RF Preview from IGN

NOTE: This preview was originally posted 14 Feb 2001 by Douglass C. Perry on IGN.

Volition delivered a single-level demo disc today and we have first detailed impressions & screens.

Now that the PlayStation 2 launch is done and over, Volition, the developer that delivered the first American RPG on the PlayStation 2, is hard at work on its second game, Red Faction. This first-person shooter that introduces geometric modification -- i.e. fully destructible environments -- has the potential to be a major blockbuster on the level of N64's Goldeneye and the PC's Half-Life because of the way its unique technology and fun-induced gameplay expands the FPS genre. Today, we finally had the chance to spend some quality time with Red Faction, and man, is this sucker fun. THQ and Volition made a wise move recently to delay the game's ship date into spring, providing more time for bug testing, polishing, and honing, which the game can use at this point. Why? Even though Volition could have made its late March release, those few extra months could mean so much to the game's overall feel and play quality.

The demo level that we played has only two real problems at this point, a medium-speed framerate, and occasional slowdown. In almost all other cases, the control, movement, weapon selection, the textures, AI, and the level of detail in each room, are all truly inspiring. Even though Unreal Tournament and TimeSplitters had their moments, Red Faction looks to be the first truly original story-driven first-person shooter on PS2.

The one-playable level demonstrates several cool features that are core to Red Faction. The demo is a single-level that shows off special effects, a good range of weapons usage, and provides players with the ability to pilot a submarine. There is no two-player action in this demo. At the very beginning, you get to control a stationary missile launcher, sort of like a gattling gun, but substituted with grenade-like missiles instead of bullets. We started off the level by grabbing the gun and watching as the militia from the mining corporation Ultor rush in to stop your uprising.

Of course, we didn't stand for that, and I personally found a great deal of glee in not only blowing up the enemies, but the pillars that hold up the room in which I stood. You can fully destroy these columns. I personally thank Volition for enabling me to satisfy my primal urge to blow the crap out of these environments up chunk by chunk. In fact, I found more often than not that it's superior fun to simply destroy the environment than to kill the enemies. I guess this means I'm not a homicidal maniac after all (just a lot more like an anarchist than I would like to admit).

Once I blasted my way out the first room and collected some hand-mines and rifle rounds, I faced the first of many obstacles in the game that will come to define Red Faction. There are three doors to exit the area. Only one is the right path, and it doesn't open. So, what should a good anarchist miner do? Blow the stuffing out of the wall, that's what. I took two mines, placed them one after another beside the door and blew the concrete away to create a path I could climb through. Geo-Mod = brilliance.

As I made my way through the level, I encountered a wide range of gameplay elements. I piloted a submarine, after blowing through the ice lake to let it into the water. I shot down enemy submarine craft and blew up underwater rock formations, and loved it. I shot down a belligerent Martian whale, which was ready to kick my ass. And then after taking over a loading dock in which an Ultor space craft was quietly nestled -- and which displayed some of the best looking textures I've seen on PlayStation 2 -- I started some traditional run-and-gun FPS gun-slinging.

There were lots of rooms to either walk into, or sneak into via ventilation shaft. Almost all of the rooms contained second stories, too, with lots of crates, behind which bundles of ammo and health was stored. These power-ups weren't obviously just sitting there either. Health was placed in actual emergency kits hung on the walls, just like in a public corporation. Some were placed in lockers. Ammo was placed in places that military personnel would place it. Throughout my short experience, I found that Red Faction was well-thought out, cleverly designed, and that its designers had paid a lot of attention to the best first-person shooters on the market -- Quake III, Unreal Tournament, and Half-Life.

On that particular note, this demo still didn't show off any significant amount of scripting, or story telling of any kind. Your narrator, Hendrix (See Hendrix's Story) leads you to the right spots, and you speak with a guide prior to piloting the submarine, but other than that, there is no story-telling. I suppose that along with perfecting the Geo-Mod technicalities, and tuning the levels, Volition also is working double-time on integrating the story and scripting.

