Oh no. A door I can't get past. Well I could go and backtrack for 3 hours and fight enemies that have respawned again, looking for that keycard... or I could just blow a hole in the wall and go around it. Like literally anyone carrying explosives would do.

THIS IS WHY RED FACTION IS ONE OF THE BEST GAMES EVER MADE. WHY IS THIS THE ONLY GAME WHERE THAT'S A ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ OPTION.

Pros
-Good story
-Fun mechanics
-Variety of weapons.

Cons
-No auto save feature, only manual saves.
-The sneaking around missions are tedious

Neutral
-People talking to you can be drowned by the action around.

Tips
-Use the purefaction patch to be able to play in widescreen and at an higher resolution than the game allows (make sure to dowload the beta, this is the only version that works with steam. Check out the guide in the community section for more info)
-Lock the framerate to 60. Anything higher and it will cause some game breaking bugs.

Still a classic. Grab it and have fun.

Personal Rating: Worth playing. 8/10

Red Faction is an FPS with destructible environments. It takes place on Mars, inside of a mining colony. The main character, Parker is involved in a series of revolts against Ultor, a corrupt mining company.

Gameplay: 9/10
Red Faction plays smoothly. The engine is pretty decent for a 2001 game. You can choose different paths in the level by blowing up the walls, leading to alternate routes. Destroying the walls can also lead to secret areas, containing health packs, armor, and ammo. This game is, in fact, a linear shooter. There are several vehicles to drive, and they all have guns. Vehicular combat is in the game, but it only exists inside the driving levels, which don't last very long. There are also stages of the game where you must holster your weapon, and enter a non-combat environment. These stages are also fun, giving you a break from the normal FPS experience.

Story: 6/10
The story in red faction is a decent one, but overall it isn't the main focus point of this game. You play as Parker, a random miner who is actually very skilled in combat. Once the Red Faction revolt starts, Parker is one of the few survivors of his sector, making him of interest to the enemy, as well as the other protagonists. As you play, there are a couple good plot twists, but overall, the story isn't the greatest.

Soundtrack: 8/10
I'll admit, Red Faction has a solid soundtrack. About half of it is ambient, but the other half is for combat situations, and it's pretty good. The more fast paced songs are in the techno family, and have a slight industrial tone.

This is a long review, so if you want a brief summary of why I recommend Red Faction skip to Results and read from there.

Volition, Inc. provides an amazing action experience that brings you back through the ages. Red Faction is the start of an amazing series which provides a possibly reality to early space colonization.

Story:
You play Parker a man who travelled to Mars in order to work for Ultor Corporation and create himself a future. Ultor Corporation lures miners with the promise of a future. Little do they know the corporation is manipulating the media to show people a completely different light of what is really going on. Breaking basic Human Rights Ultor is essentially torturing miners forcing them to work in terrible conditions. But all is about to change as the Red Faction rises up from the dust and who is going to be unwittingly a part of the rebellion, but Parker. As you progress through the campaign you learn more about the horrible tortures that Ultor is actually conducting.

Campaign:
The campaign is broken up into 12 levels: Mines, Registration, Abandoned Mines, Gryphon, Canyon, Comm Center, Barracks, Docking Bay, Geothermal Plant, Capek, Subway, and Shuttle. The game takes you through the underground of mars, through canyons, and to space itself. Throughout the campaign you will be put against bosses, environmental hazards, and hordes of enemies.

Gameplay:
The game has an array of difficulty levels that allow you to enjoy a casual simple first person shooter to a hard-core gaming experience. Red faction has a variety of weapons: FCA-26 Rail Driver, UAR-42 Assault Rifle, F-1TL Fusion Rocket Launcher, URL-6T Rocket Launcher, UBS-4 Riot Shield, UFT-1 Flame Thrower, UCB-24 Control Baton, USP-16 Pistol, UAP-32/20 Sub Machine Gun, UAS-18 Shotgun, UHG-90 Offensive Hand Grenade, URC-15 Remote Charge, JF60 Heavy Suppression Machine Gun, MK/SG-1 Defender Pricision Rifle, and USG-50 Sniper Rifle. The massive combination of weapons provides a very deep gameplay experience allowing you to go for a close and personal combat all the way to a long-distant assassin. The scenery is highly destructible allowing you to blow holes into walls, destroy furniture, and even destroy parts of scenery making it fall onto enemies below.


