A Martian HR disaster.
QUEST LOG #15: RED FACTION (PART 2)
Welcome back - if you missed the first part of this you can follow the link below. Spoilers ahead.
Another stealth section here and you’re posing as a doctor this time – the fun never stops. Everything inevitably goes to shit as per usual as you end up gunning your way through some labs. After a while you get interrupted by a little shielded bald bloke. He sounds like an evil Winnie the Pooh, so I’m not really sure what his deal is – other than experimenting on miners, apparently. Oh, and he’s called Capek… You chase him through a bunch of tunnels and en route you must kill lots of irritating creatures that Capek has engineered, as well as a bunch of guards. He keeps talking over the radio here and says you’ve strayed into his zoo. But guess what? You get another vehicle, and it’s an armoured jeep or sorts. This part is pretty fun, and involves running over lots of creatures, scientists, and guards. There are also a bunch of zombie-like miners, which are failed experiments. Gun ‘em down and move on. Take heed however, your jeep may get stuck in the terrain… a lot. There’s a bit of swimming coming up too – tiresome, but necessary to proceed unfortunately. You swim to a submarine base, which Capek rather gleefully informs you of, and he invites you to take a ride – you do. More underwater tunnels. One particular thing I do like about this, is that when you explode an enemy sub, the pressures of the water counters the explosion. It’s a nice touch.
You make it to the location of Capek’s base eventually and after trudging through yet more tunnels, you then come to a weird worm like monster which spits at you as soon as it spots you. A few rockets in its gob deals with that problem nicely. Unfortunately, there isn’t just one, but at least you know what to do. Once you’re in the base proper, it’s basically just endless killing and a bit of door opening – that is until you reach Capek’s inner sanctum. I wonder what it’s like to have an inner sanctum… My desk is in the hallway of my flat, so I can’t quite relate to him. Anyway, Eos explodes into the room after Capek reveals himself and her bullets even out the imbalance here, and after inserting enough of them into Capek, he flops to the ground. Careful not to let Eos die here though – she is vulnerable! Just as you’re about to end the little bastard though, she stop you. Apparently, Capek is the only hope of finding a cure for the plague that’s ravaging the miner population.
We need that antidote, Parker! If you’re not going to help, shut up!
Eos attempts to interrogate him, but the old codger dies. She then tells you to leave, so that at least someone survives to continue the good work. As the cutscene ends, a computerised voice tells you very loudly that you have sixty seconds to evacuate before the lab self-destruct. Out through the tunnels you go and the next thing you know you’re jumping onto at turret on the back of a jeep that’s waiting patiently for you. A miner drives this time and you can relax with a nice standard turret section. In case you couldn’t hear, that was the sound of my eyes rolling – although, to be fair, he drives more successfully than I have ever managed. After that, you’re directed towards more tunnels, and these are even more confusing to navigate – they’re also full of mutant rat things. After getting out of that hell hole, you overhear a couple of guys talking, and I’m pleasantly reminded of the little conversations between Stormtroopers in the Jedi Knight games. Unfortunately, you interrupt their little chat with your shotgun and after exiting the cavern, you emerge atop a cliff. There you jump on a cable car and cross the valley to reach the Communication Centre. Lots of honest to goodness shooting guards here, and after reaching the satellite control, you mash your palm on the keys Homer style, no dialing wand needed however. You’re ambushed then, but after a load more killing, you head off towards Missile Command. During the trek, you gain access to a few new weapons and are introduced to more well-armed and armoured mercenaries. Eventually you find another train, and this one is luxury – it has a chassis. Anyway, as you speed along the tracks, another train runs alongside filled with guards and as you’re having your little shootout, you hear that Eos is alive and well and has recovered the antidote formula. Great stuff. You disembark to more murder. This leads you to the missile control room, and it’s there that you… launch a missile. You must peg it again. Lots of running in this game - worrisome for an asthmatic.
You escape in the train, but it crashes, and before you even have a chance to check if you’re in one piece, Hendrix comes on the radio with another time limit. Good job Parker isn’t asthmatic too. Another vehicle section comes up, and you’re in charge of an APC this time – despite the actual experience of some of these vehicles being very similar, there is a rather impressive array of them available, and for the most part, the sections within which they are used are short and sweet, not outstaying their welcome. You drive this thing along what looks like Beggars Canyon, and you gun blokes down the whole way. This leads to the shuttle bay - some Die Hard 2 vibes here with the conveyor belt combat – not a bad thing. You enter what looks like a manhole cover after that and cower inside while the shuttle launches you into space.
