Red Faction Demo

It's the year 2075 and Earth is running out of minerals to sustain itself, which forces the corporations to turn their attention toward the closest neighbor: Mars. Here, miners make sure that the materials are extracted and refined, although they also have to deal with extremely harsh conditions, since Ultor Corporation (the company that owns the mine) is basically treating them like slaves.

Red Faction is a first-person shooter that tells the story of this corporation and the rebellion that starts in the mine, when one of the workers gets killed by a guard during a routine inspection. Using everything they had at their disposal, the miners kill their way out of the mine and start to plot the demise of the company, in order to make them pay and return home to their families.

Your character is one of these miners and you must help him survive along the way, as well as play your part in the rebellion against Ultor Corporation. Along the way, you get to explore Mars quite a bit, as well as take down a lot of enemy forces and find out the cause of “The Plague”, which is a mysterious disease that slowly kills the miners and turns out to be a product of their vaccination.

The most notorious component that's part of the game is the “Geo-Mod” graphic engine, which allows you to use the environment to your advantage and destroy almost everything around you. Thus, you can come up with many new strategies along the way in order to avoid direct confrontation, such as destroying access bridges, or blasting through walls to create alternative routes.

As far as the rest of the game is concerned, it plays out as any other first-person shooter, except for the fact that the weapons are a bit more futuristic and you get to explore some very interesting locations along the way. The enemy AI can get in you into trouble if you underestimate it, although you can easily outsmart it and avoid getting killed most of the time.

In the end, the destructible environment and the interesting mechanics it spawns should be incentive enough to give this title a try, but the background story should not disappoint you either, especially if you are a sci-fi fan.