Red Faction

And also one of my top 3 in the genre. Yes, it's THAT good. Astraight-forward sci-fi action shooter, not unlike Quake 2. The best part of this game is the AI, which is still amazing to this day. You fight mostly human enemies who move constantly, take good cover, ambush you, shoot your explosives, and flee when they feel cornered, only to turn quickly around and shoot you in the face when you least expect it. The AI alone makes the game a lot more fun than most shooters out there, but Red Faction is awesome in almost every other aspect. Level design is amazing (at least once you get past the mines at the beginning). It's almost completely indoors and close-quarters. The atmosphere of the game is amazing, especially thanks to the BRILLIANT music. Oh, and some weapons are great, especially the riot shield and the railgun with a heat vision that you can use to shoot people through the walls. So what prevented this game from being a classic? A couple of downsides that gamers and critics were not able to look past: One of them is the GeoMod, a technical feature that is still impressive today: you can actually blow up walls and even create tunnels through the terrain. And the way walls break is not scripted, it's calculated in real time. Why was the GeoMod a bad thing? Because it was used very little in the single player campaign, so people were very disappointed. There are a lot of unbreakable walls and the levels are pretty linear, so forget about using it as a strategy to go through the levels or surprise foes from behind. The GeoMod still shines in multiplayer though, where you have a lot more freedom and long matches end up with maps that look like swiss-cheese. The other one are the graphics, which I never considered bad, but they looked dated and clunky when the game came out. I still consider the visuals to be very good because they manage to create a great atmosphere.

Red Faction is one of the standout classics among early 2000s first-person shooters. The campaign offers a solid 6 hours of blasting through hostile guards, mercenary soldiers, mutant creatures, vehicles... oh yes, and also walls. One of the main selling points for this title back in the day was its unique technology that allowed you to blast holes through walls, making it possible to deform the level geometry and bypass certain obstacles that would be impassable in other shooters. At least, that was the theory. Before Havok physics came into play, this sort of physical destruction engine was a neat feature to play around with. However, in practice, it doesn’t have much practical use. There's one moment early on where you can shoot the bridge out from underneath an enemy APC, and I can recall one, maybe two other instances where I had to blast through a wall to bypass a closed door. But beyond that, it's mainly cosmetic and doesn’t provide any tactical advantage to the otherwise straightforward run-and-gun gameplay. So, what else makes this game such a gem? Well, everything else, to be honest. The game's story and atmosphere were definite standouts. The campaign is structured much like a Half-Life game, with seamless level transitions and a narrative that rarely breaks your point of view. The story of oppressed workers on Mars' mining colony launching a rebellion against their corporate overlords is reminiscent of many classic science fiction tales from movies and literature. It's good stuff. The campaign itself is also mostly well-made, with plenty of variety in the form of vehicle and stealth sections, as well as scripted set pieces sprinkled throughout to keep things from getting monotonous. The only notable difficulty spike worth complaining about comes from rail gun-wielding soldiers toward the end of the game, who can essentially one-hit kill you, sometimes without warning. It’s incredibly annoying but not too hard to manage either.

Fun game for the most part. The sound keeps dropping out though. The last thing you do in the game is just bad game design. I won't spoil the ending for anyone who cares, bat you have to put in a bunch of imputs that are completly randomized and you are on a 45 second timer. There is no way to logically figure out the solution. You just have to press random buttons and hope you just stumble upon the right combination. I have no idea who decided that this was a good idea, but this final encounter is easily in my personal top 10 worst game design decisions that I've ever encountered.

Red Faction is one of those games that my sister and I used to watch our father play back during the early 2000s. It stands out particularly through its setting and the destructible environments, which were quite literally groundbreaking at the time. Unfortunately, there is a very prominent bug involving a submarine on-third into the game that explodes instead of lowering into the water, making the game completely unwinnable. This bug was present back then and is still a serious problem in this version. You need to either cheat to skip the section or download a fan-made patch to fix it. I cannot recommend a game that needs an outside source to be fully playable.

"Red Faction" is a pretty standard shooter game with a fun mechanic - Geomod, which theoretically allows you to blow holes into the environment. In practice it only works on select surfaces and I quickly forgot about this mechanic during my playthrough, only noticing it when an NPC threw a granate every now and then. The later levels tend to become somewhat frustrating - not really hard, but ammo and health is quite scarce and enemies generally instakill you. I had to re-load the game about every 0.5 seconds for some 30 times in some of the battles because I had only 1 HP left and had to get the timing right. Beside these issues "Red Faction" is a fun 90s-style shooter.