O tempora is a series of retrospective posts where I play games from ages before to see if they stood the test of time.
It has been a very long time since I’ve played Red Faction last time. So much so that I’ve actually remembered the game being about twice longer than it actually is. Luckily, it isn’t and it still plays surprisingly well. With the help of a few mods, this title is still quite exciting. Unlike its sequel, but we’ll get to that.
Red Faction is an FPS from 2001, the wonderful time when all FPSes wanted to understand what made Half-Life work, but also add some unique flair of their own. In case of Red Faction, the big gimmick was the GeoMod engine’s (developed internally by Volition) capability of allowing almost complete destruction of every level. At least on paper. The game originally started as a next entry in the company’s classic series Descent, which might explain some of the vehicles that you get to pilot in this title. But ended up being the first FPS title from the studio. And it feels like a good example of an FPS from the era – it’s incredibly varied, it has just enough story and world building to keep you engaged, it’s basics are very good and it’s not too long to get boring.
To get it out of the way from the start, I did have to use a modification to make sure the game runs well on a modern system – I used Dash Faction. With it installed, the game looked and felt even better than it did back in the day and some of the visual elements still look fantastic today. What you see in the game is not extremely varied overall, but there’s much more to it than the boring looking caverns you start in and it looks great at higher resolutions. The music is pretty solid as well, although I wouldn’t call the soundtrack particularly memorable (similarly themed Chaser was better in this regard). And the voice acting, for how average the story is, is pretty solid.
What makes the game still enjoyable today is not even it’s main supposed gimmick, but rather the fact that it always tries to keep things fresh. There are typical shoot them all sections, some stealthy bits (picking up and hiding bodies included), vehicle sections, timed sequences. There are enemy types that appear for less than a level and are never reused again, for example, while most of the humanoid enemies are very visually distinct and kinda stylish looking. There’s also a desire to have some things work in a systemic nature, so you can get friendly fire and AI vs AI situations. Most weapons are very fun to use and some are really inventive and cool. Like, there’s a Rail Driver weapon you get closer to the end of the game, that shoots an almost instant-kill laser through walls and it’s scope lets you see the enemies through the walls as well. While all explosive weapons are, of course, constantly deforming the levels, creating new holes and craters.
Some of the variety can get a bit annoying – the game takes all of your weapons away 3 times, for example, for a stealth section, where you can only use a silenced pistol and must carry it holstered to avoid an all out combat. Because while you can actually do said combat, the game will not let you out of your stealth clothing and one weapon limitation if you do. That said, even here there’s choice for one of these sections and you can, if you want, just shoot everything instead. Some of the vehicle sections can be a bit poorly thought out too, because of the enemy placement and additional requirements.
And the enemies you fight at the very end get really frustrating. They have lots of health and using anything but the most powerful guns is more or less pointless. And most frustratingly, some of them start carrying the Rail Driver, meaning that as soon as they get aggroed on you, at any point you can suddenly get one-shot through the walls. There’s one boss fight that’s incredibly stupid, because it requires the enemy pathfinding to work in a particular way, while you’re being sprayed with bullets and rockets. And, if I’m entirely honest, the rest of the boss fights aren’t great either. Also, that whole destruction thing – developers quickly realized that it doesn’t work well with a linear title, so it’s far more limited than what you might hope for. Still impressive, though. But then, when you start getting mildly annoyed from time to time, the game seems to realize that it’s about to overstay it’s welcome and ends. I was actually surprised when it did, because I remembered the game being longer and was pleasantly surprised at how concise it is instead.
So even 21 years after its release, Red Faction is a really fun FPS, as long as you install the mod to make it work well. It has a few moments of frustration, but it’s really fun otherwise, even without the destructibility of the levels, which is more like a cherry on top. While perhaps not as essential as some of the FPS titles, it’s a wonderful entry from the era that’s worth playing today.
As for Red Faction II… Of all the titles in the Red Faction series, 2 is the only one I never even considered replaying until now. I remembered being miserable while playing the game back when it was just released and didn’t want to experience that again. But curiosity got the best of me and since I’ve gone through Red Faction, I decided that I might as well play the sequel too. My memories weren’t wrong – it’s an infuriatingly terrible title.
Red Faction II is a much simplified, much more linear and “dumbed down” version of Red Faction with a plot that reminded me of C&C Renegade. It retains the destructibility of the first game, but now it’s even more simplified, ditches a lot of the niche mechanics and ideas (like stealth, carrying bodies or most of the fully controllable vehicles) and tells an even more primitive story than the original title.
It starts with a couple of intriguing levels, where the game focuses a lot on giving you enough grenades and letting you blow up enemies and parts of the level, but very quickly descends into forcing you to use very crappy feeling non-explosive weapons and exploring horribly designed levels. The game is full of “now what?” moments and about as many “are enemies infinitely respawning?” moments where you have no idea what the game expects you to do. Enemies do spawn out of thin air and often behind your back a lot (sometimes indeed infinitely). About halfway through most of the enemy types switch to incredibly tedious and annoying bullet sponges that are simply not fun to fight. And then you also get lots of obnoxiously extended and unfun boss fights where the best way to win is to cheese the boss AI somehow.
