Red Faction

Seeing Mars as a new opportunity away from his life on Earth, Parker leaves home to sign up with the Ultor mining company. But the glamorous advertising of working in the mines promising high pay and high adventure quickly deteriorate as the truth of life there hits him. With horrible pay, abusive guards and a plague that sweeps the workforce, the other miners have had enough... It's time for a revolution.

Red Faction is the first entry into the destructive series, featuring an action packed story as well as a fantastic set of weapons and some really impressive destruction technology for a game that came out in 2001.

Over the course of the game you'll be fed story and objectives from messages sent to you by Red Faction's leader Eos as well as the resistance's Ultor inside man Hendrix. But how those objectives are completed is ultimately in the player's hands. Want to kill every guard between you and what needs to be blown up? By all means, go ahead and do that. Want to find an alternate path into a base for a semi-stealthy infiltration that avoids many of Ultor's forces? Go right ahead and do that. There are even two instances in the game that ask for total stealth while wearing disguises, avoiding getting close to guards or killing the stray one that's between you, an objective and raising an alarm to call for backup and dumping the body from any who patrol the area.

But revolutions aren't quiet. And Red Faction is generous with the firepower it provides to players. From stun sticks, to pistols, rifles, flamethrowers, rocket launchers and more. Most of the arsenal you'll acquire will also come with alternate fire modes. The pistol for example comes with a suppressor that can be put on or taken off with a single button press. The assault rifle will come with burst fire on left click and full auto on right. There's plenty more options out there but you'll notice a sharp transition in the late game when new weapons are rolled out that make everything else obsolete. This is also easily noticed by players because of how quickly both armor and health get drained after a short engagement with the late game gear in comparison to everything else used for three quarters of the game.

But what's most impressive to me is the use of the GeoMod engine. For a game that came out in 2001 and looking at others around that time, the tech used in Red Faction is well advanced for it's time. Tearing apart terrain or walls with explosive ordinance and carving a path to get to your next objective or to use against enemies and the fact that whatever you've blown up remains that way even after going through a auto-saving load zone is a marvel for the time. Also of note is how damage to glass and how it all shatters is dependant on where you shot through. A good way of explaining this is if you shot a window in the bottom left corner, there'll be a hole to show that bullet going through before the rest of the glass collapses. It's incredibly dynamic and the size of the hole in the glass can also depend on the calibre of round shot at it. All of this just goes to say how technically interesting this game is.

Overall, Red Faction comes as an easy recommendation for me. A mix of action with a plethora of destructive firepower and an engine that highlights it all makes for a fun playthrough no matter the difficulty.

However that comes with a slight addendum. Red Faction by itself has a lot of issues when run on modern PCs. From it's resolution to issues with the advanced power of our current day technology and bugs that can come with it. So if you want to play Red Faction and have it running nicely on your hardware, i recommend installing and following the instructions of the Dash Faction mod. Nothing changes at all with the game if you choose to download it. It's still the same game but the mod will just make it more accessible for modern PCs. And it can still count towards your Steam playtime.

Link for download of Dash Faction: https://redfactionwiki.com/wiki/Dash_Faction_Installation_Guide

still rocking after 23 years! Classic gameplay with questionable lore, has many legendary moments like when the miners free you and scream "REEEEEEED FAAAAAACTIOOOOOONNN"

Absolute Cinema

The game of my childhood, 10/10, everyone should try to finish this game!

An instant classic, I had no problems playing it on modern hardware and I'm impressed by the mechanics and quality, but at times the level layout can get confusing. Its impressive for its era and personally holds up well, It's definitely worth the 10$ Their asking, although i got it when on sale in a bundle for all the Red Faction games and DLC's so i can't say what i paid exactly besides all of them in total was-

Red Faction Complete Bundle - $13.03
Subtotal $11.99
Discount -$48.00 ( -80%)
Tax $1.04
Total $13.03

Pretty goated, a mod loader called Dash faction let me edit my fps and resolution which was so needed lmao.

