to the
norm of escaping from Mars while trying to stop the Ultor company.
And this is where things get extremely difficult...
Especially when the enemies started wielding one hit kill rail guns as well as some seriously
strict time limited sections.
I must say that completing this game on impossible is one of my prouder gaming achievements.
Red Faction is a perfect demonstration of what a first person shooter used to be like.
Aiming, for example, uses the strange mechanic of moving a cross hair around the screen,
rather than simply looking down the sights.
Grenades are a weapon you have to select, rather than having their own dedicated quick
button.
The secondary function of a sniper is in fact to zoom in, as if it's some kind of special
feature and not something that should just be done automatically by aiming.
And goddamn where ladders annoying in first person shooters back then.
But despite some of its more archaic mechanics, this is a game that's still a huge amount
of fun to play.
It's a blast from the past and an interesting look at the how we used to play our shooters.
Red Faction, one and two, are for me, up there with Doom, Wolfenstein and Half Life as
true FPS classics.
Now all I need to do is relearn that it's R2 to shoot, not R1!
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