So here's
the thing.
There's a section late on in Red Faction that
took my breath away. I'd spent the past ten hours
fighting for my life in the depths of cavernous Martian
mines, in high-security research facilities and
oppressive office blocks. I'd fought guards and soldiers
and ferocious mutations. I'd seen hundreds of comrades
perish, but I'd survived. I'd escaped. All that was left
was to saunter off to safety on one of the vehicles the
rebellion had prepared. On the back of an armoured
truck, I emerged, blinking, into the strange outdoors.
And I looked around.
There's rock, and there's fog. In the distance, there's
a collection of mercenaries, mercilessly assassinating
anyone who dares to venture too close. Between us is an
enormous, gaping void of outer space, thick with dust.
The sky is a foreboding terracotta. And all I can think,
in spite of Ultor's evil plans, the mass-scale uprising,
the carnage and the chaos, is that I'm so very far away
from home. My heart sank. I should never have been so
naive as to think this would be my escape. All that lay
ahead of me was an inevitable, painful and harrowing
death.
In that moment, I became Parker. I was at the centre of
the Red Faction. I'd been fighting for our freedom, but
now, it looked as though everything was in vain. I shed
a tear for my loved ones. And I vowed to fight until the
very end.
Now then.
This is quite something. Out of all the games to have
that effect on me, I never for a second imagined it
would be Red Faction, an aged and largely
disappointing first-person shooter built on the
foundations of half-finished ideas and incomplete
technology. And yet, here we are, nearly eight years
later, that moment fresh as ever in my mind. There's a
lot to be said for emotional charge in videogames, but
here it seems wrong, unnatural, unintended. What's
behind it?
Red Faction
sure had its problems, but the surface levels
drip with a heavy, helpless atmosphere.
Because Red Faction doesn't really do atmosphere.
It tries to, sure, but somewhere between the
incompetent AI, bland visuals and uninventive storyline,
it resolutely fails. It's also a game of unfulfilled promises, a textbook old-school shooter that seemed to
forget it aspired to be the genre's reinvention. Who
else remembers their crippling disappointment regarding
the much-touted GeoMod technology, which purported to
allow players to blast their own ways through levels by
destroying the environment? Seemingly, Volition expected
players to forgive its inconsistent application early
on, and forget it even existed by the time the entirely
static later levels rolled around. Red Faction
set its sights high, then slipped achingly back to
mediocrity. Mediocre games don't do this to me. What's
going on?
Red Faction starts abominably. Cast into your day
job as an oppressed miner on a future Mars, your shift
ends in a splatter of spilt blood, as - for seemingly no
reason whatsoever - the entire security force starts
shooting at you after your buddy gets into a minor
altercation with one of the guards. It's a nonsense
opening, glossing over any logic in a dismal attempt to
thrust players straight into the action. This is a game
that cited the slow-burning unease of Half-Life
as a major influence on its heady ambiance. Goodness
knows what they were thinking here.
Thus begins a treacherous yet dull sci-fi dungeon crawl,
through monotonous underground networks, plagued by
badly-planned blueprints and texture issues. The first
couple of hours of Red Faction are woeful, but
something compelled me, spurred me on, something other
than the gradually improving level design. It's worth
noting that Red Faction is one of only two games
I've ever played through in a single day. What was it
that I found so captivating about this ugly and broken
shooter?
Maybe it's escapism. It's what the modern videogame form
does so very well, after all: taking us to places we
could never visit, positioning us in roles usually
confined to dreams. Red Faction's
ludicrous implausibility lends itself surprisingly well
to this, and the chance to rise from everyman to every
man's hero is what drives experiences such as this one.
As you plough through the Ultor facility in search of
your freedom, your reputation rises. People begin to
recognise you: "You're that miner from Sector M4! I
can't believe you've made it this far!" And it
feels good.
Or maybe it's my inexplicable love of 'Total Recall'.
Arnie's big dumb Red Planet excursion seems to be where Red
Faction draws most of its inspiration from, to the
point where not only the location but much of the actual
plot is lifted straight out of it. It smacks of a lack
of ideas, or even a stubborn refusal to think outside
the box. For many, it'd be off-putting. For me,
strangely, it sat quite nicely.
Never light
sparklers indoors, kids.
But why, of all of Red Faction, that one section?
While by no means the worst part of the game (that award
goes unequivocally to the 'sneak in and escort' section
halfway through, involving the stealthy kidnapping of a
man who enjoys walking into walls far too much for his
own good), it's not particularly better than any
other bit either. In fact, Red Faction remains so
consistently stale throughout that's it's rather
difficult to pinpoint any specific highlights. Manning a
submarine through an aquatic cave segment is somewhat
thrilling, and the set-piece where the escape pod blows
up provides for some agreeable thrills. But nothing
really stands out on its own merits. Not even this.
But maybe, just maybe, that's the key. In a game like Red
Faction, one that puts so little effort into
creating these moments for you, perhaps you go one of
two ways. Either you turn off, idly shooting away until
the end credits roll and you cast the game into a pit of
forgotten memories. Or you tune in, you engage, you make
the game your own. And, the more I think about it, the
more I become certain that's what I did eight years ago
in the back of a truck, heading towards my clouded
destiny.
Who is truly at the centre of this medium? Gamers have
long assumed that the community is at the heart of
online games, but what about the story-driven,
single-player experience? Most, I'd wager, would
consider it to be the developer, finely-tuning their
experience in order to manipulate their bitch, the
player.
Red Faction, to me, suggests otherwise. This is a
distinctly clumsy game, a heavy sack of lazy design,
wrapped in a colourful shroud of marketing deceit. But
it's not about them. It's about me. It's about my
engagement with this entertainment, this art, whatever
you want to call it. It's about getting caught up in
moments, about letting go of the mundane restrictions of
everyday life, and committing - for better or for worse
- to the world on-screen in front of you. It's about
rejecting one reality, and connecting with another.
So I became Parker. I shed a real tear. I readied my
firearm and, screaming, poured hot lead into the mass of
cold killers on the bridge ahead. I saved my friends
from certain doom, and I escaped that forsaken planet,
heading back to my own home. I was a hero, a real
fucking hero, and I wasn't going to let anything stand
in my way - least of all shoddy level design,
nonsensical narrative exposition or inferior technology.
Did a games developer create these important memories,
or did I? "A man chooses; a slave obeys," a
twisted suit would shout six years later, the focal
point of a game that tells us we will never, ever be
free from the developer's reigns.
I reject this. Are you a slave to the foibles of your
entertainment? Or are you that hero, fighting for the
lives of humanity with every last breath?
I know, from now on, which one I'm going to be.
A version of this
article originally appeared at Honest
Gamers.
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