Distributed by
THQ

Price: £44.99

Players: 1

As Half Life escapes release on the Dreamcast, the PS2 gets the next best thing with Red Faction. It's a plot-driven first-person shooter (FPS) that pits you as Parker, an junior miner working for the Ultor Corporation in a massive Mars mining complex. After an altercation with a guard in a kill-or-be-killed situation, you choose to life and end up on the run from everyone else and having to blow up the place as you go, destroying Ultor's operations and that's just the first mission. There's the usual array of weapons here, although my favourites include the assault rifle, the shotgun (at close range) and the rocket launcher, complete with a thermal imaging camera to reveal where guards are from a safe distance. Vehicles around the complex can also be driven, whether underground, overground or in the sea (not wombling free) and usually contain a weapon of their own of a higher magnitude of power than you can normally deliver. A favourite of mine is the mechanical digger. Although you can't get all the way through rock walls as it knackers the digging apparatus, if there's an enemy on a platform above you that's held up by pillars, simply dig through the pillars and then gore the baddie to death! Ha!

As it's a FPS you know how it plays, but the controls are a bit odd having to use a combination of the analogue joysticks to move forwards-backwards and left-right, rather like Timesplitters, but it's something you do get used to. The sound is outstanding. Blow things up or just shoot people with a silencer. It's all here and it's all as impressive as this type of game usually is in the sonic department. However, the graphics aren't quite up to scratch. With the PS2 I'm expecting games to at least be the same quality as a 3D graphics card but at times they look like they're verging on PSone territory and are too jerky on occasion. The plus point though is the "Geo-Mod" technology used here. Put simply, if you can't find an exit then more often than not just blast a hole in the wall and you'll find your answer. Practicing will help you work out what you can and cannot destroy but it doesn't amount to most things. Billed as an unlimited experience for perfectly-created real-time explosions, it does put the mockers on you from time to time. As mentioned earlier the digger breaks down if tunnelling through rock walls so they don't want you to stray too far off the beaten track. The weird thing is with doors though. When a hovering enemy shot at me from the other side of a pillar, I made a dash for a small room adjacent to where I was. Thinking I was safe, the bastard blew holes in the wall and came right up to me, although I was on the other side of the door which cannot be destroyed. No matter how many times he fired at close range, I stayed alive(!)

Overall, this will tide us over for the time being until we get a similar, but better-looking, FPS on the PS2, instead of those deathmatch-frenzies like Quake 3 Revolution and Unreal Tournament, but there's no reason why it shouldn't have looked better.

GRAPHICS SOUND EFFECTS AND MUSIC PLAYABILITY ORIGINALITY ENJOYMENT
OVERALL

Review copyright © Dominic Robinson, 2001.

The following is a list of the Red Faction games reviewed online to date :