Results:
Red Faction is an amazing first person shooter that offers amazing combat and a fantastic story. Red Faction may be an older title, but it offers features still not fully offered in games today. The campaign has pretty decent length and you will not be regretting the purchase. This game is a fantastic experience, and I would recommend getting it as part of the Red Faction Collection when it goes on sales. As the other titles of the series are definitely a great group of games.

Pros:
+Loads of weapons.
+Destructible environment.
+Great difficulty curve.
+Boss fights
+Fun vehicle scenes.
+Great gameplay that varies throughout the campaign from full blown action to assassin style.

Cons:
-Audio levels make it hard to hear cinematic scenes when action is occurring.
-Make sure to save a lot or when you die you will be wishing you did.
-It is old, thus it has poor GFX (if you can't enjoy games for their content alone and you need them to be pretty you may want to avoid this).

My thoughts about this game are mixed, so I'll shorten them down:

Things I liked about the game:
-Decent story
-Fun gameplay
-Cool guns
-Decent voice acting
-Semi-free roam gameplay
-Almost everything was explodable
-With enough RPG/Grenade/Satchel Charge ammo, you could make a tunnel in a wall
-You can kill everyone (including "innocent" bystanders) except for vital characters

Things I didn't like about the game:
-Game felt a little too long
-Repetative enemies
-Repetative enemy voices
-The voice acting was decent, but writing, dialogue, and and cutscenes were awful
-The cutscenes were REALLY awful. It's almost like they didn't even try
-The conclusion/ending of the game felt void and unrewarding
-The villains were boring
-Some levels were way too big to enjoy
-Vehicle controls were awful
-The jumping felt a little too floaty

Final thought:
The game was really fun to play through. However, as mentioned before, the game felt a little too long and the outcome was unrewarding. The story was okay, but wasn't oscar-worthy. I'm half and half about this game, which really makes me wish Steam had a "Maybe" option aobut recommending this game.

P.S.
The game can get a little too hard/annoying, and there's even a part (that many have experienced) where a submarine you need to progress explodes for no reason. In times like these, I recommend using the cheatcode "vivalahelvig" to get passed them. You can enter that cheatcode in-game by typing it into the "~" commands. It's the god-mode cheat, and you can turn it on and off as many times as you like by simply just typing "vivalahelvig" again. You should get a message on the lower center screen if it worked.

"Die miner!"
"Don't shoot me I'm unarmed!"
This game is 2fun

You haven't lived until you've played this.

It was a blast to replay this game even after all these years. Totally recommend this classic.

Was a pretty fun game however it seemed a bit short and the enemies gets repetitive after a while but some of the bosses are fun to fight and I loved the plot. However the ending seemed to sudden. It felt like the game could have gone on for at least another 30 minutes to feel complete. There was a couple of levels that were frustrating because I was wandering the levels for a bit looking for the objective which I passed a few times because it was not obvious or displayed for some reason. Still it did not ruin the fun and the fact that there is destructible environments. Final Score 7/10.

One of my favourite games of all time. It will keep me going back to play it for many years to come. If you enjoy games such as Half Life I would reccommend you give this a go. Cheap and with hours of great content, what can go wrong?

9/10

I was 10 when Half-Life, Sin, CS, Project I.G.I and Red Faction hit. Try picture that.

I remember playing this back in 2001 and being totally blown away by the fact that you could actually demolish the environment! oh, how things have changed! :)
Anyway, I played through the game again recently and enjoyed every moment. OK, so it's dated rather badly with some little glitches here and there but it's a solid shooter that should be played if you missed it first time round. It's great for nostalgic reasons too... *sigh*

YES YES YES YES! I am so glad they brought this ♥♥♥♥ onto Steam. Love it, play LAN parties with mates and since its an old game the frame-rate is amazing. 10/10

it's perfect 10/10

Great game and pretty far ahead for its time. Playing this brings back lots of good memories.

Cheers!

Old school fun - with terrain mods! Who wouldn't love this! Granted, it's dated, but if you want a great story with fun gameplay - this one's for you.

I was pretty shocked that a game I picked up for 79p and had last played about 12 years ago turned out to be one of my most enjoyable gaming experiences in recent memory.

