Remembering Red Faction

[Music] hey guys this video is sponsored by steel series so make sure to stick around after the end to find out how you can get a discount on your next order when you mention the name volition i think most people would immediately think about the saints row series but for me it's always been one of their earlier titles with the original red faction and its sequels set in the year 2075 the first game was a first person shooter with the premise that after us natural resources were depleted by zoomers in their genetically enhanced offspring humanity has taken to exploring other planets for minerals one of them being mars which is where the majority of the game takes place in the first game you're playing as a guy named parker who lands a gig working for the altar mining corporation but then soon finds out that working there is worse than being a moderator on a discord server workers are treated like crap they lack basic human rights living and working conditions are dangerous and worse than that there's a disease called the plague that's killing off people at random and then there's the plague killing off miners left and right so really 2075 doesn't sound all that different to the current year so a rebellion is launched by the eponymous red faction group and parker finds himself caught in the middle of it and that's kind of the same premise from game to game you're pretty much just fighting back against some kind of powerful organization whether it be the altar mining corporation mercenaries or various military and other factions in the sequels but it all started way back in 2001 when a lowly miner named parker kicked the whole thing off okay let's go now parker doesn't utter so much as a single word during the gameplay itself but during cinematics he's frequently chatty showing off the kind of lip syncing and facial animation that i've really come to expect from early 2000s gaming [Music] and it might have just gone down as another shooter from that same time period only it did have a pretty nifty trick up its sleeve you see there was one main thing in particular that red faction was banking on just go and watch any of those old trailers or gameplay demos and you'll see what i'm talking about and this thing was the geomod technology it's a pretty cool idea for the time it's a brand new engine where you could blow down walls you could carve your own path through the environment to achieve your goals and all that kind of stuff and for the first five or ten minutes of the game it actually seems like they pulled the whole thing off but it doesn't take long to play to see that the engine's kinda superficial at best and outside of a handful of instances most of which are more or less scripted you don't even really have to worry about destroying walls to progress one section really early on when you're making your way out of the mines has got this apc crossing a bridge and you can just shoot this bridge apart with a rocket launcher and watch that apc tumble off the ledge this kind of stuff is about the best the engine ever gets and it's just a bit of a bummer that you don't get to see it more often for the rest of the game don't do it please this geomod stuff was just still a burgeoning concept and well i don't think that they really mastered it here i do have to admit that it's an interesting mechanic so you've got to give it credit i don't think it's a bad looking game either it's about on par with whatever was out at the same time there's a space station level near the end of the campaign that i think just still looks gorgeous with really impressive lighting and the scale of some of these other areas is great too now there's two other things i think are worth mentioning with the engine and that's the way it handles mirrors and glass the way this engine handles mirrors has to be in the top 10 or maybe bottom 10 i should say for working mirrors in video games i know sport 4 had some pretty bad mirrors and though i also never played it i know that mafia 3 had mirrors that apparently looked like a gateway to hell but man these mirrors in red faction they're definitely up there and it's very clearly just a television screen playing back what's standing in front of it it's kind of like having a zoom meeting with yourself on a positive note though the other thing is the glass now you see in pretty much every other fps i'd played up until that point if you shot a window it broke it didn't matter where you shot it it just broke in red faction though the window would shatter depending on the spot you actually hit it and it looked way more dynamic and i think it might have been the first time that i've ever seen a game do this one of the simplest comparisons to make with red faction i think is half-life i mean it's pretty much half-life on mars which having said that i think is kind of funny considering that half-life 2 would take that realistic glass physics even further having individual shards you could chip away but i really do think that red faction's taken a lot of cues here from that iconic game featuring our favorite non-speaking theoretical physicist i mean it's very similar in the way that you start off with no weapon before then getting a melee weapon and a pistol in half-life it was the crowbar and a glock and in red faction it's the stun prod and the altar pistol this all happens a lot quicker in red faction though within the span of about 30 seconds but still it's the same formula like half-life 2 the progression through the world is also done in real time as you move seamlessly from one area to the next later on there is a couple of times when it changes locations but you're still moving from point to point yourself you're rarely teleported and suddenly in this entirely new area and you can usually backtrack if you really want to as well it also has a very similar weapon selection system with weapons broken down into categories and instead of a hiv suit with a power supply it's a mining suit which even has a very similar looking helmet to the hev suit there's even a bit later on in the game when you captured and lose all of your weapons yeah sounds familiar [Music] though it doesn't really last all that long because red faction's pacing in the second half of its campaign is just all over the place and i think that's really the good and the bad part about red faction is that campaign i mean it starts off so strong it has this really great sense of momentum but then about halfway through it just kind of nose dives and it never really recovers just feeling kind of rushed right up until the end right so the start of the game is actually pretty cool you're inside the mines at the time the revolution begins and then from that point on all you're really trying to do is meet up with the resistance so you can get the hell of the planet these early areas in the mind introduce the pistol the right shield and the cattle prod cattle prod what the that thing called these early areas in the mind introducing the pistol the right shield and the right prod the latter two you'll probably never use i say that about the right shield because it's purely a defensive weapon and about all you can do with it is whack someone with it which does so little damage that i think you'd hurt them more if you farted in their face and the same thing with the right baton because whenever you've got this thing you'll always have a pistol handy so there's no real reason to swap from a ranged weapon to a melee one if you could have used the shield and the baton at the same time well then they might have really been cooking with gas like maybe you could bash