RF Preview from Planet PS2

NOTE: This preview was originally posted 7 Feb 2001 by Andrei Alupului on Planet PS2, which is no longer available.

You’ve been playing this first person shooter game you just bought for the past three hours and you’re completely lost. All of these find the switch "puzzles" are boring you to tears and you’re currently searching for the yellow button you missed 10 rooms back. Finally, you give up, pull out your rocket launcher, and blast a hole clean through the wall that was keeping you from progressing. You grin and keep playing, your interest renewed by the brand new area that you’ve just opened up for yourself to explore. Does this sound like a familiar scenario? Of course not, because no game has ever attempted to give the user the ability to actually change their environment -- Until now.

Red Faction is the latest game being developed by Volition, who brought you Summoner for the PS2 and the Descent: Freespace games for the PC. To say that this latest project of theirs is ambitious would be an understatement. Besides the incredibly cool real-time arbitrary geometry modification engine, or Geo-Mod for short, Volition also plans for the game to provide the player with a real world physics simulation, land, sea and air vehicles to drive around, a location-based damage system, the list goes on and on. Interested yet? Thought so.

The game takes place at some point in the future, though the actual year has not been established. You are Parker, a man who came to Mars to escape the tedium of life on Earth and lead an adventurous life as a miner working for the Ultor Corporation. However, it appears as if the Ultor Corporation isn’t familiar with the concept of treating its workers humanely, and the living conditions are poor. What’s more, a disease known simply as the Plague is killing off all of the workers. Well the miners have had it, and they decide to revolt.

As Parker, you’re attempting to set the workers free, destroy the Ultor Corporation, and figure out just what’s behind this Plague that’s destroying everyone. Volition proved with Summoner that they could create a complex back-story for their games and they’ve done so with Red Faction as well. You will interact with tons of NPC characters, some of which have rather interesting back-stories created for them. These stories are entertaining, well written and can be seen at the official Red Faction web site.

The game will have a nice amount of weapons available for you to play with, as well. Of course there are the standard weapons, the pistol, assault rifle, submachine gun, etc. Then, there are the more unconventional weapons, like the Gauss Gun, which utilizes magnets to fire rounds at a high speed. One of the weapons that you’ll most likely find yourself using a lot in this game is the rocket launcher. Not only because it’s one of the weapons you can use to blow up the terrain around you, but because it has a cool Heads Up Display on it that allows you to detect body heat. The possibilities that come with this feature’s implementation are pretty cool. You could be walking along a hallway with your rocket launcher and see that some baddies are on the other side of the wall. You could then bust through like the Kool-Aid man and put them in a world of hurt.

This entire game is filled with possible situations that you’ve never encountered before in a game of this sort and, as a result of this, you’re going to have to adapt the way you normally approach things in FPS games. The physics simulation employed in the game will take into account most of the laws of nature, which will allow you to do some pretty amazing stuff.

For example, in a much-publicized preview video of gameplay footage released by Volition, the main character was seen blasting the ground in order to divert the flow of lava to a different direction. In addition, wind and steam pressure from pipes will be taken into account. So if you’re outside and the wind is blowing in a certain way, the game will take the wind’s direction into account when you throw a grenade. This yields all sorts of opportunities for you to blow up a bunch of enemies with a grenade without ever even having to even walk around the corner.

The opportunities will carry over to the multi-player modes as well, which means that it will require a lot more strategy and cunning to defeat your friends in Red Faction than it will in most of the other first person shooter games out there. Currently, only standard deathmatch and some Geo-Mod specific objectives are planned for the multiplayer mode, as Volition are focusing on making the single-player game the best that it can be. Sadly, only a 2-player mode is going to be available in the PS2 version, but this could possibly be changed at a later date. It would be a shame to have an excellent single-player game with a lot of potential for interesting multiplayer modes to only have a lackluster 2-player mode.

On the other hand, the vehicles in the game will be pretty amazing. You’ll be able to get behind the controls of a driller, an APC, an underwater vehicle, and even a flying vehicle. Volition plans to have one of the vehicles control much like the ships in the Descent games controlled, which means that you can fly everywhere and anywhere you want with no restrictions.

In fact, one of the key things that Volition are striving for is complete freedom. As long as you have a large enough supply of rockets you can dig a hole in the ground as deep as you want. Good luck getting out, though. I for one can’t wait to get the opportunity to blow a hole in the ground and use it as a foxhole to give myself cover from enemy fire. Or perhaps, take out a pesky sniper by simply destroying the legs of the tower that he is shooting at me from and watching it fall to the ground with him in it. This is a game with serious potential and, should it meet its potential, could be one of the best releases we see on the PS2.

So what should all this mean to you, as a gamer? It should mean a lot. Never before has a game attempted to allow you to do so much. Never before has a game given you the ability to completely change your surroundings until they meet your liking. This is one to definitely look forward to. Red Faction is scheduled to be released on the PS2 in May.