You’re told that you must disable the planetary defence system before backup arrives. I’m sort of losing interest in the story around this point, and I think perhaps it could have been a little more condensed. Either way, you push on. You do have some slightly different visuals to enjoy (along with reduced gravity) in the level design in this section though, so not all bad. Colours other than red and brown – my jaw has dropped! The space station is more visually science fiction than the rest of the game, looking more like the Elite Force games - keeping in mind it’s a game about miners in space. Regardless, the aesthetics certainly shift from this point. After blowing up some computers, you hear that things are taking a turn for the worse on the surface. To make things permanent up here, you’re to damage the reactor. Some shit kicks off and the automated voice woman lets you know of another impending disaster as the reactor is about to blow. No rest is there… Time to hoof it to an escape pod.
You get a nice cinematic of the station blowing to buggery after that, and your pod darts out just in time. Phew! You crash back on Mars after that unfortunately, as you have to fight your way through yet more tunnels. You have a few miners on board this time, but they die incredibly quickly. You reach the mercenary base eventually and as you’re entering one of the airlocks, you hear laughing. That can’t be good, can it? No – you get gassed. You wake up in prison after that – fuck sake! The bloke in the cell opposite starts chatting away when you hear someone yell “RED FACTION”. This brave soul opens all the cells and gets killed immediately. Once again, shit and the fan have a reunion. You grab a gun and get killing again. The aesthetics shift again here, and it’s made absolutely crystal clear by the mercenaries’ décor that they are evil – if you didn’t already know. After popping every Merc skull you find, you eventually meet up with Hendrix and as he works on opening the way, you do some more shooting. The Merc leader Masako gets on the radio then and starts giving it large. Her guys kill Hendrix almost immediately then… that’s the least annoying character in the game gone. He should have stayed hidden.
You keep on killing (but now with revenger in your heart), and after crawling through ventilation shafts (Die Hard again) and a brief bit of gunship piloting, you find Masako in a gunship herself. After blowing this up, she jumps out and starts floating around the room, equipped with the same shield that Capek was using. She takes LOADS of bullets before dying but die she does. After that, you leave her corpse to rot and take a massive elevator down to find a big old bomb. Eos is tied up next to it, but she tells you to deal with the bomb first by using her circuit analyser. You use this on the bomb, and it brings up the disarming puzzle. Quite a weird one, and jarringly out of character with the rest of the game – but hay-ho, you can deal with this, can’t you? The puzzle requires you to enter a combination of either up, down, left, or right arrows, and with every mistake in the sequence, it resets. Not too difficult if you have a good memory for that kind of stuff, but a minute is a little tight if you’re a fuck up.
After you disarm the bomb, you get a cutscene with Parker getting too close for comfort with Eos. Just as you’re chatting, a gunship comes up to the window to threaten you. Just as it’s about to attack, a massive Earth Defence Force ship blows it up, and you’re now officially a hero, and Eos suggests you start dating now that you’ve got nothing to do. Slightly odd ending if you ask me.
Overall, Red Faction has been a blast to replay after all these years. The gameplay itself has aged pretty well considering. The story isn’t the most amazing thing to have ever been conceived, but the gunplay, variety of weapons, the interesting level design, the uniqueness of the Geo Mod system… these all add up to create a pretty decent game. One thing in particular that caught my eye was the iconography and graphical design of some of the in world signs and posters, there’s a pleasing and cohesive style in them, and they really add to the believability to the world. On top of all that, there’s multiplayer too. Unfortunately, I was unable to join any servers, and apart from a very small number, all they were empty anyway. You can host your own games easily enough, but there aren’t any bots, so unless you have enough chums, you’re likely out of luck. This is such a shame, because the multiplayer maps are diverse and well designed for quick and fun combat (à la Quake and the like) - they’ll most likely go unused forever more. Another little extra, besides the included trailer for Summoner and the option to watch the credits again is a little map called Glasshouse. Here you’re given some weapons and, as the name suggests, a glass house. You can shoot up the place and experiment with Geo Mod here. I spent wasted far too much time fucking about in this when I was younger… Don’t attempt to dig out the house with rockets, unfortunately once a certain amount of the terrain has been destroyed, the deformation stops working. Ho-hum. And one last thing, if you are going through the game for a second time, it’s fun to play with the good stuff at the beginning, so open the console and whack some cheats in (find them here).
For a middle of the road game that’s well over twenty years old, I can’t think of any real complaints about Red Faction. With a little bit of updating from the Dash Faction mod, it runs perfectly on modern systems and can offer a lot to both old and new players alike. Have you ever given it a go? Or played any of the subsequent releases? If so, what did you think?
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