someone with a shield to stun them and then use that baton for a finisher but alas they're both about as useful as a blind cameraman at a porno shoot need help the pistol isn't very good either and the spread on this thing when you're shooting it is absolutely ludicrous i mean it has to be one of the most inaccurate pistols of all time doesn't help that the enemies have this tendency to slide all over the place like they're wearing roller skates yeah and get used to hearing the same enemy dialogue over and over because these old tall guys have about three or four lines of banter and they seem to repeat it at nauseum just you and me miner and i think anyone who's played this game if their beard is gonna know exactly what i'm talking about just you and me i do have to say though seeing them go from a trash talking tough guy to their pants when they've been injured is pretty damn funny from this point on you're also introduced to your hacker buddy hendrix who gives useful information along the way about where to go and what to do along with the goals of the red faction not to mention just being an absolute bro of the highest tier god these starting areas i think also show off the geomod stuff pretty well too letting you play around with some explosive charges in the rocket launcher there's a massive driller that i think only shows up once in the entire game and if this thing had a blatant reference to total recall then i don't know what's real anymore no and then not too soon after this you get the shotgun which is actually pretty damn awesome all weapons in the game have a primary and an alternate fire mode and the on fire for this thing is the fast firing mode unloading all of your shells super quickly i've always really loved the look and the sound of this shotgun and it's really effective against these first few enemy types and i mean just listen to it it's glorious after that you'll probably find the assault rifle which is again pretty damn useful offering burst and full auto firing modes there's one thing i also want to bring up at this point and that's the music which is awesome one of my favorite tracks comes at a point when you first get to drive a submarine and it is pure unfiltered early 2000s video game soundtrack at its absolute finest the campaign i think is definitely saved early on here by some of these vehicle sections especially the submarine and that gunship later on both of which control super smoothly and are just a blast to use no pun intended but there's also help to reinforce the size of the planet itself i mean you often forget that you're not in kansas anymore you're now on mars and these sections are always these long cavernous tunnels that really help to re-establish how you're a small cog in a very vast and empty machine well i mean not empty there's plenty of enemy gun ships waiting for you along the way and it's really fun blowing them to smithereens i'd expect no less from the same developers who created the descent series and with those gunship sections in particular i mean all i think it needed was a few more different flying enemies and these sections could have really felt like a spiritual successor i can't help but feel that there was wasted potential here i mean the descent games were set inside mines that were taken over by hostile robots and it would have been a really perfect opportunity to introduce a new enemy type here they could have been like reprogrammed bots that altar had fashion to do with the rebels something like that but if we start talking about missed opportunities well we're all gonna be here until we start to bleed from if you're not gonna help shut up anyway at this point things start to take a bit of a shift and it turns into a stealth game well optional stealth where you're trying to find an escort an altar employee to the rebels take the silence pistol keep it holstered under your suit use it only when you absolutely have to the stealth here doesn't try to be super complex it's about as simple as just staying a fair distance away from someone so they can't detect you if you are detected you can pretty much shoot your way through the whole thing anyway it's just for some reason you can't hold other weapons when you're in disguise so you're limited to the pistol i don't know i guess parker's outfits doesn't have enough pockets or something once you find this guy who works for altar you've then got to babysit him until you link up with the red faction then there's a series of levels that has to be one of the coolest bits in the whole campaign when you get to fly a gunship battle ends with a boss fight against a big ass robot which has to be lured and then trapped inside a giant incinerator shaft and i do kind of appreciate how there's more to that boss fight than just kind of shooting it until it explodes thank god god it's also probably around this time you'll find the sub machine gun for the first time and not only does this share the same ammo as the pistol but it also lets you swap out to the same ammo as the assault rifle essentially making both guns redundant i don't know the logistics of how a gun can use two ammo types like that but i mean hey it's the future we're on mars so who gives a at this point it shakes things up again i mean after probably getting bored from escorting that for the last half hour now you're moving through caverns and underground tunnels having to fight these weird looking monsters along with driving the world's slowest atv hang on i'm gonna floor it watch out move move move at this point is where things start to head south with the introduction of one of the main antagonists an evil scientist named k peck who kinda looks like a shriveled nut sack and if you say kpec five times really fast it almost kind of sounds like you're saying cope keck you spend a fair bit of time chasing this guy during which he chimes in on the radio to intimidate you because i guess parker's frequency is given out more than your mum's mobile number something is hungry until you finally corner him for what's probably the toughest fight in the game it's also i think one of the most dreadful because he fires out these energy blasts which just go straight through solid walls not to mention they can kill you in almost a single shot and after he's dead it really starts to mark the beginning of the end for this campaign because i really do think all of what comes next is just such a stark contrast in quality and hundreds more will die unless we find a cure for the plague i mean look i'm not saying the first half is a masterpiece it has some crappy spots here and there and there is a fair few superfluous elements as well i mean i never really used weapons like the grenade the flamethrower or the sniper rifle i might use them once or twice but they're never essential and i could see how people could look back fondly on this game because they're probably just remembering this first half because sadly from this point on is where it really goes to cold in fact let me ask you a question right where do you go after you've already killed off the only serious antagonist you've had at this point well you've introduced another one i guess and this is in the form of a mercenary group sent in to clean up the mess again sounds familiar only these guys are a huge step up in challenge from the old tour security forces these guys carry one of the most powerful weapons in the entire game the precision rifle which is a semi-automatic scoped weapon that does insane damage and makes a pretty cool sound to boot along with carrying a belt fed machine gun both of which can absolutely ruin the day but both