I was first introduced to the Red Faction franchise by a high school friend who had us purchase Red Faction: Guerilla, an "army man" game (defined as a game where you walk down straight hallways and shoot enemies for several hours, featuring a half-baked story with entirely forgettable characters throughout, you know the type) from the early late 2000s with a very special gimmick - you can destroy the environment! We organized a couple of LAN matches, marvelled at the environmental destruction, and forgot about it shortly thereafter largely due to us preferring the gameplay and environmental destruction of Battlefield: Bad Company 2.
I was reminded of the Red Faction franchise a year ago when Donkey Kong Bananza released with the Nintendo Switch 2. Touting the novel mechanic of real-time environmental destruction, I decided not to purchase it as my compulsive completionism would have caused me to waste hours that I simply do not have on finding the wealth of hidden secrets promised by such a game. However, it did remind me that the game industry first developed real-time destruction 25 years prior and got me curious about this "lost technology" enjoyed by our gaming forebears which was entirely abandoned in the mainstream industry.
Red Faction's Geo-Mod (Geometric Modification) engine is certainly a cool technology, especially for 2001 where every similar game (e.g. Half Life, Doom) took place in a relatively static world. However, it's important to remember that cool technology makes for a cool demo, but not necessarily a cool game. Indeed, Red Faction fails in virtually every other respect as a game. The story is entirely forgettable, the boss battles are criminally uninteresting (shoot a guy with a shield a bunch, and then shoot him until he dies), the gun play is generic, the level design is way too linear for a game touting environmental destruction, and crucially -- the destructible environment is barely even used! It serves only as a vehicle for obtaining a particular weapon a couple levels early or for getting extra health packs. In maybe two specific cases (giant worms mission and the famous tank mission), environmental destruction can be used to skip small annoyances in a level, but a vast majority of the annoyances remain unskippable. The developers did not hide a single easter egg in the environment to pique my interest. Worst of all, the environmental destruction leading to cool secrets seems to have been abandoned beyond the first act. For proof, see this video in which the author loaded all the levels into the Red Faction level editor and searched for secret rooms hidden in the terrain. The author found a mere eight secret rooms beyond the clearly marked hidden areas in the game, all exclusively in the first act! The final fatal flaw in the environmental destruction is the severe limitedness of environment-destroying ammunition, discouraging deep exploration into the level. Unlike Red Faction: Guerilla, Red Faction has no unlimited-ammo environment destroying weapon. Fine, we can use the console to grant unlimited ammo, but as previously shown there is simply nothing interesting to discover in the levels - no major skips, no developer easter eggs, no special weapons, nothing.
The story is some revolution against the big bad corporation, featuring a whole cast of forgettable friends and enemies. Following a worker's revolt after years of abuse, you disable an orbital defense space station to enable your comrades to escape, only to find that the corporation hired ruthless mercenaries to wipe out the revolting workers. Somewhere along the way is some mad scientist trope which fits awkwardly into the story, but this was, for some reason, a common story trope back then (take, for example, Far Cry 1 and Deus Ex). Divided into three acts, it's clear the developers put all their effort into Act 1, and just dragged Act 2 and 3 into a minimal shippable form to satisfy the release deadline. I honestly can't say what I hate more, the olden days with strict release deadlines forcing major content cuts before we assumed widespread internet access, or the brave new world we find ourselves in where a game is never effectively finished and the constant updates whore for more and more of your attention.
The gunplay is ripped directly off of Half Life, featuring the ever-irritating bullet spray patterns which seem to have snuck their way into every modern shooter. As a side note, why is THIS the technology we chose to carry into the next 25 years? This abominable mechanic that ensures that casual players will forever be left in the lurch while nolifers will memorize the minutia of each gun's spray pattern making online matches borderline unplayable? Anyways, continuing on the vehicle sections are abysmal, especially the two submarine levels where you are stuck in an underwater unmanuverable metal box, doomed to be hit by every single torpedo or robotic whale spit projectile sent your way. In all fairness, however, I would go so far as to claim that there has never been an enjoyable vehicle mechanic in a single first-person shooter. I played this game in the exact same way I played Doom - jump around and kill enemies, never stopping lest I get hit by a stray bullet. Six hours in, I defused a ticking bomb, saved the good guys from certain destruction and was left sorely disappointed.
So yes, Red Faction functions as a cool tech demo, but the combination of stupid difficulty settings, milquetoast gunplay, underusage of real-time environmental destruction, and bad storytelling makes for, in my opinion, a waste of a great concept.
