Singleplayer

Going it alone

There are a lot of ways you can approach a single player FPS. Doom and Serious Sam take the "hordes of enemies" approach, while NOLF and Half-Life use unrelenting action mixed with suspense. So what does Red Faction use? One would think they would leverage the GeoMod engine and fill the game with deformable terrain tricks. But after playing through the single player game, I have to say Red Faction doesn't really do anything.

Hordes of enemies? Not really. More like a slow and steady stream for the majority of the game. You're swarmed by enemies a handful of times, but even those feel short-lived. The rest of the game is filled with small groups of enemies with pauses for walking and reloading. The enemies act like deathmatch bots. On easy they just stand there and die, on hard they constantly strafe. Neither of which resembles facing a real person. Red Faction fails in being a frantic, adrenaline pumping shooter.

How it all begins

Everyone that helps you dies

Cheesy cut-scene

Save, Load, Repeat

Some levels require you to sneak about undetected, armed only with a pistol. Walk too close to a guard or draw your weapon in front of a camera and all hell breaks loose. Unfortunately these levels are implemented poorly. Guards detect you easily - if you're in the same room you may as well load your last saved game. Worse than that, you don't need to use stealth to finish the level. Every time you hit a "Loading" screen, the alarms reset and the guards forget they were chasing you. Just run really fast and you can finish the levels.

The level design in the single player missions is boring. 90% of the game occurs in tunnels and underground buildings. There are few outdoor/underwater areas. In general the levels lack character - if you see one rocky tunnel, you've seen them all. Too add to the boring quality of the levels, there are no real puzzles. Not even ones of the "find the key to open the door" type. Where's the challenge in that? The only thinking you need to do is, "how to I kill those guys between me and the exit?"

That will leave a mark

Just missed your ship

Big rooms

The single player game is also too short. I beat it on "hard" difficulty in about 10 hours. That doesn't mean that the game is easy, I had to reload saved games after I died plenty of times. The game is just plain short. Games like NOLF prove that you can have a long single player FPS filled with interesting levels and action; it's too bad Red Faction isn't up to that caliber.