of these i can deal with it's those guys carrying the goddamn x-ray railguns which brought my blood to an absolute boil you see one of the last weapons you'll get in the game is a railgun that can both see and shoot through walls and look that's fine and dandy it's just the enemies can use this weapon as well and that x-ray capability is something that swings two ways basically what i'm saying is you're gonna get and you're not even gonna see coming half the time and there really are times when it seems the only way to avoid it is to know that it's coming kind of feels like it removes all the skill at this point and just instead forces the player to memorize enemy locations and look if there's any prospective game developers out there watching this which i'm sure there is can i just say to you directly please don't do this in your game there's nothing fun about an enemy that can kill you in a single hit all i can say here is thank god for quick saves i also just really find that from this point on the whole game seems to feel very rushed and kind of unfinished you'll frequently move through areas which lack any real detail or interesting landmarks things like copy pasted rooms that lack memorable features and the only thing that slows you down here is dealing with the abundance of these mercenaries it's not navigating the environments you drive an apc at one point which handles like absolute dog and it kind of shows how these flight controls don't really work all that well on a land vehicle the vehicles are controlled with the directional keys for moving but the mouse for looking and shooting and that works fine with the submarine and the gunship because you can obviously control the direction you're moving and your momentum with the strafe keys in an apc though you have to turn left or right to face someone to shoot them and it kind of forces you to constantly change direction to shoot them which kind of kills momentum with the vehicle makes sense the final boss though who gets introduced about half an hour before you fight her is the leader of the mercenary group and she uses the same technology that kopeck had hovering around with a super powerful energy shield before then fighting parker on foot so in essence this is almost like a recycled boss fight but worse than that though is this final puzzle you need to solve you see those damn dirty mercenaries have activated a bomb that's going to blow the whole base to kingdom come to help them hide their tracks again sound familiar only this thing is like a one-off puzzle where you've got to input these two codes in a time limit or else the bomb detonates and die the thing is the code changes every single time you try it so it's really just luck that you're gonna memorize it in time and why they decided to end the game on a mechanic like this when they hadn't used anything like this in the game prior is just beyond me but what a fitting end to a game that started off so strong and then kind of slowly flushed its head down the toilet and it's one of those reasons why when i see people talking about this game and how amazing it was it always makes me think that they're really just remembering those first couple hours of the campaign which are admittedly pretty damn good and i think they're just kind of forgetting about all the stupid crap that happens in the second half still though there is something about those six generation console games and just that period in general which really rubs people's nostalgia dick in just the right way and that's also why i think that despite its many faults and shortcomings it kind of struggled to find people who talk badly about it most people i speak to who played this thing absolutely rave about it and that's fair enough especially when you consider that it also had a really good playstation 2 port i mean this is before games like time splitters 2 metal of on a front line double 07 night fire or kill zone so a shooter about playing as a rebel fighter on mars with a few destructible walls here and there and combat subs and gunships to fly around in well yeah i'd buy that for a dollar i think aside from the first halo game which came out around the same time it also might have been one of the first fps games that let you control different vehicles like that and also that did it so well the only other game i can remember that did it was terminator skynet back in 1996. yeah but let's not go back to the past to play those shitty games that suck ass let's look into the future in fact a year later in 2002 when volition followed it up with a sequel red faction 2. with this though i think you'd actually be a bit more hard-pressed to find people who say great things about it because red faction 2 i think really joins that long roster of fps sequels that just aren't anywhere near as good as their predecessors along with games like blood 2 fear 2 and gal gun 2. the setup is that the technology kopec created on mars has now fallen into the hands of the edf or the earth defense force for short and i don't know what it is with this faction in fps games i mean there was an edf in duke nukem and also one in cirrus sam as well anyway these guys have weaponized this technology and now it's being used by a dictator named sopot and you're playing as an elite soldier named alias working with a squad of people with equally badass sounding names as you carry out missions on sopot's orders while the premise itself makes sense the writing and the dialogue in this thing really isn't a leak of its own and it makes the first game seem like gone with the wind in comparison you have to consider when this thing came out i mean this was the early 2000s when skate and punk culture were an all-time high and it seemed like so many games and films were doing their best to appeal to teenagers and i really feel like this kind of culture seeped over into video games with the writing always seemingly trying to appeal to that basic demographic of adolescent kids who thought that spiked hair and deep voices was all you needed to make your character cool repta resistance heavy outnumbered fifteen to one under control so you've got characters called shrike quill repta and molov i mean they just sound like the most generic tough guy names you could come up with ah yeah i witnessed it all it's just really cheesy stuff and you don't have to watch further than some of those early cinematics or listen to some of the dialogue to pick up on that shrike vehicles a madman with a taste for speed a madman with a taste for speed i mean jesus christ someone wrote that line with a straight face it's also around the time when it seemed that celebrities would pop up more doing voices in video games vice city came out around the same time and although red faction doesn't have anywhere near that kind of lineup it does have some notable actors with lance henriksen and jason statham we were created to fight when tangier arrives you three will be declared enemies of the state and publicly executed i witnessed it all even more than that though the guy who voices sopot is also the same guy who played bub in date the dead player on the other hand is named alias a pretty forgettable guy who barely talks about the entire game seems like he's someone we're supposed to identify with and feel thrust into his shoes but honestly who knows let's go alias the game opens with barely any explanation as to what's happening but you get the gist that you're playing as a-list and working for sopot attacking a rebel base are still an important piece of tech this opening level lasts for all the five minutes and then during a cinematic which