Awesome classic

Even 23 years after release still such a good game.

download dash faction. game will run like butter. cap fps at 240. game is spectacular

Another fun retro FPS, apparently considered one of the PS2's best shooters, but it holds its own against any of the others. It's certainly intense - the second half jumps up in difficulty a fair bit, with much tougher enemies coming at you with more powerful weapons, as well as a couple of boss fights. Using the vehicles is fun and I was able to control them easily using the mouse. Warning: you may have to find a workaround in an instance where you need to lower a sub into the water. Quicksaving just after I pressed the button seemed to work. Yep, there is water on Mars.

Red Faction is not a bad shooter game but I recommend it with a couple of cautionary notes.
First the exploding sub, you can find help for this in the forum.
And then the end sequence which I found bizarre.
The game becomes rather tricky towards the end but overall it's good fun for a couple of quid.

Oh boy. Where to start.

This is a game from my childhood so naturally the sale price of $1.99 was a no brainer, seeing as I'd get to play it on my wide-screen monitor with a mouse and keyboard for the first time rather than my PS2 controller while sitting on the floor of the living room in my old house. That part of it I really enjoyed -- but unfortunately, that's where the pleasure stops.

Red Faction is, for lack of a better term, deeply flawed. As THQ's answer to highly innovative titles like Half Life, Red Faction doesn't really have a lot going for it in the way of originality, story, gameplay, level design, weapons, mechanics... you get the idea. The destructible environments are really the only thing going for it, and they utilize this feature so little throughout the game that it might as well not even exist. A lot more could've been done to incorporate remote charges, grenades and the like, but sadly, the focus here is run-and-gun. You could do what I did as a kid and just spend lots of time blowing holes in walls for fun, but if you want to make any considerable progress, you'll need to shoot people until the story progresses.

Half Life made you think. Red Faction makes you suffer. This game is chock full of game-breaking bugs that will force you to install fan-made mods like Dash Faction that will "fix" the game to make it actually playable. Red Faction features almost no puzzles, just rooms full of poorly coded enemies that exhibit the lowest quality AI I think I've ever witnessed in a game like this, as well as giant rooms that lead nowhere and serve no actual purpose other than to waste the player's time. Lots of events are triggered in such a haphazard way that it ruins the reveal of big moments that are supposed to wow and delight the player.

I realize that there was a lot of hardware limitations at the time that would've made this game truly great, but Red Faction feels largely incomplete. I feel like the developers wanted to do much more with it but it was rushed for completion and released as-is. You'll know what I mean once you encounter the laughable "boss" battles, which essentially feel like a crap shoot until you basically just... win. I guess. The bugs you'll run into range from funny to game-breaking, and require a complete restart of your save file. So get used to playing the beginning, you'll be doing it a lot.

The latter half of the game is ushered in by what I can describe as one of the most dramatic difficulty curves of this century. If you're not used to being one-shot from across the map by an enemy NPC with perfect aim and triple your health, this may not be your bag. Health is so scarce in the second half that you may be stuck in some inconceivable save/load loop for quite a while until you're driven utterly insane. And I could go on for hours about the ending, which feels like such a bath-fart that I had to lay down and think about my life for a few minutes. The payoff for beating this game is so lackluster that it may as well have not even happened and it feels like the developers agree with how it unfolds.

HOWEVER, Red Faction is nostalgic if nothing else, and harken to a simpler time when Friday nights were spent riding to Blockbuster, renting a game, getting a big Mountain Dew and playing it into the wee hours of the morning. Red Faction is a mess, but it's *our* mess. I'd still recommend it to anyone curious about the franchise.

Great game. True hours played are a lot more than reflected because I downloaded the dash faction mod to fix a few bugs with modern PCs. One of the best shooters I've played in a while.

I played Red Faction Guerrilla first, and loved that game. So I decided to play the OG Red Faction, and loved it, was cool to see where the dialog comes from in marauder territory came from.

