Red Faction (THQ, PC, MA 15)

By PETER ELEY

(Herald rating: * * * * )

Many PlayStation2 owners will already have played this game, and probably most thoroughly enjoyed it. Red Faction filled a niche in the PS2 catalogue as an intelligent, good- looking, first-person action game with a head-to-head mode reminiscent of the Nintendo classic Goldeneye.

Now it has been released for the PC, and this is a whole new ball game. For unlike the PS2, the PC galaxy sparkles with star-quality shooting games, and it has to be good to survive against Half Life, the many incarnations of Quake and Unreal, and the new king of the hill, Max Payne.

Fortunately, Red Faction hangs in there. The game itself is standard fare — assault rifles, machine guns, and grenade launchers. But it has some interesting elements which give it a new spin.

The main one is its Geo-Mod (short presumably for geography modifier) graphics engine. This lets the player blast away at walls to create shortcuts.

If you can't find the entrance, shoot your way in. This has some limitations, but it is an effective way of getting around for the temperamentally-challenged.

On the subject of getting around, Red Faction has armoured vehicles, light planes and submarines to commandeer, which again add to to the diversity of the game.

When the game was released for the PS2, much was made of the artificial intelligence. Enemies didn't just stand around wating to get shot, but dodged from side to side, resorted to subterfuge, hid, and ran off to recover if wounded. It's a great feature missing in many otherwise excellent games and adds to the reality.

Red Faction is set on Mars. You take the identity of a colonist-miner called Parker, who works in mines run by the monolithic Ultor corporation. One day the miners cry enough, and rise up in revolt.

Parker gets caught up in the conflict between Ultor and the radical Red Faction, although the storyline tends to get blurred by the constant action — a legacy of its console origins.

The graphics are moody rather than spectacular, and have a certain redness, which is only to be expected given its setting on Mars.

Red Faction runs smoothly on a Pentium 2 400 with 64mb ram, and needs a mere 8mb graphics card. This alone, plus the fact that it's a good, solid action game, should guarantee it a healthy level of sales.

peter_eley@nzherald.co.nz