cuts two years ahead into the future it now turns out you're being hunted by sopot and have instead teamed up with the red faction okay for the honor of the commonwealth tonight sopot dies now the goal is to hunt down sopot and assassinate him for the good of the commonwealth and i've got to say as an australian all i can do is smile when i hear the word commonwealth used in a video game and i do have to admit that when you finally catch up to sopot the way this guy dies is pretty funny so after getting captured by alias he's locked into a silo as a rocket takes off which then sets the guy on fire causing him to run around screaming as he burns to death and look all other issues aside i have to admit that is entertaining as i witnessed it all anyway this then forms the next main objectives for the next couple of hours before yet again allegiance has changed and now your buddies have turned on you so now the goal becomes to fight back against your buddies or former buddies one by one these guys aren't foxhound though and this ain't metal gear solid so don't expect any groundbreaking or innovative boss fights it's about the most textbook boss fights you're ever going to see that being just give the boss a bazillion health points and make the players shoot them with so much firepower that in reality they'd be completely de-atomized overall the shooting ain't amazing and about the only thing i think they've improved with the combat is that there's now a dedicated grenade throw button being able to just press the g button and throw out one of these things is a huge improvement but overall it just feels like so little has been done here to build upon the shooting in the first game the fact you could probably get through the entire thing without ever having to change weapons is a pretty big testament to how sloppy the shooting is and just how repetitive the combat is relegated mostly to just the same two or three enemies over and over you've got guys with guns you've got guys with guns or you've got guys with guns could have been an interesting moral dilemma if they address how you're now shooting your former allies but the story never takes enough time to establish any of that fat to have any meaning even the few times when they try something different though kind of sucks like when you've got to shoot these kamikaze robot spiders which are the most annoying enemies in the entire game yeah two things i hate the most in video games spiders and kamikaze enemies but the only way to go to make these things worse was if they left behind some kind of residue on the screen when they blew up i think the biggest blunder though is that this really is a console game first and foremost that's been ported to the pc and there's a few main ways i think in which that's pretty obvious right off the bat the pc version's been outsourced to an entirely different developer instead of volition this version was worked on by outraged games and yeah what an ironic title aside from that though there's no way to change the visual settings in the game it all has to be done through a launcher about all you can modify in the game itself are the brightness settings and the controller sensitivity you get checkpoints at the beginning of each new area which is also kind of disruptive because instead of like a subtle loading screen with a small graphic you get this giant one that covers the entire screen and the actual sense of progression through an environment which is part of what made that first game so good is just gone entirely it's also got a much simpler health system instead of health and armor to worry about you've now got a regenerating health system similar to the one from halo playing through this now on the xbox series x is actually i think one of the better ways to play it the pc version ain't exactly broken but it ain't exactly great either you pretty much have to run this little program side by side so you can fix the resolution as well as that horrendous fov but visually aside from the xbox running in a 4x3 ratio and the pc in 16x9 they still look almost identical it's also just really i think a downgraded game from the first one in so many other ways too i mean for starters for a lot of these new vehicle sections they're now on rails you fly in the back of a gun ship at one point and then on a tank as well but all you can really do here is shoot at things as they pass by it's really a little more than just descriptive shooting gallery the submarine section is kind of similar to the first game in that at least you've got total control but i mean look at it it just looks like you can barely see ahead of you compare that to the first game and just look at how much better the visibility is as well kind of goes into my next point which is how i'm not even sure that this is a better looking game everything just looks so blurry and flat and about the only thing i liked here visually was that rain effect that they use i think once in the entire game and there's just always something about rain effects in sixth generation video games that does it for me time splitters two had a really good looking one in that neo tokyo level and so did milga solar 2. freeze come to think of it this is red faction too so maybe it's just sequels in general have really good rain effects look i'm a simple man right i like two things in my video games titties and good looking rain effects i do think some of the weapon modeling looks better than the first game and there are some nice looking environments here and there but in terms of the textures and the character modelling it honestly i think looks worse off than the previous game don't even get me started on the cinematics and the facial animation too and i don't think their eyes even move this time i mean at least in the first game parker's buggy little lies would roll around in his skull a bit to give the guy a bit more life here though their mouths just open and shut like they're a marionette you inside come out with your hands up this cinematic at the end of the game here always cracks me up too where your buddy tangier is slowly sneaking towards the window and my life just aims at it without actually firing i mean what's he waiting for what are you waiting for you'd also hope they'd put that geomod stuff to better use here but again there's really only a handful of times that even comes into play and again it's mostly scripted stuff anyway early on there's a gun turret you need to avoid and you can destroy these office cubicles to flank it and to shut it down and it almost seems like this is teaching you for things that are going to come but it's the only time in the entire game where you need to do this throughout this whole first level you've got a grenade launcher and a bunch of ammo but it almost kind of falsely advertises the rest of the game because from this point on you're going to be using some of the most generic hit scanning weapons that have ever been seen in an fps during that sequence inside the tank you can shoot at the front of certain buildings but this has no tactical advantage whatsoever and these buildings are about as empty as the streets are anyway at that point too when you're on that section in the gun ship you'd really want to be able to just level these buildings with all these missiles but they all seem to be impervious to your attacks you ever play that game path and neo well there's that really cool level in it when you're on the back of a minigun as you're trying to rescue morpheus from this building and twice in this level you can see two different buildings get demolished this is the kind of thing you