The game plays well, and even has mechanics and easter eggs that I never expected, like low gravity portions and the water sounds from the water fountain when its activated. While the game is old, and needs extra software to run well, it is still a joy to experience.

just loved it from my deepest parts of my heart

This is an old classic game. Works with Win 11. Can be played with Ubuntu 24.04 but saving does not work properly. There is a submarine explosion bug in the game and you need to install a fix (DashFaction-1.8.0_Win_X86.msi) in order to proceed.

an absolute classic, really had fun playing this game just like back then, destructible environments are also fun to mess around.

though the best part of this game may have to be throwing charges at random people and seeing them run around and scream and anyone around the person also gets scared, that never gets old lol.

i'll list off the positives and negatives of red faction

Pros :
- Has a great soundtrack
- fun weapons to use that mostly feel different to use
- the first half of the game is fun

Cons :
- the game is unplayable in places unless you use a mod called Dash Faction, the reason why this is a con is because playing without it will lead to a bunch of stupid softlocks, one of which is a sub that you have to drop into the water but with higher FPS, it doesn't travel enough to reach the water to fall in so instead, the sub will drop and will instantly explode, the two ways around this is either downloading the mod or saving the game just as the sub drops and it will be a dice roll on whether or not it will land in the water or not.
- the second half of the game is incredibly unfair, enemies are very tanky, do a lot of damage and there is one specific enemy type that can instantly kill you with a rail gun regardless of difficulty, which can also hit you through walls, as well as this, after the final boss, you have to disable a bomb in a time limit and the code is random every time with no hints as to what it is so you have to do guess work and if you don't finish it in time, have fun dying and redoing the final boss if you didn't save before doing it.
- the bosses are unfun to fight, the first at least had a cool mechanic where you have to lure it into an area to drop it in a incinerator to kill it but the other two are bullet sponges and the second one will just kill you in two hits with homing projectiles that go through walls and are hard to dodge.
- there is no checkpoints throughout the whole game so unless you manually save the game, you have to replay the whole game again and you will likely be redoing sections a lot cause the railgun enemies and the second boss will make sure that you die as you play.
- some points in the game, there is no clear direction on what you're supposed to be doing or where you are supposed to go, i found myself wondering around certain parts confused on what i am supposed to do next.
- tabbing out of the game at any point will softlock your computer and force you to have to restart it cause you can't close the game and you can't interact with the main menu anymore.

i wanted to like this game and in some ways, i do like that it was the starting point for one of my favourite game series but there is so much crap wrong with the game that makes me not want to touch it again.

good game totally enjoyed with exemption of the bomb difusal being totally random

This game is rough around the edges, and is really just a Half-Life clone, the selling point of destructive environments really isn't relevant through out the entire game. Can't really give the game a negative review though, its fairly harmless as fps games go

The music is pretty good though

Fun FPS.

Pros:
* good variety of weapons
* mostly standard FPS mechanics
* no automatic loss when revealed during the few "stealth" sections (alarms sound, guards show up, just kill guards)
* several boss fights with actual mechanics
* partially destructible environment, which can open up new paths
* often multiple paths leading to the same goal
* in the handful of escort mission portions (none of which are very long), the escorted doesn't get lost/stuck and does a very good job of staying back out of the line of fire or behind cover

Cons:
* very dated graphics
* mostly standard WASD but some of the keys, like crouch and use, have unusual assignments and need to be remapped
* no checkpoints/autosaving, manual saving only, so you have to make it a point to save often to avoid losing progress

.

I grew up with fps games in the early 2000's so I feel right at home with this one, games made In the 90's and early 2000's weren't perfect but they tried so much new stuff it felt very innovating for its time and were overall very fun, I see red faction as a classic series that could do so much better, And to anyone who thinks this and the second one suck, you're just spoiled by better fps games out there and compre this and 2 to them when ofcourse it's not gonna be the same, it was made in 2002, they aren't perfect.

Also download dash faction, it saves you headaches and people still play multiplayer.

THIS WAS A GAME IN THE YEAR 2002 THAT HAD DESTRUCTIVE ENVIRONMENTS, it's crazy

AWESOME NOSTALGIA

Hard crash 12 minutes in

An essential classic.

I enjoyed it.

bought this bec my buddies wanted to play online gotta say it is amazing so far will keep playing for sure

OG game, was introduced to Red Faction & Half-Life by my father. Love this game.

Good game, definitely not worth 10 dollars, wait till it's on sale. I finished it in 5 hours and since it's hard to get a multiplayer game together, that's probably the most you're gonna take with it.