Has anyone noticed that almost all mining companies in games and movies are evil? Especially those based in other planets? No-one’s really explained to me why this is so, but as a rule of thumb, Mining = Evil (Whoever came up with that concept must have been a hippie)

Red Faction is Half-Life on Mars.
Actually, that is a lie. Red Faction tries to be Half-Life, but doesn’t quite make it. It has a good attempt, but fails in most criteria.

It’s storyline is based around you (Hapless worker for giant evil mining company) on Mars, fighting against them. You must find an evil scientist, and some mercenaries (A La Government Clean-Up from Half Life), and to cut a long story short, kill them. Not much of a storyline, but it will have to do at a pinch. You wear a biohazard suit, and have a load of guns to play with.
The missions you have to get through range from the normal janitorial role, to stealth runs, and also playing with vehicles. Not much variation at all, but I hope some mod or mission pack will help it along.
Overall, the single player missions take a paltry 12-15 hours to complete. Not good, when even Monkey Island 3 can better the time…

The Geo-Mod technology, supposedly to set this title alight, doesn’t. Sure, it’s cool to shoot through walls and floors, causing rubble and such, making new doorways and routes to other places, but it gets a bit boring. You can only do it with certain guns/weapons, and even then you waste your ammo. Admittedly, it is cool the first few times you do it, blasting a wall, but it’s tiresome. The only fun part is where you destroy a bridge and make a giant APC fall to it’s doom. Big whoop!

Red Faction tries to be atmospheric, and indeed it tries hard. It isn’t. Caves and corridors are never atmospheric, no matter how many enemies you put in front of the player. It’s graphics fail to light any imagination either. Everything is plainly made, much like the music and sound. The techno music may be good, but even that fails to make me think about the game more like Half-Life than Quake 1.

I advise you all, it is fun for a few minutes, but might be better when the mods and extra levels come out from the community. Don’t buy it for Geo-Mod…

Gameplay

Graphics

Sound

Overall