want to see in red faction 2 but it's like the gunship that i'm traveling in may as well be shooting at nerf darts speckled throughout the campaign there's instances when you can destroy the occasional wall or the floor to circumvent a more direct route but again it's not taking you anywhere you don't need to go i think the cleverest it ever gets is when you're inside this mech suit and you come to a tunnel that's got a very clearly labeled height limit so what do you do well you blow the ceiling off so you can get through [Music] stuff like this i think is really cool that really shows you the potential that the engine had next we come to the weapons and there's so many guns in red faction 2 here only half of them are just completely useless or made redundant by newer guns that you keep coming across you've got a pistol returning from the first game though the difference here is that they can now be dual wielded i never thought i'd see the day where dual smgs are completely underwhelming either but here we are with the machine pistols and i think the main reason these things feel so crappy is the combination of the sound effect and that really piss weak impact it has when you hit enemies enemies don't really react at all to getting shot by these things aside from having so many sparks coming off their body armor that it's like they've got a sparkler tucked into their shirt then for some reason they decided to add in another smg this time a silenced one which is completely pointless because there's no stealth in the game at all and what is with this thing's stock sound effect if that's not enough they've added in yet another smg weapon with these nano pistols you get within literally like the last 15 minutes of the game am i starting to prove my point here how just redundant some of these guns are [Applause] returning again from the first game is what's basically like an updated shotgun and assault rifle the main difference is instead of a faster firing mode for the shotgun it gets incendiary shells which are really just more of a spectacle and not really all that practical and then the assault rifle is pretty much unchanged outside of its appearance the primary fire mode is still a more accurate burst fire and the secondary is full auto but this weapon is made completely redundant as soon as you find the nanotech rifle that not only comes with an under slung grenade launcher but also just outline wall hacks showing your enemies through cover with this giant marker and the fact that it also uses the exact same ammo type as the assault rifle i think makes it even more superior now i do think this kind of thing would have been fine for like an eight to ten hour long campaign but you really do find this thing less than half an hour after getting that assault rifle for the first time and you might not even use it before you get this objective upgrade the mercenary rifle and the railgun both make a return and again they control almost exactly the same the main difference with the rifle is that it now takes up about twice as much of the screen and it also has this really odd crosshair because someone thought it would be a good idea to give every gun in the game a different crosshair i mean whatever happened to the good old plush shape how about even taking the max payne route and making it like a single pixel that's all you ever need anyway this weapon though is incredibly useful for one of the last areas in the game where you've got to move through this gauntlet of mutants and nanotech soldiers and the reason i say this thing is so good is because it's really effective at shooting their heads off this whole area gave me a real time splitters vibe too it reminded me a lot of those horror levels where you had to use a shotgun to decapitate zombies plus the nanotech soldiers i think also looked very similar to the time splitters with this weird sort of energy aura that's coming off them again it's like poetry so if they rhyme i guess the weaker counterpart to the precision rifle is the actual sniper rifle which i don't think you even really need to use at all in the entire game the first time you kind of need to use one is when you're having to deal with other snipers on nearby buildings but then later on when you're having to shoot this endless swarm of bad guys who keep popping up in all these windows by that point you've got the precision rifle so again the sniper rifle is another redundant weapon before it even had time to make itself be missed on the plus side though i do have to say that i like the grenade launcher in this game only because it actually feels like i'm doing something when i use it leaving behind a pretty huge impact mark and doing a lot of splash damage and if there was enough ammo for it i'd play through the entire game with this thing definitely makes those first few opening levels a complete joke the wasp is like a bigger slower firing rocket launcher which is only really useful for two boss fights in the entire game mostly just the final fight against molov only because you not only have to fight this guy in his mech suit but then again after you've destroyed it when he's running around on foot with a railgun kind of reminds me of the hitler fight at the end of wolfenstein 3d the only cover you get is the single metal pole in the middle of the room and you want to get him out of that mech suit nice and quick with the wasp because he's an outright aimbot with that railgun let me tell ya you red faction 2's ultimate mercy is that it's a super short game in fact it really might be one of the shortest fbs campaigns i think i've ever played aside from maybe rogue warrior which i think can be finished in two or three hours red faction 2 i'd say is a little bit over 3 and that's three hours of your life that you're never gonna get back there's not really any point to replay through this either unless you wanna play through it again on a high difficulty mode to unlock things like low resolution concept art yeah goody gumdrops or to see the alternate endings because apparently there's four in total though every single time i finish this thing regardless of how i played i've always seemed to get the same one if you want to see the same cinematics with just a different narration though well be my guest but this ain't no fallout new vegas endings let me put it that way now i think regardless of whether or not someone enjoyed red faction 2 the fact remains that it was overall a bit of a step backwards so what do you do after you take a step backwards well how about stepping forward in an entirely new direction well that's what volition did seven years later with red faction gorilla which i think for a lot of people is regarded as the best in the series if nothing else it's definitely the fan favorite someone else must have realized that too because this is the only one in the franchise that ever got a remaster unlike the last two games though instead of this being a linear first person shoot up it's now an open world third-person chaos sandbox and pretty much every single structure you come across here can be destroyed in one way or another and often needs to be when it comes to games that let you blow up this is arguably one of the best of them and the only other game i can think of that even comes close to this to let you create this much utter carnage are the just cause games red faction gorilla comes from around that time period in gaming 2 where every main character was a gruff looking dude with a shaved head yeah and not balding either like someone shaving their hair off on purpose and as the guy who's here is rapidly disappearing