Retro spotlight: Red Faction

Where Volition planted the seeds for what would become one of their finest games.

This column is “Retro spotlight,” which exists mostly so I can write about whatever game I feel like even if it doesn’t fit into one of the other topics you find in this newsletter. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

The Red Faction games are not subtle. Which is to their credit, really. We live in an age, after all, where people with corporate or pro-American Empire interests, or who are very much pro-police, are confused about exactly which machine was being raged against by Zack de la Rocha and Tom Morello. They’re right to think the music bangs, they’re just, let’s say, ignorant about what the music is about, which is odd given they should have intimate familiarity with the subject (It’s them.) So, the lack of subtlety for something like Volition’s Red Faction series is appreciated, especially in a medium like video games, where present-day fascists whine about MachineGames’ take on Wolfenstein and openly wonder when it got so political, anyway.

The lack of subtlety for Red Faction begins before you ever even start the game:

Image credit: Internet Archive

Rather than a hammer or a sickle, the raised fist of the game’s logo is carrying the tool of miners, a pick axe. “Red” is in the game’s name, the titular Red Faction is the name of the rebellious group of miners plotting to overthrow the mining corporation that’s working them to death and experimenting on them and destroying their lives, and the back of the box tells you to join the revolution while explaining that the better life promised for desperate workers tired of Earth doesn’t exist on Mars. The game opens with a video that showcases the guards hired by the mining company — guards decked out in military-caliber gear — inflicting violence on the miners, and doing so with glee. That intro also explains the conditions for everyone, so that it’s very clear that, in the first 30 seconds of actual gameplay, why a planet-wide rebellion begins when one unarmed miner is brutally murdered by a guard for basically saying “come on man I’ve had a long day let me get back to my room.” And it also explains why you shouldn’t show mercy to any of the guards who inevitably beg for it, either.

Red Faction is a series of games about workers taking the matter of their mistreatment by corporate and political powers into their own hands, to take their own power back and assert themselves as people with needs and rights and, again, power. There are some misses in how the games get there on occasion — the original Red Faction, for instance, very rarely incorporates this larger rebellion in a meaningful way, and is very much more the story of one guy’s attempt to get off of Mars in one piece as it happens to dovetail with the needs of said larger rebellion, but overall, at the time, this was still such a wild thing to see in a mainstream game from a major publisher. (At the time, THQ was publishing Volition’s games, before their bankruptcy and absorption by Deep Silver and then Nordic Games, which became Embracer.)

Red Faction wasn’t a game about one evil guy who had to be taken out in order for everything to go back to being The Way It Should Be, which too often happens whenever a game is trying to say something political or philosophical. Red Faction was about an entire corporation powerful enough to control a planet taking advantage of workers, abusing them, experimenting on them, murdering them, grinding them into dust literally and metaphorically. And how the only cure for such a thing was complete annihilation of that corporation and its power: you’re a little more than halfway through the game when you kill the kind of villain that typically would have signified mission accomplished, The Bad Guy is dead in a lot of games. Instead, things get worse from here, as the mining company in question gets even more desperate, and is willing to accept as much collateral damage as possible to even their own infrastructure in order to guarantee that the idea that the workers coming together against them could harm them does not survive nor escape.

The entire mining operation was built on exploitation, on cheap, replaceable labor that would work until it couldn’t any longer, at which point the worker had no more utility in the mines and would be killed or taken away to be experimented on. This is clear from the jump — well, the experimenting part becomes more obvious later — and therefore so are the reasons for you, as protagonist, to pick up a security baton and start slamming it on the head of the first guard to point a gun at you as you try to return to your bunk from your shift.

Gameplay-wise, Red Faction has plenty going for it, though, it’s not nearly as compelling or original as the stellar game that would eventually come out of this series, Red Faction: Guerilla. You play as Parker, a disillusioned miner who makes the split-second decision to fight back against guards who just killed a prisoner, and everything spirals from there. It’s a first-person shooter that, in many ways, is pretty typical for the time in how it plays. The Playstation 2 version launched in 2001 alongside the Windows edition; for the former, you’re probably going to want to enable the aim-assist, because the DualShock’s analog sticks (or maybe it’s 2001’s early-life PS2 programming) just weren’t up for the task of precision aiming, and it all feels a little slow otherwise even if you crank up the sensitivity. The weapons are mostly the kind of stuff you’d find in any other shooter, with a pistol, an assault rifle, submachine gun, shotgun, rocket launcher, sniper rifle, grenades, and so on. There are a few more intriguing options, like the Fusion Rocket Launcher or the Magnetic Rail Driver, which manage to be a little more sci-fi and more miner-oriented, but by and large the weaponry is the kind you could find without a far-future, interplanetary sci-fi setting attached.

It’s all of a piece, which is impressive even if Half-Life had managed to do the same three years prior. Still, no breaks in between chapters/levels, and just going from one area to the next, all connected, with you making all of these moves from place to place yourself instead of via cutscene, is notable. The thing that hurts a little bit, though, is that the Playstation 2 (or those developing on it) simply wasn’t ready to handle this kind of thing yet in a more seamless fashion. The load times between sections are extensive, and they’re also a regular occurrence: you might be going down a hallway and entering the next area without a real break, but you’re still frozen in time for 10, 15, however many seconds while that next area loads up.

