Resurrection: Red Faction

Anti-hero…

Resurrection: Red Faction

Resurrection is a our weekly retrospective feature, in which we take a look back at a game gone by. This week, in an article originally published way back in Resolution’s monthly magazine era, Lewis Denby ponders the reasons he became so engrossed in RED FACTION.

SO HERE’S the thing.

There’s a section late on in Red Faction that took my breath away. I’d spent the past ten hours fighting for my life in the depths of cavernous Martian mines, in high-security research facilities and oppressive office blocks. I’d fought guards and soldiers and ferocious mutations. I’d seen hundreds of comrades perish, but I’d survived. I’d escaped. All that was left was to saunter off to safety on one of the vehicles the rebellion had prepared. On the back of an armoured truck, I emerged, blinking, into the strange outdoors. And I looked around.

There’s rock, and there’s fog. In the distance, there’s a collection of mercenaries, mercilessly assassinating anyone who dares to venture too close. Between us is an enormous, gaping void of outer space, thick with dust. The sky is a foreboding terracotta. And all I can think, in spite of Ultor’s evil plans, the mass-scale uprising, the carnage and the chaos, is that I’m so very far away from home. My heart sank. I should never have been so naive as to think this would be my escape. All that lay ahead of me was an inevitable, painful and harrowing death.

In that moment, I became Parker. I was at the centre of the Red Faction. I’d been fighting for our freedom, but now, it looked as though everything was in vain. I shed a tear for my loved ones. And I vowed to fight until the very end.

Unfinished business

This is quite something. Out of all the games to have that effect on me, I never for a second imagined it would be Red Faction, an aged and largely disappointing first-person shooter built on the foundations of half-finished ideas and incomplete technology. And yet here we are, nine years later, that moment fresh as ever in my mind. There’s a lot to be said for emotional charge in videogames, but here it seems wrong, unnatural, unintended. What’s behind it?

Because Red Faction never really did atmosphere. It tried to, sure, but somewhere between the incompetent AI, bland visuals and uninventive storyline, it resolutely failed. It was also a game of unfulfilled promises, a textbook old-school shooter that seemed to forget it aspired to be the genre’s reinvention. Who else remembers their crippling disappointment regarding the much-touted GeoMod technology, which purported to allow players to blast their own ways through levels by destroying the environment? Seemingly, Volition expected us to forgive its inconsistent application early on, and forget it even existed by the time the entirely static later levels rolled around. Red Faction set its sights high, then slipped achingly back to mediocrity. Mediocre games don’t do this to me. What’s going on?

Red Faction starts abominably. Cast into your day job as an oppressed miner on a future Mars, your shift ends in a splatter of spilt blood, as – for seemingly no reason whatsoever – the entire security force starts shooting at you after your friend gets into a minor altercation with one of the guards. It’s a nonsensical opening, glossing over any logic in a dismal attempt to thrust players straight into the action. This is a game that cited the slow-burning unease of Half-Life as a major influence on its heady ambiance. Goodness knows what they were thinking here.

Thus begins a treacherous yet dull sci-fi dungeon crawl, through monotonous underground networks, plagued by badly-planned blueprints and texture issues. The first couple of hours of Red Faction are woeful, but something compelled me, spurred me on, something other than the gradually improving level design. What was it that I found so captivating about this ugly and broken shooter?

Continues…

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