as i'm slowly creeping into middle age i'll never understand how someone can willingly do that anyway back to my point you had characters like coal in infamous nathan hale in resistance too starkiller in force unleashed and even old mate sam fisher got the chop with his edgy appearance in splinter cell double agent hair ain't the only thing missing here either though because they also forgot to include any kind of memorable story and again it's not the most engaging premise i'm on it you're playing as a dude named alec mason coming to mars to see his brother who is promptly killed by the edf who was serving as the main enemy faction this time alec then joins up with a mostly forgettable cast of characters who are all working with the red faction it fits and i will say though that i do like how the game outright references red faction one i mean the starting area is even named after parker there's an area named after hendrix and eos and there's references to ultra mining corporation as well so it sure seems to treat the series with more love than the second game did i mean that's for sure but this game has an almost non-existent story outside of that i mean the basic gist is that the edf are bad and you've just got to stop them i know this is a lot to take in but you're going to have to trust us whereas in most open world games the side missions are like a fun distraction to the main missions in red faction gorilla the side missions are the main ones like i said the main enemy faction here is the edf and each area on mars has to be liberated back from these guys and while there's usually like a few main missions to complete you're going to spend the majority of your time here completing guerrilla missions the same half a dozen side missions over and over to loosen their control every time you finish one of these the edf's grip is reduced on the area and it's one step closer to liberation you have not helping available in edf rage or driving around on the back of a jeep blasting out speed metal and causing all that mayhem and yeah look it's fun the first couple of times you do these but starts to get pretty repetitive sooner than it should another way to remove their controllers to destroy important landmarks like buildings wind turbines starbucks and other pivotal resources that the edf seem important but again the same way you destroy these buildings doesn't ever really change i mean you get better weapons and you get more effective at it but it's just the same process from the start of the game right up until the end this is also a pretty damn grindy game all of the best weapons and the toys need to be purchased and that's all done by collecting salvage which is earned mostly through missions or just by destroying buildings and picking this stuff up off the ground and you're going to spend a whole lot of time here collecting the stuff despite it being pretty grindy though it is still a pretty fun game to mess around with the backpack and its many mods also gives you a whole heap of options to play around with as well like a mod that thrusts you up into the air which also somehow turns you into a human mortar ripping through buildings and other solid objects or an upgrade that surrounds you in a shield as you can charge forward destroying anything in your path in what might be one of the dumbest things i've ever seen though the difficulty modes affect how expensive these upgrades are and it gets exponentially more expensive the higher the upgrade is i felt no shame in turning this thing down to casual mode just to buy these upgrades because on casual mode they're almost half the price of what they cost on hard and normal and look i'm buggered if i'm going to spend double the time collecting literal junk just to unlock the ability to make the game more fun but i think the biggest blunder here are the vehicle controls because they're just awful which for a gamer you spend probably 70 of the time driving around is an absolute cardinal sin the issue is that whenever you get airborne you lose control which is fine i mean yeah that makes sense and that's how cars work but because the roads are so bumpy this happens frequently and it's kind of like these quick periods like a nanosecond or so where it feels like you've lost control of the car it's an open world game from the late 2000s but it also kind of feels like one from the early 2000s with basic missions that just involve killing a bunch of people driving somewhere or blowing something up this was before the oversaturation of open world games that we'd get in the coming years with things like the far cry and the assassin's creed games but i mean we'd still had gta 4 a year prior to this so then coming into something like gorilla which does kind of feel destitute in comparison well it's a bit of a downgrade that's also the problem i guess when your entire game is set on a barren empty red rock but you know what none of that matters when things start blowing up volition have called this engine the geo mod 2.0 when yeah that ain't no because this is the kind of destruction i really wanted to see in the first game and now it's finally here your melee weapon is a hammer which may as well be forged by the gods of asgard because it tears through almost every single surface with a single hit and i love too how mason is basically wearing like a hive his outfit just to make him look even more like a construction worker when he carries this thing around but you'll also be using remote charges and the rocket launcher to do your demolition work here as well which really does still look amazing at times even more so when you consider that this is from 2009 in fact the only game i can think of that even comes close apart from the sequel armageddon is a game on steam called tear down which came out like a year or so ago really kind of feels like for a decade there that gorilla was the poster child for how destruction in a video game should be handled the only downside is that you can't destroy the terrain only the buildings and all these structures which is a bit of a downgrade in a way but still there's just something so visceral about bringing an entire building down through sheer determination and little more than just an inanimate piece of metal at one point i destroyed like a giant bridge and watching this thing shatter into a bazillion pieces and come crashing down just looked amazing and honestly ranked up there is one of the most gratifying moments i've had in a video game in recent memory it also rarely ever seems to come at the expense of the performance and someone evolution really earned their big dick status here putting this new engine together one of the earliest upgrades you can get is turning vehicles into salvage magnets so any scrap you drive over is automatically collected and then this goes hand in hand with just driving straight into buildings like a bulldozer and demolishing them entirely picking up all of that loose scrap instantly i've gotta say that there's few things as fun in gaming as driving a truck from a building in red faction gorilla and those instances where you can get this perfect run up and then just level an entire structure in a couple of goes is the stuff that boners are made of one of the vehicles you get is a mech walker with these mechanical arms it's kind of like the power loader from the end of aliens but on steroids and with this thing you can just run right through entire buildings pulling them apart like they're made out of toilet paper i think my main issue with this game though is that that enjoyment factor is really kind of ruined at times just by the