It’s worth remember that Red Faction released in May of 2001, because Metroid Prime didn’t come out until a-year-and-a-half later. Prime, for those who remember, attempted a more seamless transition and exploration experience, and largely succeeded at it, too, by loading one room at a time, and causing the game to do its loading for the next area when you were opening up the door to enter it. You’d occasionally have to wait a couple seconds longer, but it felt like the door was just malfunctioning or taking its time instead of the game taking too long — an impressive magic trick, that, to achieve so much in terms of making the wait palatable and shifting the blame, by switching from doors and invisible loading and away from the very clear “Loading” progress bar that could even pop up back-to-back, say, if you had to turn around to pick up ammo or health or whatever that you left behind you in the other part of a room separated by an invisible wall.

If Red Faction had released a little later on, basically, maybe the technology would have been there to make these transitions more seamless than they were on consoles. Those innovations were in the future, though, in the short-term with titles like Prime, and more longer term with something like the Playstation 3’s Uncharted. Red Faction had the technology it had, though, and Volition did what it could with it. It also wouldn’t be nearly as annoying if this wasn’t also during the era of having to manually save everything yourself rather than relying on autosaves — saves, for those of you who remember the “speed” of PS2 memory cards, were not quick, and neither was loading one.

The cutscenes are also fairly 2001 — the voice acting gets the job done, but the syncing of what’s being said and how mouths move doesn’t line up well, and there are some extreme facial expressions on display on occasion that certainly express whatever feeling was supposed to be expressed, just in a real cartoony way. You have to remember, though, Red Faction came out one year after Perfect Dark on the N64, which utilized voice acting, too, but the mouths of characters didn’t move. This, too, was early days.

Which is to say that none of this is a direct criticism of Red Faction so much as a reminder of what the genre and games were like two decades back, so you know what you’re getting into when you travel back to a time when toggling aim-assist on wasn’t to counter a skill issue so much as compensating for limitations that were out of your hands. Making mouths move in sync with words wasn’t easy, and neither was animating the faces of more realistic-looking polygonal people, and Red Faction released during a transition period for all of this.

You’re going to spend most of your time in Red Faction traveling down corridors, firing at and killing progressively more heavily armed security forces. Sometimes those corridors are in a mine, sometimes they’re part of a laboratory, sometimes a corporate office. Sometimes you’re underwater, or in a cave full of ice, or surrounded by heavy machinery. You’ll occasionally pilot or drive a vehicle, a couple of which — like the submarine or the “Aesir” Fighter craft — should feel familiar to anyone who played the “six degrees of freedom” Descent games that Volition’s predecessor, Parallax Software, released for DOS and Windows in the mid-90s, as they twist and turn and move and hover and float in more directions than a person (or an APC) can. (In fact, the canceled Descent 4 ended up having a bunch of its ideas used in Red Faction, per Mike Kulas, formerly of Parallax and Volition’s president.)

The real innovation of Red Faction is its Geometry Modification system, or Geo-Mod for short. Geo-Mod allows for you to attempt to make your own doors, windows, escapes, and paths, rather than simply going the most direct route, or through the most perilous one. Basically, through explosions — whether from remote charges, grenades, or rockets — you can blast your way through rocks or walls or floors and find an alternate path that you yourself opened up. Early on, the game tags certain spots with symbols you can’t miss unless you aren’t looking at them, and blowing those up will reveal hidden tunnels as well as weapon and item caches. That’s one way to use the Geo-Mod system, but you can also decide that hey, you don’t want to figure out how to make this door work, let’s blow up the rocks next to it and walk right through the hole, or, I bet if I flatten out the rocks on that wall over there, I can jump over and escape through this non-obvious path, rather than the clear one. Use Geo-Mod to break into heavily guarded areas other than through the front door or the ladder that a bunch of guns are trained on.

It’s also just satisfying when enemies who fire rockets at you start to blow up your hiding spaces, causing walls and ceilings and floors to collapse, changing the nature of where you are and where you were hiding. And you of course can return the favor whenever possible, as well, but it makes for some enjoyable setpieces that would feel a lot more like any other game otherwise. And all in all the Geo-Mod system is what makes Red Faction feel less like it’s pulling from a bunch of FPS you had played a few years before, and like it’s something else entirely instead. What’s here isn’t as fleshed out or as satisfying as what would come in Red Faction: Guerilla, but you can say that about most games that aren’t Red Faction: Guerilla, too.

Between the Geo-Mod and how Red Faction looks on a PS2 hooked up through S-Video cables, the graphics and tech of the game is impressive. Yes, it all looks old at this point, but there was a real clarity to all of this (when viewed through S-Video), and there’s no denying that the ability to change the landscape and “build” your own tunnels and paths through destruction was impressive. It’s the same kind of impressive technological pushing that allowed Volition to develop intricate 6DOF games like Descent on DOS at a time when other FPS using the popular DOOM Engine couldn’t have one room directly on top of another room just yet, and looking up and down to shoot in other first-person shooters was just beginning. Like how Descent would eventually lead to the wildly impressive space combat sim Freespace 2, Red Faction’s innovations and focus on destruction would lead to Guerilla, which, like Freespace 2, remains a standout in the field well after its release.

Red Faction is widely available 22 years after its release. You can buy it on the Playstation 4’s digital store, and it also works on the Playstation 5. It’s on Windows through Steam, GOG, Humble, and so on. It’s not on the Xbox Series S|X, but that’s only because the original Red Faction didn’t release on Xbox — just the 2002 sequel, which released on GameCube, Windows, and Xbox one year after. Since there wasn’t an official remaster, it’s also not on the Switch. Still, being available via whatever Windows devices are powerful enough to play a video game from 2001 means the availability is a lot wider than for a whole lot of other games. And even if Volition is no more thanks to Embracer shutting them down, they’re going to keep those games up on storefronts like Steam, so that availability should continue.

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