Red Faction has 4 difficulty levels - easy, medium, hard, and impossible. The higher difficulties are harder for the worst reason possible - the enemies' aims improve meaning you will get cheaply one-shotted constantly at the highest difficulty. I started out this game on medium difficulty, a fun enough experience until the horrible robot boss/incinerator room level which requires you to lure a massive, unkillable, missile-shooting, dual-machine-gun-wielding robot on top of a closed incinerator, scramble madly up a ladder hoping you don't get blown up by a stray missile, press a button to open the incinerator, and survive the machine-gun onslaught for several seconds until the robot falls into the incinerator, provided the poorly-programmed game registers the robot is atop the incinerator. Of course, this game was made in 2001 and any cutesy mission like this that doesn't involve shooting your way out of a situation will inevitably require you to cheese the AI in some way. I died many times prompting me to switch the difficulty to easy. After a couple of failed attempts, I finally got the stupid robot to go into the incinerator. I was too lazy to change the difficulty after this so I played the rest of the game on easy mode which made for a much more enjoyable experience. All in all, my half-medium half-easy playthrough took 6 hours to complete. It would have been a lot faster if I had realized earlier on that the only secrets that can be gathered from blowing up the walls are weapons that you would simply unlock at a later point; I wasted a lot of time in the early part of the game looking for easter eggs in the destructible environment. Aside from a couple of cutesy missions like the aforementioned robot incinerator mission and a couple of escort missions (which are horrible enough in modern games, let alone with 2001 AI), none of the missions were especially difficult.
Due to the autosave at each loading screen, there are a couple of opportunities for softlock throughout the game - I fell victim to the Act 2 mission in which you blow up the space station to allow the miners to escape. The game very clearly wants you to blow up the reactor to destroy the space station, a task with which I was more than happy to comply. Unfortunately, what the game left out is you have like 5 other tasks to complete, so I was left with one minute to complete these tasks thanks to the autosave. After trying to cheese it a couple of times, I had to use the console to restart the level.
The singular puzzle in the game is the bomb defusal at the very end, which is just a sequence memory test and presents no major difficulty. The vehicle sections are miserable due to the general clunkiness of the vehicles, and especially in the two submarine levels the enemies' missiles home in on you so there's no way to avoid them unless you can redirect them into the environment. I am much too lazy to deal with that avoidance, and there was no point in performing any kind of avoidance at the easy and medium difficulties as you have more than enough health to absorb all the hits. In conclusion, it's your basic "army man" difficulty and not really difficult for any good reason.
Playing from the first-person perspective, Parker has two health bars - health and envirosuit health. Damage taken is only partially absorbed by the envirosuit, leading to easily softlocked situations where Parker has low health but high envirosuit health. The environmental destruction is carried out with remote bombs, grenades, rocket launcher, and the fusion rocket launcher (the rocket launcher but a bigger explosion), all of which are not particularly plentiful largely discouraging exploration of the environment through destruction. Many weapons are available, but only a few are worth using - the pistol is valuable early game as ammo is plentiful and two or three head shots kill all early game enemies, the assault rifle carries through Act 2 with high damage and fast fire rate, the precision rifle becomes available in Act 3 and does high damage with a fire rate as fast as you can click the mouse, and the sniper rifle and rail rod are useful for long-range engagements with high accuracy and a one-shot kill on most enemies. Other weapons include the auto shotgun, which has too small of a magazine to do anything useful, the control baton, a taser that would be useful if you foolishly participate in the clumsy, paleolithic stealth gameplay, the riot shield which blocks most shots but does almost no melee damage, the flamethrower which kills you more often than it does your enemy, and the submachine gun which chews through the ever-scarce ammo while doing meager damage. I fully acknowledge at higher difficulty levels other weapons probably come more into play, but nothing in my first playthrough made me want to restart the game at a higher difficulty.
Along the way, you meet and fight alongside several members of the Red Faction but they die in a single hit, rendering them entirely useless - more often than not I just ended up shooting them as it's easier to just shot at everything that moves in the chaos. There are a variety of secret passages scattered throughout the levels, but these secret passages ultimately lead to weapons available through normal gameplay or small skips - secret passages only excite me when they lead to special weapons, skipping of major parts of the level, or developer easter eggs.
The graphics themselves are horrible in the base game and are improved significantly through mods such as Dash Faction and Alpine Faction, but even at release the graphics were a common point of contention. Thankfully, the story exposition happens through pre-rendered cutscenes instead of clumsy real-time animation.