Don't be fooled by the game's age - if you've never played Red Faction before, or, like me, had simply forgotten about it over time, it's immediately obvious that it's a surprisingly solid shooter, and a fantastic PC port to boot, given it's age. The controls are smooth and responsive, and whilst the default mapping is not entirely intuitive this can obviously be corrected quite easily. This smooth control scheme lays a solid base over which the rest of the game is very competently assembled.

Visually, Red Faction is head and shoulders above many shooters of the time, offering varied locals (from claustrophobic mines, to sterile office environments, to sprawling underwater caverns), a good dose of atmosphere, and of particular note - fantastic lighting. The lighting in this game holds up so well that I often found myself just walking around the environment observing how the lighting effects the various surfaces around me. The levels are often non-linear, which can be confusing at times, but more often than not simply makes the environment feel like a more realistic, lived-in place. You can play multiple times and find new things every time, which for a game that is essentially a corridor shooter, is pretty cool, I think.

Gameplay is quite varied with well-designed gunplay supplimented with stealth, driving, flying, and submarine sections. The stealth is passable, and if you follow the rules everything works. The flying and diving vehicles control beautifully and blowing up an enemy sub underwater results in some great underwater explosion effects which are imaginative and impressive even in hindsight. There's a raft of fun weapons to use as well, most of which have their own alternate fire, including the most fantastically OP flamethrower in video game history.

The soundtrack is a standout, with wonderfully moody electronic tracks perfectly supplimenting the action, and giving the game an irreplacable personality.

And of course I have to mention the environmental destruction. Whilst it isn't exactly a gameplay staple as much as it is a useful gimmick, it absolutely improves the experience when your battles dynamically scar the environment around you. Walking away from a gunfight with holes in the walls and scorch marks on all surfaces is a great feeling, and it's the moments when you forget about the mechanic, and then an enemy blows a hole in the wall you're hiding behind that you truly appreciate just how much this little touch does to improve the immersion. It's worth noting as well that this mechanic completely changes your multiplayer experience for the better, as you can strategically shatter your opponent's cover around them - I've never played more local VS. in my life than I did this game when I owned it on PS2.

Now it's not perfect, of course - the voice acting for the NPCs is repetitive, and the quality of some of the character is often poor, but in saying that, it's not uniformly bad, so I can personally let it go. It's also a game that occasionally leaves you wondering where to go as there is no mission objective screen as far as I can tell. However, there's a number of problems that I solved by simply blowing giant holes in the wall until I made a path around the obstacle, and I'm still not sure if I did the right thing or not. I, for one, call that the mark of a pretty cool game. Other than that though, I'd have to nit-pick to name issues that really bugged me.

Red Faction has single-handedly restored my faith in the quality of games released around the early 2000s - a time in which I feel a large number of developers' reach exceeded their grasp. Sure, it's not the most ground-breaking shooter, and it has its issues, most of which were somewhat characteristic of games at the time. But when it plays so well, and is so much fun, who cares? Given that I'd played it so much when I was younger, I expected nostalgia to be playing a large part in my judgements, but it's been so long that it was like playing it anew, and I just found myself genuinely excited by what the game offers.

I'd highly recommend this to anyone looking for a fun, well-designed shooter, with a decent amount of variety and some neat gameplay mechanics.

For a game of its time, this Red Faction is truly impressive. What impressed me the most is the destructible enviroments this game has to offer. You can break or destroy virtually anything; rock walls, metal walls, etc., and make a sort of "cave" out of the destruction. The only con that I can come up with is that there is only manual saves and no auto-save feature. This game is worth the money, even when it isn't on sale. Later when I play more of it, I'll review for the story.

So far, I really recommend this game. I can't wait to play the following games. "-/10" coming after I beat the game.

SUGGESTION: I would recommend getting the Pure Faction 3.0 mod for this game and installing the "beta" patch. It includes mainly a new launcher, widescreen options including 1080p resolutions, and enhanced graphics options including better polygon models. There is a community guide explaining how to properly install the mod.

Lots of fun. Storyline is different than the sequel though.

I got this in a package sale.

I honestly thought I was not going to enjoy this antiuqated game.
Boy, was I ever so wrong.

Pros:
Just a fun shoot em up game.
Here and there you are given puzzles in order to proceed. It's just enough to keep you interested.
Story line is not too deep, but just enough to entertain you.
Higher difficulties are actually a challenge.
Has building destruction (first game to do this).

cons;
out dated graphics

This isn't anything AMAZING. However, it's just a nice fun game to play when you have time to kill.