constant presence of enemies and honestly i feel like the edf in this game may as well just be called the fun police because that's really what it's like going up against them as soon as you start blowing stuff up and causing mayhem these guys pretty much pop up out of nowhere and then they just never stop coming and it becomes outright distracting when you're trying to bring a building down to suddenly have to deal with this never-ending influx of foot soldiers honestly it's like they're materialized out of thin air and it's that really annoying mid-2000s gunplay where they just hit you with 100 accuracy all of the time when they introduce snipers later on and those guys with shields well it gets even more annoying the only way to stop them from coming is to simply run away hightail it out of there until they give up the chase or go back to one of your nearby hideouts at which point they'll just stop chasing you instantly the worst ones though are the gunships because unless you've got that heat second upgrade for the rocket launcher well good luck taking those things out i honestly just got to the point where i'd let them kill me it was far less time consuming than trying to outrun them or head back to the nearest safe house which was like a five minute drive away i guess it kind of makes sense going with the whole guerrilla theme they've got going on but it doesn't make for enjoyable gameplay when you're suddenly under attack by a platoon of soldiers and given no real option other than just running away with your towel between your legs honestly there's so much more i could say about this game and maybe in the future i'll go back and take a look at it more in depth but for now there's not really much else i have to say about it after playing it for like an hour or so you've already really seen all there is to see him do then it's just repeating the same mechanics in a slightly different looking backdrop until it all comes to an end the various locations on mars do differ slightly in appearance mostly just whatever textures they've used for the terrain but once you find a weapon combo and a loadout that works best for you well i just never found a reason to change things up still though it's a mighty fun game when played in short increments and it also had a really good multiplayer mode to boot or something told i sadly missed the boat on that one because that was around the time when i had credit card debt coming out of my ass and i had no job still though this thing is easy to play and i understand now why people love it so much red faction armageddon on the other hand is a completely different kettle of fish and while the whole thing was seeming pretty good with red faction gorilla this right here is the game which essentially killed off the whole franchise released in 2011 it sure had some heavy hitters to contend with games like skyrim arkham city not to mention dead space 2 which i'm sure was an influence on the change in direction they took with this one any idea how to get out of here you do have to wonder though what kind of wacky chewbacca everyone was smoking when they made this thing i mean after they had such a positive response to making the last game an open world destructive sandbox someone thought it was a good idea to change it back into a linear third person shooter which funnily enough makes gorilla the black sheep out of the entire bunch considering it's the only game with that open world design now i know this thing got pretty average reviews when it came out most of which justified and i'm supposed to all over it but i still do think this game gets bashed pretty unfairly and it's not an amazing game but as a third-person shooter it's still perfectly fine and i think it has some cool ideas the only issue is that it just feels so generic in armageddon you're playing as a guy named darius mason a scavenger who's supposed to be a descendant of alec mason from gorilla and just like his ancestor darris is also taken to shaving his head oh keep trying along with half the other male npcs i mean seriously what is it with the shaved heads in these games it's like everyone in the matrix always wearing sunglasses anyway after a cataclysmic event all the inhabitants on mars now live deep under the planet's surface in a network of tunnels stiffing their own farts and rarely venturing out for a breath of fresh air how could this have happened mason is tricked into releasing this ancient alien species known as the plague the most perfect name considering how annoying they are to deal with and then he also has to stop a cult to screw her up to no good and started causing trouble in the neighborhood mostly though it's another cast of forgettable nobodies but it does have the best waifu i think in the entire series with mason's lady friend named cara and look anyone who has a high cut one piece leotard with the sides exposed like that is okay in my book you are so easy to find just listen for the gunshots i didn't expect to see you again but you're gonna spend most of your time here killing things as opposed to engaging them in conversation so again it's one of those stories that goes in one e and just right at the other and it ends up playing out like a pretty standard third-person shooter i chose to play it on the pc this time just because i thought it'd be easy with the mouse and keyboard and i gotta say i think that was a pretty good call i can fix it and it sure doesn't feel like a console game firsthand with the pc tacked on as an afterthought well aside from that fov which is painfully low there was this one other pretty huge issue i ran into later in the game during this bit that happened during the world's slowest minecart chase i kept getting knocked off the card and falling to my death first i thought it was a bug but then it just kept happening [Music] why are we not moving and the only way that i could fix it was by forcing the game to run in 720 at 30 frames per second kind of made me think that maybe it had something to do with the frame rate because it was only happening when i played the game at 144 hertz we need to be moving by the way though if nothing else it made for a couple of entertaining why are we not moments otherwise though the controls are smooth and most of the guns are fun to use there's actually quite a few weapons here as well from shotguns and assault rifles flamethrower grenade and rocket launcher through the dual wielding pistols and of course it wouldn't be red faction at this point without your trusty hammer and don't worry that thing makes a return i think it's definitely a better shooter than gorilla was too which is kind of to be expected considering they've completely removed those other aspects mostly the vehicles in that open world design the inclusion of an upgrade system again used in collectible salvage i also think encourages you to take the time to explore these environments so it's not just a race down essentially this one long corridor you can upgrade the damage you do with certain weapon types you can upgrade your health points and reload times and it's that basic concept of extrinsic rewarding that we all just take for granted or you might not even notice but it's what keeps you coming back and entices you to keep playing honestly at least half a dozen times when i was playing this i'd plan to like take a break i was going to go outside and get something to eat or grab a glass of water or just take a fat we need to be moving but then i'd unlock a new upgrade and i kind of felt like i had to keep playing to try it out about the only thing in the game that doesn't make sense to me is like