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Dom Robinson reviews
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, anjunior 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 chooseto life and end up on the run from everyone else and having to blow up theplace 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 theassault rifle, the shotgun (at close range) and the rocket launcher, completewith a thermal imaging camera to reveal where guards are from a safe distance.
Vehicles around the complex can also be driven, whether underground, overgroundor in the sea (not wombling free) and usually contain a weapon of their ownof a higher magnitude of power than you can normally deliver. A favourite ofmine is the mechanical digger. Although you can’t get all the way through rockwalls as it knackers the digging apparatus, if there’s an enemy on a platform aboveyou that’s held up by pillars, simply dig through the pillars and then gorethe baddie to death! Ha!
As it’s a FPS you know how it plays, but the controls are a bit odd having touse a combination of the analogue joysticks to move forwards-backwards andleft-right, rather likeTimesplitters,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 thesonic department. However, the graphics aren’t quite up to scratch. With thePS2 I’m expecting games to at least be the same quality as a 3D graphics cardbut at times they look like they’re verging on PSone territory and are toojerky on occasion.
The plus point though is the “Geo-Mod” technology used here. Put simply, ifyou can’t find an exit then more often than not just blast a hole in the walland you’ll find your answer. Practicing will help you work out what you canand cannot destroy but it doesn’t amount to most things. Billed as an unlimitedexperience for perfectly-created real-time explosions, it does put the mockers on you from time to time. As mentionedearlier the digger breaks down if tunnelling through rock walls so they don’twant you to stray too far off the beaten track.
The weird thing is with doors though. When a hovering enemy shot at me from theother 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 tome, 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 likeQuake 3 Revolution and Unreal Tournament, but there’s no reasonwhy it shouldn’t have looked better. SOUND EFFECTS AND MUSIC
PLAYABILITY
ORIGINALITY
ENJOYMENT
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Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.