There was a time when I was about 13 that I would've listed this among my favorite games. The destructible environments did make for an extremely good time, tunneling your way through mine walls or blowing the ground out from underneath enemies never got old. And any game with a working class revolution as the inciting incident is always gonna be right up my alley.
But nostalgia's a hell of a thing. Turns out the destructible environments were pretty limited, the vehicle sections that I remembered fondly were actually monotonous slogs a lot of the time and the writing and plot does absolutely nothing with the potential of the game's premise.
An ambitious game with interesting ideas and fun mechanics that falls flat after its extremely promising beginning.

First-person shooters were new to me when Red Faction launched in 2001. I didn't have a gaming PC growing up, so games like Doom, Wolfenstein, and Quake were nearly foreign to me. Red Faction was an overhyped game full of development issues and overpromised ambition. The "Gen-Mod" destruction model is half-baked and barely there. The visuals are dull and boring (even for the time), and the story doesn't go anywhere at all. Not to mention zero character development. I rented this game and got bored with it maybe an hour in, and I can see why.

Sure, the game looks much better on PC, but there's not much to really look at. Even for the time level, the design in shooters was fairly dull. Very few had interesting things to look at, such as Half-Life or Halo. Red Faction is just browns and reds with boring caves and industrial buildings. You are on Mars, by the way. You are part of a rebellion group called the Red Faction, who are miners uprising against the overbearing government. You are trying to fight your way to the top and stop a deadly plague that's killing the miners. This story starts and stops here. It doesn't go anywhere; there's nothing to spoil. You end up finding the cure, and that's really it. The voice acting is actually really good for the time, but the only thing that kept me playing was pure curiosity to finally see this game through to the end.

There are quite a few weapons in this game, but most aren't found until the last third of the game. You have your standard array of guns. Submachine, assault, precision, sniper, pistol, rocket launcher, and rail driver There's also a heavy machine gun and grenades. It's a standard list of weapons we've used in so many shooters, and Red Faction doesn't do anything interesting or fun with them. The shooting in this game feels pretty good and holds up well today, but the enemy AI is terrible, so don't expect much of a fight. There are vehicles you can pilot in this game, but they aren't anything fun or interesting. They shoot bullets or rockets, and a lot of the time I would end up stuck in weird physics glitches.

The game isn't very long. You can finish it in under 4 hours, and thankfully there's a quick save feature, which I suggest using often. Enemies are run-of-the mill faceless military dudes, and there's an occasional weird creature thing to mow down in the caves. Environmental detail is what you can expect from this era. Rooms are equipped with an occasional table, chair, or monitor. Nothing stands out or looks interesting in this game. Destruction is boiled down to blowing open a wall to get to a button (there's a lot of button pressing in this game), and that's about it. The occasional chunk of wall breaks off, but this is far from what Volition was touting back in the day.

Red Faction is at least a solid shooter. It's fun while it lasts, and the last act throws new enemies and weapons at you, and there are two whole boss fights in this game. Vehicles don't feel great to pilot, destruction is minimal, the story has a strong premise but goes nowhere, and the visuals are pretty bland. I did find the stealth section of the game pretty fun. Trying to find your way around without being spotted is like a giant puzzle, but that's all there is that changes things up. In the end, if you never play this game, you aren't missing out on gaming history.

Red Faction is a game that's been kicking around in my head for the twenty or so years it's been since I'd last played it. I've been meaning to go back to it for years, as my memories of the game were quite fond ones. What I have found in returning to this game, however, is that memories can be unreliable, even outright incorrect.

Aspects of this game unearthed memories buried deep within my brain, things that without my knowing I've been carrying with me for a couple decades: the enemy call outs and death screams; the incredibly stupid line at the beginning as the mining corporation thug attacks your comrade, "You threatenin' me? Yeah, well threaten this!"; a select few sequences here and there. But what I also came to realize is that this game that I looked back on so fondly? It's a total blur. I remember almost none of it. And for good reason: it kind of sucks.

For the purpose of not making this drag on too much (edit: about that... oops), when Red Faction is at its best, it's a pretty fun FPS. Shooting feels for the most part good, although I do think the spread could use to be tuned to be a bit less dramatic. There's a world in which this could be a game right in there in the same breath (or at least not far off) as the greats. So why is it, then, that I sort of hate this game?

