This was one of the first shooters on the Playstation 2, and a lot of people tout it as one of the best. For the life of me, I simply can't imagine why they would say this. After spending some time with the game, I am exponentially disappointed by its many failures.

The storyline is nothing more than a simple rebellion against an oppressive government. I don't count plot too much against games that are simply meant to give you a way to blow people away for hours on end, but I've been spoiled by Halo and Half-Life. Shooters CAN have decent plots.

Gameplay is really the most important thing, though. On

the surface Red Faction seems to play pretty well, and I'll admit that for a while I was having fun. Your weapon selection is pretty standard fare (Machine guns, rocket launchers, pistols) but they're still enjoyable to use, if lacking in innovation. But some of the more subtle mechanics needed work. There are no checkpoints. If you want to make one, you have to manually save your game every single time. It gets annoying. The Geo-Mod engine makes your environments almost fully destructable, but you rarely have any real use for this function.

The worst flaw, without a doubt, is those damn stealth sections. Twice I had to go through two

long areas with no weapons except for a dinky little pistol. I had weapons beforehand, but they were taken from me BY MY OWN ALLIES. Why would I want to sneak past the guards when I have enough weaponry to blow away a third-world country? Not only that, but pistol ammo was impossible to come by during these portions. If there was a melee attack this wouldn't have bothered me, but unless you have a very specific, impossible to find weapon, there isn't. I died 50 times in a shootout just so I could find a guy with a keycard I needed. When I finally found him, nothing happened. You apparently

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need to kill him for his card, and I was out of ammo and without any means of getting more. In a nutshell, I could not progress in the game. That's when I turned it off and vowed never to play again.

I don't like to say the game has no redeeming value. I'm not quite that mean. The music is quite good, and the multiplayer is quite fun. But really now, you can get your multiplayer jollies elsewhere. The game only costs five dollars now, but after playing through the single player campaign, I feel like THQ should pay ME five bucks for putting up with it.

Score: 6/10