Red Faction

The game installs and runs perfectly well in Linux with wine, for those that are interested. The Pure Faction patch also works just fine with wine, so in all this is a great buy for Linux gamers. As far as the game itself goes, I had it when it first came out but never got around to playing it. Going through it now, I am finding it still pretty fun in a dated way.

I spent around three hours shooting my way through guards on this game. It is entertaining, Even with the ancient graphics. However, It has game breaking bugs that don't allow you to progress. If you make it to the sub bay after blowing up the geothermal plant, And have no explosives, your screwed! You cannot open the wall to get in the control room to lower the sub. There is no button on the girder to lower it either. At this point i'm just going to uninstall the game, Maybe someday i'll try it again, But i doubt it.

I remember when this came out, it made quite a buzz because of their destructible environment tech. I got to get my hands on a demo of it and like everyone else was amazed at being able to create tunnels in the environment using a rocket launcher. The single player demo was pretty great and combined with this awesome new tech it seemed like the game would be a real success. Anyways the game starts you by getting you into a fight straight off the bat, there is no introduction sequences like Half-life, doom3 and other had which is a shame. You start with a pistol and shoot your way to the top literally. Along the way you'll be fighting guards who all sound the same and shout the same thing at you. Their A.I is fairly good and can offer a challenge, but it doesn't have the same kind of realistic presentation that you get with games like half-life and others. This is too bad because it would have livened this up quite a bit as this who you'll be shooting at for the majority of the game. The arsenal of weapons is stored similar to half-life which is great and it offers you a lot to use. The writing in this is not very good, and one of the main villains literally has plot armour in the form of a nano-shield just so he can introduce himself in a extremely boring manner. I'm not sure why people are giving this game 5 stars? Maybe I'm just missing something.

This game has some problems on modern systems. There's a sequence where the player must lower a submarine into the water and the sub blows up. Fortunately, there's a god mode development cheat that can get players past the sequence. Further in the game, the player must activate an elevator that opens one set of doors and closes the other set of doors at the same time, making it impossible to proceed with the game. There are some saved files from other player's games on the web that could get me past the point I'm stuck; but, I'm leery of using them. If the game worked correctly, I'd give it about 3 1/2 stars. It's not particularly memorable; but, it's a solid game that won't leave you bored.

I've just played this game again after many years, having downloaded from GOG. In terms of the game, i haven't tried MP but have played through the SP campaign again and for the most part really enjoyed it - i love fast-paced shooters and while it's fundamentally linear there are different approaches to be made to some of the maps. There's a decent variety of weapons and enemies and whilst some others have said the dialogue is repetitive (in which game is it not?!) i actually think the NPCs have more to say than in some more recent games. In some ways it reminds me of Far Cry 1 without the tropical island - even the 'helper' who talks to you on the comlink, and as with FC1 there's some amusing taunts - "Try and take ME, miner!" and my favourite "It's just you and me miner!" The blasting of holes in walls is also fun and innovative at the time Of course the graphics are dated but perfectly good enough, in fact i'm quite impressed with the characters' faces. There is one glitch i can find when the submarine you're supposed to use blows up but you can find a solution (not a cheat) by googling. But overall this is a great game and assuming you understand the concept of this site and really enjoy this...