Yes, there was slowdown. In many of the full-on fighting scenes, I encountered moderate slowdown and a slightly chunky framerate. That's why THQ gave Volition the extra time to speed it up. But, you know what? Even though the framerate isn't up to par yet, this one-level demo provided me with a superb level of fun. I could turn around quick enough and could strafe and run fast enough, and the enemy AI, rather than stupidly running right into the muzzle of my gun, was smart enough to hide and position itself smartly behind crates, walls, and gratings to protect itself.

Later on I encountered another relatively big-ass boss, too. I guess if I could call the enemy sub and the Martian whale mini-bosses, I could call this loader robot a mini-boss, too. In the second to last room before the level's end, I fought off three marines and a hovering missile-launching robot-loader. While the marines whittled away my health, I strafed around a giant pillar and hammered the pudding out of this monstrous missile-launching annoyance in a robot suit. Once I had wiped him out, and no, it wasn't that hard (at least on the easy or medium difficulty levels), what I noticed was even cooler than fighting him. When I turned around, I witnessed enormous craters where his missiles had landed. They weren't just textures, either. Just like all of the Geo-Mod stuff, these craters were real, 3D holes in the ground. If I dug them deep enough, I could have crawled into and slept in them.

The control is easy and friendly. Just like the TimeSplitters and Unreal Tournament, the right analog controls is like the mouse, looking up, down and all around, while the left analog controls forward-backward direction and strafing. R1 is primary fire, while R2 is secondary fire, each performing slightly different kinds of shots -- see out fully detailed preview for the complete details on secondary fire. To switch to the next weapon, players press Circle, and to switch to the previous weapon, they press Triangle. Holster, reload, and other necessities are enabled by the dpad. L1 is jump and L2 is crouch. L1 and L2 also work quite well in the sub, enabling the sub to ascend or descend, respectively. The sub is phenomenally simple and agile to use, and the great sense of being underwater was implemented well by Volition.

So, when I finally finished off the level, I played through it again on a harder difficulty level and took note of several items that make Red Faction Unique. Red Faction feels amazingly like a PC game on a console. You feel lithe and speedy, like say in Goldeneye, but the kinds of effects, textures, and AI you face all seem incredibly like they were borrowed straight from a PC game. I think it was the footsteps that really pushed me into thinking that. Sure, it makes sense, I mean Volition comes from a PC background, but the overall result is pure sweetness, and it shows that the PS2 has the potential to be a great platform, and not in like two years, but this very spring.

Graphically, Red Faction is packed with unique textures, articulate and well-defined character models, and original vehicle design. And there are lots of little graphic things to seek out. The textures show lots of variance, and many were patterns that I had not seen before. Similarly, the explosion marks from large blasts created realistic spray patterns, and left a strangely beautiful impact texture that's never been in any kind of console game before.

Lastly, Volition hasn't just created levels and textured them. The environments in Red Faction are cleverly peppered with communist-style propaganda and they create a subtle but effective mood throughout the level. Ultor, the evil corporation that is secretly testing out miners as experiments with a strange substance deep in the Martian mines (or something like that), is darkly portrayed with slogan-filled fliers and giant posters stamped with Ultor's machinistic symbol that strangely resembles the Soviet Union's Hammer and Sickle logo. Surely the artists at Volition are having great fun spinning the old Soviet Union's symbolism with Red Faction. Heck even the name sounds like some kind of revolutionary separatist group.

Overall, I loved the demo. Red Faction is no ordinary game. The kind of infinite gameplay that Volition's first-person shooter is capable just gets my blood running. I find myself saying this more often these days, now that's it's February 2001, but stellar games are starting to surface with more frequency. After Onimusha, Star Wars: Starfighter, Z.O.E., and GT3, Red Faction is -- without a doubt -- one of those true next-generation games that will prompt you to buy a PlayStation 2. I believe it's going to be that good.