Skip to main content

Red Faction Blues

You are tasked with levelling an EDF controlled watch tower. Initally the alert status is green and you can easily sneak around the few guards and get up to the base of the tower. Your trained eye assesses the tower and you can see that a couple of strategically placed demolition charges will do the job. You lay the first charge and suddenly the previously sleepy guards wake up. The alert status goes to yellow. In yellow status the guards are aware of your presence and will try to seek you out. It gets hard to concentrate on placing your demo charges with bullets whizzing past you so you turn and shoot  the nearest two guards. These guys re-spawn almost immediately so you shoot their replacements. This jacks up the alert status to orange. The number of guards spawning doubles and you now have a firefight on your hands and you need to duck behind cover to recover from your wounds. Dodging and weaving you kill 4, 5, 6 more guards but they keep coming and then .. the alert status ramps up to red. The area is now flooded with shotgun wielding guards and a gunship flies overhead. You are now hopelessly outgunned. A couple of local insurgents have joined the fight on your side
but they are ineffectual in the face of such an onslaught. Your only hope of survival is to get into a vehicle and drive away as fast as you possible can all thought of demolishing the watchtower forgotten.

In my opinion the colour coded alert system in Red Faction just does not add to the game. It is like a Hydra in that the the more enemies you kill the more enemies spawn. This is a mechanic that would work well in a stealth game. Red Faction could work very well as a stealth game but the developer choose not to make stealth a viable option. The moment you swing a hammer or place a charge you are going to set alarm bells ringing and the whole thing snowballs. What you end up with is a wonderful demolition game hindered by a fairly crappy shooting game.

Comments

Cap'n John said…
One does wonder why quietly setting a packet of plastic explosive against a wall, while out of sight of the guards no less, would set off alarm bells in the first place.

A long time ago I thought I might be interested in the game Commandos, so I dl'd the tutorial and gave it a play. While initially it seemed very sandbox-like and appeared to allow the player a lot of freedom with what they could do to complete the Mission, if you did actually want to complete the Mission there seemed to be only one correct way to do so. Veering off that path by killing the wrong guards, even if none of the other guards saw what you did and even if you hid the body, the fact that you'd killed a guard somewhere on the level increased the alertness of all the remaining guards.

Have you checked out the GTA-like game called The Saboteur? It seems a rather interesting concept, and might prove more fun to play than Red Faction.
mbp said…
Don't get me wrong Capn John. THe demolition in RFG is so much fun that I am still enjoying the game its just that the combat is so annoying. Someone else suggested to me that the game is more fun on and "Easy" setting - I might try that.

Nope I haven't tried the Sabateur game. I'll keep an eye out of it.

Popular posts from this blog

My First Gaming Mouse: Logitech G300

I bought a gaming mouse yesterday a Logitech G300, here my initial thoughts. What is a gaming mouse?  There are a wide variety of devices available classified as gaming mice but a few features  seem common: 1. Wired rather than wireless: Although some high end models are wireless wired connections are just better and faster than wireless so most gaming mice stick with wired. As a bonus wired mice don't need batteries so the mouse is lighter.  2. High response rate: 1 to 2ms response rate so the mouse immediately responds to input.  2. High DPI. Gaming mice invariable boast high DPI numbers from 2,000 DPI upwards. This makes the device very responsive to the smallest movements.   3. Adjustable DPI . High DPI improves responsiveness but reduces precision so gaming mice generally allow you to adjust the DPI down for precise work such as pulling off headshots in sniper mode. Generally the mouse allows dpi to be changed on the fly by pressing a button.  4. Extr

Android Tip 3: Sharing a Folder between multiple users of an Android device

Android has allowed multiple user logins for quite a while now. This is can be very useful for tablets which are shared by family members. Normally Android erects strict Chinese walls between users preventing them from using each others apps and viewing each others files. This is a useful security feature and ensures your kids don't mess up your work spreadsheets when screwing around on the tablet and should also prevent them from buying €1,000 worth of Clash of Candy coins on your account. Sometimes however you really do want to share stuff with other users and this can prove surprisingly difficult. For example on a recent holiday I realised that I wanted to share a folder full of travel documents with my wife. Here are some ways to achieve this. 1. If you have guaranteed internet access  then you can create a shared folder on either Dropbox or Google drive. Either of these has the great advantage of being able to access the files on any device and the great disadvantage of bein

Portal 2 two screen coop on one PC.

I mentioned before that I intended to try Portal 2 in "unofficial split screen co-op mode. Well split screen on a small computer monitor is a recipe for a headache especially when the game defies gravity as much as portal. However a minor bit of extra fiddling allowed us to drive two seperate screens from one PC. The Steam forums describes a complicated method of doing this that I couldn't get working so this simpler method which worked for me might be of use to someone. 1. First I followed the instructions in this post to get split screen multi-player working: http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1847904 A minor issue not mentioned is that you need to enable the console from the keyboard/mouse options menu I am using keyboard and one wired Xbox360 controller as suggested. Getting the controller to switch to channel 2 was tricky at first but as Chameleon8 mentions plugging it out and in again during loading works. The trick for me was to do the plug / p