Review: Red Faction

Reviewed By: Kirk Hiner

Review Date: February 18, 2002

Genre: First Person Shooter

Format: 2 CDs

Developer: Volition

Original Publisher: THQ

Mac Port: Graphic Simulations Corp.

Publisher: Graphic Simulations Corp.

System Requirements: 300 MHz G3, Mac OS 8.6, OpenGL compliant 3D graphics acceleration card with 6MB VRAM, OpenGL v1.2.1, 1.2 GB hard disk space, 128 MB RAM, 8x CD ROM

Network Feature: Yes

3D Support: OpenGL

Mac OS X Compatible: Yes (v1.2b3 or later)

Retail Price: $44.99

Availability: Out Now

Rating: Teen (blood and gore, violence)

I have a belief that has gotten me through many a troubling time in life, and that belief is this; everything will happen. Not anything can happen, everything will happen. It's the only way I can make sense of cloned cats, people who kill for their god, and the continuing popularity of soccer.

But, for the life of me, I never thought I'd see the day when a computer game would be based on a song by Stan Ridgway.

Oh, sure, Volition may claim they've never even heard the song "The Overlords" by the original front man of Wall of Voodoo, but come on...the song's about a miner on Mars, preparing to bust free because of the horrible working conditions and the oppressive policies of the people for whom he works. That's Red Faction.

You control a guy named Parker, not Stan. I'm not sure if Parker's a first or last name, but I do know it's not Parker Posey, although that would've been pretty cool...and certainly would've made the game more popular with the Indie crowd. Enticed by the propaganda of the Ultor Corporation (a name which supposedly comes from the ancient Roman temple dedicated to Mars, the god of war, but which also sounds suspiciously similar to "Overlords"), Parker decides to break away his overbearing parents and their yuppie, upperclass expectations by clearing his head in the mines of Mars.

Of course, the mines of Mars aren't conducive to the clearing of one's head, as Parker quickly finds out, but it's worse than that. The living quarters are horrid, the work hours are excruciating, and as if that weren't enough, a plague is sweeping through the mines and Ultor doesn't seem interested in doing anything about it. Apparently, Ultor is a non-union gig, so the miners are left with only one option; revolt.

And thus, the adventure begins. Parker witnesses an assault on a miner and the subsequent murder of an Ultor guard. He picks up the gun and starts to make sure Red Faction earns its M rating.

The game itself plays something like a cross between Deus Ex and Unreal. The plot is revealed in pieces through both cut scenes and voice transmissions from various people seeking to help you. One is a guy named Hendrix, an Ultor security technician who sympathizes with the miners. Being on the other side, he has access to a lot of information that proves quite useful to Parker. He's kind of like that J.C. kid in Sin Gold, only not nearly as annoying.

And there's Eos, the mysterious leader of the Red Faction. She's a "take charge" kind of woman without being full of attitude, which is rare in games like this...or in the entertainment industry, in fact. I liken her to Ripley in the Alien series or Carolyn Fry from Pitch Black in that she has a job to do and she does it. Of course, she did yell at Parker a little too much, placing far too much responsibility on his soldiers. He'd be in the middle of a big fight, rockets and bullets bursting at him from all directions, and Eos would be yelling at him to hurry up or miners would die and the planet would blow up and the roast would burn and the kids would be late for bell choir practice and the trouble in the Middle East would escalate and it'd be his fault. Poor guy. Mom and dad's expectations pale in comparison, I'd think.

As I played through this game, I couldn't help but feel the authors had no idea where they were going with it as they were putting it together. Either that, or someone kept telling them that it wasn't quite long enough...add another scene. Characters and events kept popping up throughout with no previous reference, so quite a bit of what was happening seemed tacked on, kind of like watching a mystery in which you learn at the end that the killer was a character you never even met.

Red Faction makes up for this with the pacing, however. Parker is shoved from one perilous mission to the next, all of them ordered by Hendrix and Eos. He seems pretty eager to risk his life for these people, but we'll say that's the Flash Gordon in him instead of just considering him a tool.

Actually, the comparison to Flash is a pretty good one. Parker and Flash are both Ivy material (Flash graduated from Yale and Parker was accepted to Harvard), both spent a lot of time underground in Mars, and both...okay, well, that's it. But the design of the game harkens back to a time when everything was steel, concrete and muscle. The sheer size of some of these buildings had me thinking of Alex Raymond's scenery in the original Flash Gordon comic strips and even the sets of Fritz Lang's Metropolis. They added a sense of oppression to the game that made Parker's situation seem much more dire. Fans of Raymond's work will recall the plot line where Flash leads the Power men in a revolt against Ming. That's pretty much what's happening here.

