ed Faction is a first-person shooter that evolves the genre by allowing players to tunnel and blast their way through the Martian landscape via new terrain-altering technology.
The game opens on Mars as players are thrown into the roll of Parker, a miner who immigrated to the Red Planet after being promised adventure and profits by the Ultor Corporation. But things fall apart on Mars, where he finds the workers are little better than slaves and a strange plague is spreading through the mines. The miners are ready for revolution, and when a guard brutally beats one of the workers, they fight back. Within minutes, rebellion is rippling through the mines, and the underground political group Red Faction is using the incident to overthrow Ultor's tyrannical rule. Naturally, Parker helps out.
The game's built around Volition's Geo-Mod technology, which allows players to blast their surroundings like never before. Rockets and explosives can be used to tunnel through rock walls, blow holes in walls and generally rearrange the game's landscape. Providing the firepower to do this are the standard weapons that FPS fans expect: light and heavy assault weapons, grenades, explosive charges, rocket launchers and rail guns. It has a few new gadgets, like a particularly effective flamethrower, and an assortment of vehicles, including submarines, all-terrain vehicles and small planes.
The multiplayer portion of the game supports up to 32 players and a handful of modes: deathmatch, team deathmatch, capture the flag and mod. The "mod" mode allows players to load custom modifications to the game's environment, such as tweaking gravity and other physical effects. The game's rounded out by a level editor.
A blast-filled genre benchmark
On its face, Red Faction is a standard first-person shooter inspired by equal parts Half-life and Total Recall, complete with a lone gunman fighting his way to the surface through all manner of sadistic mercenaries and mutated monstrosities. The storyline is passable, if not particularly compelling. But that's all right, because Red Faction's real impact—and what ensures that it'll become a benchmark in the genre—comes from Geo-Mod technology. Geo-Mod delivers every longtime gamers' dream: the ability to truly damage their environment—not just by taking out lighting fixtures and toilets, but by destroying walls and other obstructions.
In the single-player mode, Parker uses the technology to tunnel his way through the mines and Ultor's buildings, which should prove immensely satisfying to longtime FPS gamers frustrated by indestructible environments. It takes a little getting used to the idea that Parker doesn't necessarily have to find the key to open a door—he can simply "dig" his way past them. In places, it's possible for players to tunnel so far into the walls that they can't see the opening to their own hole—quite an accomplishment for a genre that in which destroying a soda machine used to be pretty cool. Unfortunately, this freedom doesn't hold throughout the entire game—sometimes its structures and walls simply can't be damaged, usually because doing so might derail the story. It is an annoying, if understandable, limitation.
Where Geo-Mod is most impressive, though, is in the multiplayer mode. The mode itself is run-of-the-mill—there are none of the end-of-game ratings or advanced multiplayer options available in games like Rare's Perfect Dark, but that doesn't really matter. What does matter is that the multiplayer levels are designed to be destroyed, and players happily oblige. Martian canyons, Ultor buildings, science labs—they are all transformed from pristine environments into war zones by gamers eager to get the drop on one another by carving holes in walls, ceilings and floors. It's truly impressive to be able to look down through two or three levels of a map, through holes blasted by players. Maps at the end of a Red Faction tournament don't look damaged, they look devastated. It all gives players a degree of control over their environment that they've never had before, while giving rise to all sorts of new tactics.
Ultimately, Red Faction's a respectable, if occasionally imperfect, freshman offering. With a stronger story that makes better use of Geo-Mod and an enhanced multiplayer mode, the Red Faction franchise could eventually rival Half-Life's.
Is Red Faction the next Half-Life? No, but it does give gamers a heck of a lot of bang for their buck.
— Kenneth
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