this weird zombie shooting mini game that pops up at random throughout the campaign yes like at random i seem to get teleported to this graveyard and then i have to shoot these nazi zombies while women in lingerie appear on the sides of the screen it was just weird man and it felt like something out of an entirely different game i'm still trying to figure that out myself mason must have also inherited his backpack from his old man too because he carries around his own little proton pack looking thing that also comes with a bunch of tricks like being able to force push back enemies giving yourself a protective shield going into a sort of berserk mode increasing your damage output or sending out a shock wave holding enemies up in the air like they're being kept in stasis this is definitely the best one in my opinion giving you a bit of breathing room for those precious few seconds but more important than that it's just fun to use i do wish these abilities weren't all on the same cooldown but either way you can still pull off some pretty cool moves and it makes it more than just shooting and reloading all the time and that's handy because the vast amount of enemies you fight are just so boring and uncreative mostly just generic bad guys with guns in the form of these cultists but for the other vast majority of the game it's the various species of the plague that you unwittingly unleashed and these annoying alien bug things they aren't just creatively bankrupt it's like a creative great depression most of them just prefer to jump around and latch onto a wall somewhere and then fling their shitty which is just so incredibly grating to deal with they're not even like a serious threat either i mean aside from a couple of variants their attacks are glancing at best and it's just a nuisance it's like when a younger sibling tries to fight you know what i mean you just kind of feel pity for them more than anything else there's verticality to the level design but it only seems to be there for the benefit of these guys who jump around more than a goddamn monkey not to mention they're just completely unimaginative to look at lacking any real defining characteristics i mean at least make them female and give them some big titties and then maybe you've got something i still think the destruction side of things is pretty fun though and that idea of also being able to repair things is a pretty neat touch too considering the entire series up until this point has just been about blowing everything up sometimes you might get too carried away during combat and completely demolish a staircase for instance but it's just simply a matter of whipping out that nano forge and repairing it instantly you'll even need to repair generators and other machines throughout the game too so it is kind of cool how they've worked it into the gameplay loop and luckily too it seems to run pretty smoothly granted i was playing this on the pc with a kind of rig that wouldn't seem out of place in a bitcoin miner's lair but still man the fact that was able to pull this stuff off is impressive sadly though this might be the most basic entry in the series when it comes to the vehicles though and i think the only thing you get to actually control is a mech suit just kind of looks like the power armor from fallout it is definitely fun to use though and you're pretty much unstoppable when you're inside one of these things which kind of begs the question is why don't you just stain one for the entire game and wipe the floor with whatever is dumb enough to attack you a couple of times later you get to control a walker which is more like a giant mechanical spider than it is it's gorilla counterpart still though this thing's got a cannon and a lightning gun and again has that fantastic capability of just ripping apart everything that it touches but that's like all they could come up with i mean two vehicles for the entire game i really do feel too like this game is kind of a poor man's dead space i mean that over the shoulder viewpoint and skulking around these dark areas taking on horrific looking monsters just feels very similar there's even a very similar melee attack and a stomp move it's just that your health regenerates so quickly in armageddon that if anything's actually gonna kill you you pretty much have to put your controller on the floor overall look it's not hard to understand why people dislike this game so much and i don't think it's a bad game but choosing to take it in an entirely new direction after finally finding something that plays seem to enjoy with the third game just is so baffling i also think this just comes from that time period where if a game didn't get an 8 or 9 out of 10 from some huge publication then it was just written off as being a bad game this was really i think the apex of the life cycle for the playstation 3 and the xbox 360. gaming culture i'd argue was at an all-time high so for something to come along that wasn't this kind of unbridled masterpiece like arkham city or dead space too well then it just didn't cut the mustard this is the case with red faction armageddon you don't get off that easy and yet despite essentially killing the franchise off i have to admit i still don't hate this thing i can think of far worse third person shooters and i can also think of far worse games that came out in 2011. bringing the whole thing to an end i've got to say that overall i think red faction had a pretty good run it didn't get bogged down with a dozen sequels or crappy spin-offs and the fact that you can count every entry on one hand is something that's a bit of an alien concept these days you've got four games here that are unique and really different from each other and despite their faults they've lingered in the minds of gamers for years now and will probably continue to do so for the years to come a part of me kind of wishes that volition would remake the first game with like a new engine or something but then seeing how they're treating the new saints row well then maybe they should just leave it the hell alone i would settle for a spiritual successor though one that lets me shoot guys through solid walls or chase down fleeing security guards with an automatic shotgun we need to be moving right so if you're still watching well thanks for sticking around and let me give a final shout out to my sponsor steelseries steelseries makes some of the best gaming peripherals from headsets keyboards mice and gaming pads all synced together with a handy program that lets you modify the hell out of them i'm a bit of a stickler for high quality mouses and keyboards and whether you're playing a game that's 8 months old or 8 years old it makes a huge difference in how well something handles i would never recommend something that i don't use myself and i'm pretty stoked to be able to offer a discount to people looking at buying some new gear so just make sure to use that chad promo code gman at checkout to get 12 of your next order and as always thanks for watching [Music] you

Channel: GmanLives

Views: 1,049,329

Keywords: red faction, red faction guerrilla, red faction 2, red faction armageddon, red faction gameplay, red faction guerilla, red faction evolution, red faction all games, video game, red faction guerrilla gameplay, red faction guerrilla re-mars-tered, red faction guerrilla review, red faction ps4, red faction ps2, red faction 1, red faction 2 gameplay, red faction armageddon review, red faction 2 walkthrough, red faction 2 review, gggmanlives, gmanlives

Id: z6CPyvEXMg4

Length: 54min 24sec (3264 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 07 2022