Right as you start accruing an arsenal of decent weapons, Red Faction decides to flip a switch and turn into a stealth game. It takes all of your weapons but the silenced pistol from you, gives you a disguise, and tells not to get too close to anyone or they'll see through it. The game never communicates any of this information well enough to not feel fucking terrible and I found myself instead wishing I were playing No One Lives Forever or, shit, even one of the new Hitman games. Even if you set off alarms, and you will, you can't break out of your disguise and pick up new weapons; you have to hope you can make do with the magazine of bullets you were given. After some trial and error and strong use of quick saving and curse words you'll find your way through, but it never feels rewarding or that you've done something well. Oh and by the way? After that whole miserable sequence and more traditional shooting segments where you get your weapons back the game does it again, it fucking does it again, but this time in a more confusing area with deadlier enemies.

Even with those awful parts I wasn't overly down on the game, but then it turns into one of the least enjoyable FPSes I've ever played. For the last third or so of the game, nearly every single area you take battle in contains at least one enemy with an instagib rail gun that shoots through walls. It makes every encounter basically random: you will die dozens of times the instant you walk around a corner, well before any person could react. It feels like playing a multiplayer shooter in a lobby full of cheaters. It is horrendously fucking unfun. Except of course when you're using the gun yourself. It is awfully satisfying ripping a single cartoonishly powerful round through a line of clueless enemies from a couple rooms down the hall.

But it's not just the rail guns that made me ultimately hate the game: more generally speaking, the last stretch has a severe leap in difficulty that never feels properly challenging so much as it does cheap. Sometimes you'll open a door and be greeted by an unavoidable rocket an enemy has already sent your way. Sometimes enemies will be spawned behind you from dead-end corridors. There are stretches where there are more health items than you can use and then others where there are so few you end up riding the quick load button until you get by without taking a hit. I didn't happen to find healing before the (for the record, really, really bad) final boss fight, so I had to beat it without taking a single hit.

I should also make quick note of the game's defining feature: the so-called "Geo-Mod" technology, wherein explosions excavate the game's terrain. From a technology standpoint it's pretty neat, especially for 2001, but also: it barely exists. There's almost nowhere to use it in the single-player campaign and the places you can are at best superficial. Volition's method of stopping players from using the technology to perform sequence breaks appears to have been basically stopping the player from ever being able to use it at all. I think if they had instead taken the exact opposite approach and embraced the potential game-breaking nature of deformable terrain, the game would be profoundly more interesting. Instead, we're left with little more than a few walls in empty rooms you can make small dents in.

Before I get out of here, I've already rambled on too long, let me just briefly touch on the story. How fucking cool of a concept is taking part in a full-on violent revolution against the capitalist fucks who have been killing your fellow workers. It whips ass, right? Unfortunately no. I can't possibly imagine the concept for this game wasn't to at least some extent inspired by the real life labor history of miners such as that documented in the essential documentary Harlan County, USA, but rather than using any of that to enrich the plot or even attempt at making anything grounded in reality, Red Faction just kind of throws in some weird old cyborg guy who floats around evilly and has a forcefield. And a weird lady who also floats around evilly and has a forcefield. There's a virus or some shit too? I don't fucking know. It's written badly and acted stiffly and I didn't care about a goddamn thing that was happening. Wasted potential.

I still don't have the answer for how much of this game I actually ever played in the first place. It very well could have been that I cheated my way through the whole thing. Was my fond memory of this game based on a reality where I barely even played it? I don't know. Regardless, now that memory is replaced with a new one, and it goes a little something like this: Red Faction—a game I thought I liked.

Red Faction's main gimmick is the destructible environment which was really cool and fun to mess around with but it wasn't utilised within the main story enough, I can only recall one time where it was actually necessary to destroy the environment to progress. The story was enjoyable; as a Saints Row fan, it was really cool to see where Ultor originated.

My main issue with the game was the level design. There were some moments where I found it impossible to progress without using cheat codes. For example, at one point in the story, you're limited to only a pistol and no armour; I had run out of ammo on my pistol and there was no way to stealthily progress through the next section of the game so I just kept dying to guards. There were a couple of moments like this which really brings the game down for me because I hate having to fall back on cheats. As well as this, the game was extremely buggy and I had to download a mod just to fix these bugs and allow me to progress through some parts. I assume this is just an issue with the PC port of the game. Another thing that really bothers me about the game is how awful the boss fights are. The combat in the game is pretty average, and the boss fights don't have any unique gimmicks or concepts to them, it's literally just shooting them until they die.