Red Faction

A straightforward first-person shooter that won't confuse your pretty little head with unnecessary additions such as intricate level design, pacing, suspense, story, or character development. It's rudimentary in terms of game design and the basic skeleton of the game is lackluster, and yet the complete package has just enough polish to make it all work. Bravo for barely making it beyond mediocrity! The bottom line is that Red Faction is an enjoyable game, but be warned that it has quite a few boring aspects.

The main deficiency is in level design, both narrowly and broadly speaking. The levels themselves are often simple corridors with closed-off side rooms, often literally. Sometimes you have more than one route to take you from A to B, but there is no significant difference between them. This leaves no room for strategy and combat tactics. A lot has been said about the destructive environment feature of this game, and while it is cool technology (especially for the time), it is a wasted opportunity in this regard. There's no reason to break down a wall because there's nothing behind it, not even a useful shortcut. In the end this feature is used as a gimmick that has no effect on gameplay.

More broadly speaking, the game world has no coherent architecture. You do not feel like you are on a complex base built on Mars. You never achieve any degree of familiarity with the structure. You do not go back to anywhere you were before (there's perhaps one level that involves some back and forth). Instead, you keep pushing through to the next level, which is yet another boring corridor. There's a frustrating lack of imagination about the total design.

Pacing is also totally off. I played the game on default difficulty and found most of it to be too easy. Enemies are easy to kill, and even without too much dancing around they rarely cause you enough damage to become a problem, because there are always some health packs around the corner. Except ... everything changes right about the last quarter of the game. Suddenly a new type of enemy appears that is vastly more powerful than anything you've encountered before. It can kill you with one shot. And those health packs stop appearing. It's a jarring transition from easy to having to constantly save/load your game and retry.

There are good things, too. The programming is top notch even beyond the destructive environment gimmick. Everything is very smooth, controls are precise, and load times are fast. It has aged well in 2019. It's not the best FPS, and offers only a humdrum sense of adventure, but it does deliver on what it promises.