Final verdict: C-
Final playtime: 6 hours
This is your average open world roam-and-capture-areas-using-violence game. It’s Red Faction, so you blow up the scenery a lot.
Yeah, that’s all there is to it.
The missions are all kinda bland same-old stuff. Defend X, Destroy Y, Escort Z.
Character development and plot is pretty ill-developed. The game’s opening sequence introduces the player character and his brother, only to instantly kill off the brother. This is supposed to give you a reason to fight against the game’s antagonists, the EDF, who killed him. However, since you never even knew him, and his brother (the person you play as) doesn’t seem to give even the smallest shit, this is hardly any incentive at all and you feel like you’ve been suddenly plunged into a world that you know absolutely nothing about, and care very little about the people you’re suddenly fighting for.
Voice acting is inconsistent at best, often with really awful accents that I can only hope are fake, because if some of those people actually sound like that in real life I feel terribly sorry for them.
But still, it’s satisfying and entertaining to blow up buildings with bombs and smash things to pieces with a sledgehammer. The movement and melee attacking play a little smoother than most games of this type, so it is at least relatively enjoyable to play and traveling doesn’t become all that annoying.
Combat is dull and lifeless. It just throws lots of enemies at you time after time with no variation. They just feel like a frustrating distraction from achieving the goal that you’ll inevitably reach regardless.
There’s no punishment for death. You simply revive at the nearest safehouse and go back to whatever you were doing. Usually whatever you were doing is also still done. I.e., you’ll start wrecking a building, die, come back, and pick up where you left off. There’s no challenge.
I know this review is short, but that’s really all I can say. The game is pretty two dimensional. You’re the downtrodden underdog saving Mars from the evil government which oppresses its people. For a much better version of the same story, watch V for Vendetta. This game’s only asset is its capacity for mindless destruction, and even that gets boring after a while.
Final verdict: C-
Final playtime: Maybe 6 hours or so