Red Faction
Platform: PC
Review by AvPPoW
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Truthfully, I don't know how anyone can call this campaign fun. It seems to follow a pattern, shoot mindless bad guys for 20 mins, find a vehicle, ride around for 5 mins, get out, repeat. With such a powerful engine, you'd think they would build a better game around it.
Lets see, where'd RF go wrong. It starts off after you finish a hard day of slave-labor down in the mines, you walk with a fellow miner up the tunnel and a gaurd stops your friend. They engage in a conversation (impressive lip syncing) and start to fight. It's up to you to pick up the baton he dropped and kill the gaurds. That's basically it for the next ten minutes. After that you meet up with some miners who are heading torwards some ship or something (I was half asleep at the time, Im suprised I remember anything). Then they invite you to tag along.
Walk into the next room, they all die, you're alive, kill guys for 5 mins, then you come across a vehicle. It's a driller. Did I mention I was falling asleep from boredom while playing this? Anyways, you drive this driller into the wall but can only destroy certain parts, so it's sort-of on a predefined path. There is no purpose for this specific vehicle at the time either, the door is open. It's just there to get your hopes up.
Run through the level, shoot for 15 minutes, and you're propelled into the next level, the one included with the worldwide demo. I'm not quite sure what happened next. I fell asleep, head on the keyboard. When I awoke, I found that RF was back at the main menu. I shall never visit single player again.
Graphics:
Geo-Mod... a novel technology, but it was rarely applied. The graphics themselves were good, and the engine is rock-solid and hasn't crashed my crappy PC once. I feel that too much time was spent developing the engine, while other essential components were left out (re: ai).
Controls:
The controls were straightforward and it was easy to get into the game, it's worth taking a gander at the settings though, so you learn about minor commands like 'Holster'. There's a training mission if you're not into looking at the mapings or refrence card. As far as all major settings go there is an out-of-game config utility. I found everything I would expect there including simple things that other games leave out, like the port number red faction runs on. Since I'm running through a router this made it alot easier for me, not having to open all my ports to host a game. Mods are also very easy to load, this could be a good or bad thing depending on how you look at it.
Gameplay:
Ok, I'm going to be honest. I didn't pay a cent of the $19.95 for a story. I wasn't expecting much, and wasn't suprised by horror that is the single player campaign. The AI.. well, there is none, my toaster thinks more than the enemies. The vehicles are cool but rare in the game and are less than useful because of the selective Geo-Mod areas. Standard array of weapons, assault, rifles, rockets, rails, pistols, etc.
Sound:
Hmm... well, the gunshots were quite clear, and there were different footstep sounds depending on what material you were walking around on, basically everything in multi was great, but in the campaign I think the repetitive vocals ruined it all. "Im gonna kill you miner!", "Were gonna get you miner!" and my favorite "Wait, I'm not armed!" (enemy stands up and starts firing into your face with a pistol). None of these vocals really matched gameplay and it showed off the poor ai. There were some ingame events, mainly conversations, that were executed well but for the most part the game is filled with 'default baddies' reminescent of what you'd find in a $50 game-maker program.
Multiplayer:
This is why I bought the game, I had been playing the multiplayer demo for months. Rock solid gameplay in modes such as CTF, TDM, DM, all the classics. The maps were well designed and in multiplayer Geo-Mod really shined. Nearly everything was destroyable and by the end of a match the map looks like a warzone. Powerups and weapons are scattered and respawn on a regular basis, powerups include invuln for 30 secs and extra weapon damage.
Overall:
AWESOME multi, not much else.