The game looks and feels worse in every way too. Unlike the original, the sequel does look like a PS2 game from 2003. There are no saves and no checkpoints inside levels. Weapon selection is horrible, whenever you try to scroll through the weapons, or if you try to use the hotkeys. Ammo to weapon dependency is also extremely unintuitive and most weapons suck anyway. As there is no comprehensive mod like Dash Faction for the sequel, it also feels worse on modern systems and the best modified solutions are very hacky and annoying to use. But they’re still better than not using them. And the only cute new idea this title has is the “Heroics” score, which increases for bonus objectives and minimizing civilian damage, and decreases if you just kill everyone and don’t help your allies. Which is neat, but barely important and at times feels poorly implemented.
This game is shorter than the original, but it felt much longer because of how frustrating and unenjoyable most of it is. If Red Faction is among the best examples of the FPS titles of the early 00s, Red Faction II is certainly among the worst I’ve played. It’s boring at best, infuriating at worst and absolutely not worth 4-5 hours it takes to finish. Just avoid it even if you’re curious about the franchise.
Gosh, those RF2 screenshots. I’ve never played the game, but even just a static shot of the game screams being a pretty generic console FPS. I’ll get to RF instead…
Your review is pretty spot on. I’ve played the game only this year, after years (!) of knowing about it and hesitating whether I should give it a go. Now though, I consider it to be easily one of the best FPS of 2001, not to mention one of the last FPS that could still mostly considered to be old-school. Only RTCW tops it, as far as 2001 FPS go.
There are just so many unique little things about this game. The pulpy atmosphere (Total Recall, anyone?), the environments that feel like a perfect setting for an FPS title, the fantastic guns (I love how most of them are hitscans, yet they all feel rather different from each other. Also, they’re just well modeled!), the chunky graphics from an era right before 3D games would dramatically increase polycounts and become full of curves. It’s also unique in how overt the Half-Life vibes are, and it’s definitely one of the games that mimicked the formula best (though Half-Life remains unsurpassed, in my opinion). I also got some Doom 3 vibes, only without demons and with bright environments.
And it’s hard. Almost to a fault at times. I feel like this is one of those last games that combined old-school FPS mechanics
with an overabundance of hitscanning human enemies…which is simply not a combination that works well. Old-school FPS mechanics work better with a melee-projectile based bestiary the likes of Doom or Quake, and this problem really shows on higher difficulties. I shudder to think of just how many times I’ve gotten mercilessly killed by the AI…
At the end though, it’s still a well-paced shooter with enough tricks up its sleeve and that knows when it is starting to overstay its welcome.
(I’m posting here again, as I think my first comment got mistakenly flagged as spam and deleted)
I agree with your positive opinion on the first game. I’ve played the game only recently, in spite of having known about it for years and having always meant to try it out. I was pleasantly surprised to see how well it still held up – so well, in fact, that I’d consider it to be one of the best FPS of 2001, probably trailing right behind RTCW (which is, incidentally, my favorite FPS from that year). I’d consider this game to be one of the last really old-school games, just a short time before the CoD/MoH-style of FPS would become dominant (MoHAA would already be released in 2002).
All throughout it I got an impression of the game feeling just right in almost all aspects: chunky old-fashioned graphics, right before polycounts would become high enough for 3D games to start featuring a lot of “curved” geometry, a varied arsenal that, in spite of being mostly hitscan-based, feels like no two weapons are the same, great pacing with hardly a dull moment, including the stealth sections that quite a lot of other people seem to dislike.
You’ve made a correct observation in noticing how much RF borrows from the original HL. Many shooters did back then, of course (even though I feel like HL still remains unsurpassed), but RF feels really overt in how it did that. The Half-Life vibes are really strong, both in how the environments look (warehouses, underground bases and offices are perfect FPS-material) and in how the story is presented. Also, even though it was released later, I got some Doom 3 vibes as well – in a lot of ways, RF feels like a demon-less Doom 3 with bright environments.
My only complaint is related to precisely how this game belongs to the last wave of old-school shooters. The problem is how these games mixed movement/shooting mechanics that were still closer to games like Doom or Quake, while at the same time making the enemies mostly hitscan-based and reducing the great freedom of movement that early shooters had. The result is that these games could feel really unfairly challenging on higher difficulties – I shudder to think of how many times I got mercilessly shot down playing on the hardest level. That’s something that rarely ever happens to me when playing Doom or Quake on the highest difficulty.
Still, it’s definitely a game worth visiting today that knows not to overstay its welcome. Do you have any plans of reviewing RTCW as well?
did get into Spam filter, thanks for the heads up.
I’ve attempted RTCW a few times (ever since it first released), but it never clicked with me previously. Still want to give it another try at some point, since it is considered a classic.
Feel free to delete my other post, this one was supposed to be a rewrite of the other.
I’m surprised you didn’t get a chance to try RTCW out yet! I won’t say it’s perfect, but I’m definitely not alone in believing that it’s possibly the best entry in the Wolfenstein series. It does lose a bit of steam towards the middle, but the opening chapters are an absolute blast.