Close your eyes and imagine as I go until told otherwise. You are a random joe traveling across the world looking for a job. You eventually turn your eyes on Mars. You get your ticket or what ever they use in the future and head up to the Red Planet. You meet your brother, he's part of rebel group to take down the EDF. He get's killed soon after you get there and you get the load he carried after his Death. Due to this you instantly get considered a Red Faction member and are forced to help them no questions asked.
If that sounds like fun to you, you'll like Red Faction.
I need to have more of a review than that so let's get started. The point of that last paragraph to let you know one important thing. The plot is rather bad. You arrive on the planet, and your brother gets you in trouble. From that point on you do everything you are told without hesitation. It generally goes down hill from there. I began playing not being able continue the game due to its poor story.
What sucks you in though is the destruction. The games main (and about only) real selling point is the destruction of buildings. You'll quickly learn upon close inspection that some of the buildings appear to be made of nothing more than chicken wire and Styrofoam. I'm not positive how mars is in the future, but the mars I know will rip those buildings apart without much hesitation. Don't judge the future I suppose. The future also has the ability for the building to stand on nothing but One to Two of the original support beams the building last had. By that time you either go make a sandwich until it falls on its own or you go and smash the last beam yourself and have the building crumble onto your head.
Why yes he is using an ostrich as a melee weapon
Making a sandwich isn't quite the best idea though if you are destroying enemy buildings. The enemies come in frequent numbers but aren't any danger for you and your mighty sledge hammer of doom (MSHD for short). The issue with enemies is the alert level. You can be driving around minding your own business, turn around a curve to wide hit a street sign and have everyone and their pet turtle after you. I guess that's a little overboard but not by much. It's quite common for you to not do anything wrong yet have everyone after you in a heartbeat.
The game is riddled with side missions that get rather repetitive very early on. The fact you are forced to do them doesn't help make it better either. Rescuing people under house arrest, gunning for a crazy fellow who looks like Mario to a small degree, and raiding bases is only interesting for so long before you start to wonder what the point of it is. From what I can gather a certain amount of side missions are mandatory to make the game last longer. When you put the main missions together you find out you spend little to no time actually pushing the story along. Your time is spent doing the same repetitive actions just to unwillingly push the story along.
The weapons include your basic futuristic destruction tools. Your god-like sledgehammer, a charge that causes an explosion, a rocket launcher which causes an explosion, a launcher with an even bigger explosion, a saw blade shooter with the optional ability to have those explode, and a gun that destroys what it shoots in an explosion of "Nanites". What I'm getting at here is this game likes when things explode. Thankfully they keep the exploding within certain limits that could make the game experience rather awkward otherwise. There are weapons that don't explode but why would you even think about using those? I guess it's funny to say that considering I rarely used anything that exploded. The weapon concepts are rather creative and fun to play with but they tend to think you want everything to explode. No you want to be able to destroy things just enough to watch it crumble down upon itself in an explosion of fun; Not fire.
For some reason the game decided to have an oddly large variety in vehicles. When I say that I merely am referring to the design. It rarely depends which vehicle you take. For the most part they all have all the same. Oh sure some have turrets that are supposed to auto-target the nearest enemy but that never works as planned. Each vehicle (excluding some large trucks) tend to go the same speed: Very fast. This is what generally causes the enemies to get angry with you for hitting their stuff on accident. They don't care how fast you go, in fact I found they like it when you go fast. I got to an enemy checkpoint and assumed going slow would be good, they won't get suspicious. As with a lot of things in this game, it didn't take long to figure out the slower you go through the checkpoints the angrier they become. From that point on I went as fast as I could go through them and trying not to run anyone over in the process.
Another thing you learn quite quickly is that the NPC's are useless. Now and then you will get reinforcements to help you fight. Which is great in theory. In practice it shows to be a nuisance more than helpful. They constantly get in your way, they die rather quickly, and best of all you lose moral when they die.
All in all the game has a huge load of flaws but the more you play it the easier it is to figure out that it's sucking you in. The game really appeared like how I used to play monopoly with my family when I was a child. It was difficult to start and I wanted to quit until I started ruling everyone with an Iron Fist. Then I would always near the end just to lose the Boardwalk and Rage quit from having to sit through that awful ending.
Recommendation: Rent it. The Multiplayer is possibly the best part about the game and even then it isn't that great. It's enough if you need a quick little game you have no intentions of playing past the first time.
