Recent reviews by xenomussy

Oh boy. Where to start.

This is a game from my childhood so naturally the sale price of $1.99 was a no brainer, seeing as I'd get to play it on my wide-screen monitor with a mouse and keyboard for the first time rather than my PS2 controller while sitting on the floor of the living room in my old house. That part of it I really enjoyed -- but unfortunately, that's where the pleasure stops.

Red Faction is, for lack of a better term, deeply flawed. As THQ's answer to highly innovative titles like Half Life, Red Faction doesn't really have a lot going for it in the way of originality, story, gameplay, level design, weapons, mechanics... you get the idea. The destructible environments are really the only thing going for it, and they utilize this feature so little throughout the game that it might as well not even exist. A lot more could've been done to incorporate remote charges, grenades and the like, but sadly, the focus here is run-and-gun. You could do what I did as a kid and just spend lots of time blowing holes in walls for fun, but if you want to make any considerable progress, you'll need to shoot people until the story progresses.

Half Life made you think. Red Faction makes you suffer. This game is chock full of game-breaking bugs that will force you to install fan-made mods like Dash Faction that will "fix" the game to make it actually playable. Red Faction features almost no puzzles, just rooms full of poorly coded enemies that exhibit the lowest quality AI I think I've ever witnessed in a game like this, as well as giant rooms that lead nowhere and serve no actual purpose other than to waste the player's time. Lots of events are triggered in such a haphazard way that it ruins the reveal of big moments that are supposed to wow and delight the player.

I realize that there was a lot of hardware limitations at the time that would've made this game truly great, but Red Faction feels largely incomplete. I feel like the developers wanted to do much more with it but it was rushed for completion and released as-is. You'll know what I mean once you encounter the laughable "boss" battles, which essentially feel like a crap shoot until you basically just... win. I guess. The bugs you'll run into range from funny to game-breaking, and require a complete restart of your save file. So get used to playing the beginning, you'll be doing it a lot.

The latter half of the game is ushered in by what I can describe as one of the most dramatic difficulty curves of this century. If you're not used to being one-shot from across the map by an enemy NPC with perfect aim and triple your health, this may not be your bag. Health is so scarce in the second half that you may be stuck in some inconceivable save/load loop for quite a while until you're driven utterly insane. And I could go on for hours about the ending, which feels like such a bath-fart that I had to lay down and think about my life for a few minutes. The payoff for beating this game is so lackluster that it may as well have not even happened and it feels like the developers agree with how it unfolds.

HOWEVER, Red Faction is nostalgic if nothing else, and harken to a simpler time when Friday nights were spent riding to Blockbuster, renting a game, getting a big Mountain Dew and playing it into the wee hours of the morning. Red Faction is a mess, but it's *our* mess. I'd still recommend it to anyone curious about the franchise.

This game is hilariously bad. Don't buy it expecting a solid game with real re-playability. I bought 1 and 2 after seeing a YouTuber play it and it looked funny. Definitely not worth the $20 I spent but whatever, I've spent more on stupider stuff before. This game does not take itself seriously whatsoever, but that doesn't excuse the bugs. The bugs often interfere with playability to where it's sometimes borderline unplayable. Stuff explodes for no reason, AI pathways are glitched, people walk in place or don't go upstairs at all, invisible NPCs trying to give you money or fighting you, things glitch through walls making them unreachable, the list goes on. If you're cool with that, you might like it.

The dev clearly does not care about the quality he puts in. It's an obvious cash-grab with unity assets and not much effort put into making the game stable or playable for real. But like I said before, if that doesn't bother you, you might enjoy it. Or you might not, idk. I'm pretty sure ICS 1 and 2 are abandoned and no new updates/bug fixes are being put out. I'm glad he made his money, but for the price we paid it'd be nice to at least get some of these issues resolved. It's a shame too because this has the potential to be an actual great game that makes a name for itself. I hope the dev can get his s *it together finally and finish what he started.