Act 1 starts you off as Parker, a miner who fell for the utopian propaganda of Ultor Corporation, a Martian mining company formed due to the depletion of Earth's resources in the year 2070. What was supposed to be a reversal of fortune soon turned into a nightmare, as Ultor systematically violates the basic human rights of its mining colonists and ignores a plague ripping through colony, the effects of which are never really fleshed out. Eventually, the miners had enough and decided to revolt by creating the Red Faction, a vaguely communist revolutionary group which seeks to overthrow Ultor and establish a better society on Mars. Aided by Hendrix, an Ultor technician sympathetic to the Red Faction, Parker makes his way through the mines attempting to escape off-world with a group of miners who have rebelled. Unfortunately, Parker gets to the escape shuttle a couple of seconds too late and gets left behind. The escape shuttle is immediately destroyed upon takeoff by Ultor's air defense system, setting up the next part of the story where you disable these systems. Turning back, Parker continues to fight through the mining complex to kidnap the Ultor administrator Gryphon. Upon kidnapping Gryphon, Parker learns that the colony's plague was actually manufactured by the villainous scientist Dr. Capek who is trying to use nanotechnology to augment the colonists. After fighting his way into Capek's lab through hordes of Capek's genetic abominations, Parker with kills Capek with the assistance of Eos, the leader of the Red Faction. While dying, Capek admits that there is a cure to the plague, but refuses to divulge it. Capek's death triggered the lab to self-destruct, but Eos stayed behind to gather Capek's research on the plague cure - surprise, surprise, she ultimately survives the ordeal.
Act 2 has Parker destroying the orbiting space station to eliminate its laser defense system to enable the remaining miners to escape. After fighting through several more levels, Parker stows away on a departing shuttle and makes it to the space station. After fighting through several levels in the space station, Parker manages to overload the reactor causing the station to blow up but he escapes in an escape pod back to Mars where he is informed that Ultor has hired ruthless mercenaries to eliminate the remnants of the mining colony, marking the start of Act 3. After fighting through the mercenary camp, Parker reaches Masako, the bloodthirsty leader of the mercenaries, and defeats her. Taking an elevator down, he encounters a captured Eos who informs him that Masako has rigged the bomb next to her to explode in a minute. Playing through a sequence memory game, Parker deactivates the bomb as the Earth Defense Force (no idea who these guys are, but they ultimately become the antagonists of Red Faction: Guerilla) arrives to back up the Red Faction. The day is saved and the plague cure is distributed; Parker is hailed as a hero and Eos tells him to get a girlfriend.
The prevailing opinion is that the base game is awful - every online thread begs new players having issues with the base game to install a mod like Dash Faction and indeed the default installation scripts on Lutris don't even offer a script for only the default game - all automatically install Dash Faction as well. I did install Dash Faction but I still had to deal with more 2001 cruft than I was willing to deal with (perhaps I wasn't using the mod properly). After a quick look online I decided to instead install the Alpine Faction launcher which adds plenty of graphical options and achievement tracking but most importantly restores multiplayer after a hostfile addition. I spent a couple of hours playing the multiplayer and ultimately decided that it wasn't worth my time. The game just isn't interesting enough mainly because the maps in play gear the multiplayer towards a Quake imitation - quality maps emphasizing fast-paced gunplay, but no destructible terrain. So the question arises, why would I play this when more people play Quake (or in my case Xonotic, since I hate Quake)? On the positive side, at any time I logged in I did find a couple of players online, but community events are unfortunately exclusively organized in the Alpine Faction Discord server. A game's community existing exclusively on Discord has been my cause for departure from several old game communities, however, the Alpine launcher graciously features news of future events, one of which is scheduled a couple days after the time of the writing of this blog post, so a Discord account is not required to participate in the community and the community still appears to be active.
RED is the official map editor for Red Faction and is included in the game's installation, although an updated open-source reimplementation is located here. The best documentation I've seen for Red Faction map editing is here. The modding community seems to have congregated on their own website, FactionFiles where plenty of mods can be found including new campaigns, none of which I've explored.
Game source - GOG (9.99 USD, purchased on sale for 0.99 USD)
GPU - AMD RX580 8GB
CPU - AMD Ryzen 5 3600X
OS - Linux (ran with wine-ge-8-26 on Lutris)
Control - Mouse/Keyboard
Is Red Faction worth it? It's only 99 cents on the almost-perpetual sale on which old games like these find themselves, but at some point my time is more valuable than a sticker price. This game is unimaginative, boring, and worst of all barely makes use of its single selling point. I'll let you come to your own conclusion, but me personally? I'm content never visiting this game again, enshrining my personal experience in this post.