Of course, if you're reading this review, I'm sure you'd rather I talk about the weapons or this new Geo-Mod technology about which everyone's talking than about Flash Gordon. Fair enough.

The weapons; there are fifteen you can use, and they all kill people.

Okay, that's boring me. Let's move on to Geo-Mod. Basically, this technology allows you to destroy and alter the terrain in real-time. Don't like that wall there? Fine. Blow it up. This is an impressive feature, but only when it wants to be impressive. Quite often, you can't blow up the walls. I mean, if the programmers didn't put anything behind them, you can't rightly get there (there's a philosophy debate waiting to happen). Quite often, Geo-Mod simply means you can dent stuff or make it look black. However, when it works, the ability to blast your way through the wall of a cave sometimes saves you the trouble of having to use a door and thereby alert some guards. Sometimes it's simply helpful, other times its necessary. More often than not, I was happy to stick with the doors.

Red Faction does a nice job of changing up the action from time to time. Certain moments require you to go undercover, stealing a medical uniform from a locker, for example, and leaving your weapons behind as you make your way through the labs. It's not all shooting and maiming, although it's mostly shooting and maiming. You also get to drive a bunch of stuff like drillers, submarines and Aesir fighters. Some reviewers haven't like this element, complaining it's simply a short way to get from point A to point B. Well, they're vehicles, and the reason people use vehicles is to get from point A to point B. What do you want, an armored personnel carrier demolition derby? I like using these vehicles, and felt they did a nice job of breaking up the monotony of pointing a gun at people and shooting them. At least here, I could also run them over.

Red Faction is odd in that, for the longest time, it was far too easy to play. I made my way through countless levels hardly taking a scratch. It got to the point where I'd purposely get shot because I was feeling bad about all the health packs and armor I was leaving behind. But the game then hits a point where it almost immediately becomes too hard. The enemies become smarter, they get bigger weapons, and they take more hits to die. If you want to make it through Red Faction, you'd best become an expert at the head shot.

Killing the enemies is a weird thing. They duck and cover and roll and are generally pretty good at avoiding your shots. After you do hit them a couple times, they cower and cry out for mercy. A second later, though, they're right back at you. It seems to me that if I've taken a couple bullets and momentarily lose my courage, it's not coming back for three weeks to ten days.

The graphics are odd at this point as well. Blood splatters from bullet wounds even if the guard is heavily armored. Okay, fine, but the armor never cracks or shatters. I found this odd, considering windows shatter like nothing you've ever seen in a computer game. Putting a bullet through them (sometimes two or three bullets, depending upon the weapon), shatters the glass into hundreds of tiny pieces which crash to the floor. It sounds like something pointless to discuss, but it really is a nice feature. In fact, Volition found it so cool they included a bonus screen that's nothing more than a glass house for you to shoot up. Oh, and hey, this is cool, too. When you take a hit, a red light flashes on the side of the screen from which you were shot. No more guessing or relying on your speaker set-up to figure out from where those bullets are coming; if the left side of the screen lights up red, turn to the left and start firing.

There's a multiplayer element here, but who cares? So long as Quake III: Arena and Unreal Tournament are around, there's no reason to look elsewhere for multiplayer FPS action. Red Faction does live beyond its twenty included levels through user created maps and mods available at fileball.net.

I had fun with Red Faction. Although the story never really escapes the confines of the FPS genre, the fast pacing, the great graphics, and the intense action keep it interesting. Even better, it's devoid of the pubescent, Duke Nukem attitude most games of this type have lately. There are surprisingly few "I just killed you so now I'm going to say something clever" lines, which makes Parker feel a little more vulnerable. He doesn't enjoy all this killing. He doesn't want to be doing it, he just wants to live. He's just a man with a man's courage.

Hey! Another tie-in to Flash Gordon! Someone do me a favor and make a mod for this game that dresses up Eos like Princess Aura from the 1980 Flash Gordon movie and puts Queen--or at least Stan Ridgway--in the soundtrack. Ridiculous, you say? Hey, everything will happen.

[an error occurred while processing this directive]

.