Finished Red Faction.
Alright, I'll try to look at it from objective 2001's perspective and as such it's pretty alright. It has a good sense of pacing that keeps the momentum going forward never getting bogged down in the mud, you never spend long in one place and periodically there's a fun but short vehicle section where you get to drive/pilot something for a while. Submarine and the flying fighter felt pretty nice to pilot but the land vehicles did not, you steer them with mouse! Especially the jeep felt really janky.
Gunplay while nothing special does its job. Weapons are a bit mixed bag, the shotgun for example is painfully slow and since it fires two rounds at once you get only four shots before having to reload and the damage doesn't really make up for it. Bad shotguns are punishable crimes in my book. Assault Rifle is okayish, primary fire is a short three round burst that is accurate but slow, secondary is full auto but not very accurate. Meanwhile Submachine Gun and Precision Rifle felt pretty good, though Precision Rifles slow bullet travel in longer ranges constantly caused silly situations with the later enemies who do like to move around rather sporadically.
No point to mention the story elements, it's an FPS from 2001, it's exactly what you'd expect.
There is some jank showing it's the first traditional FPS Volition made. Sometimes I was left a bit confused what exactly was I expected to do, for example there was this big security bot that the game very obviously wants you to push into an incinerator but the damn thing plain refused to follow me to the incinerator. But if you damage it enough THEN it suddenly happily follows you there. Also the game got pretty sloppy with enemy spawns during the latter third, couple times an enemy appeared from thin air right next to me.
And yeah, while GeoMod is neat it's unfortunately just a gimmick in the end. Couple times you need to go through something with explosives and there's a couple short alterate routes you can take that don't benefit you much. Probably missed some hidden equipment stashes too but that's about it. Impressive technically considering the game is from 2001, but it isn't much more than a curiosity in the game.
The absolutely worst thing about the game reared its head during the last third when mercs arrived to the scene. One of weapons in the game is Rail Driver and this funny little thing kills everyone with one shot, including you, and plenty of said mercs carry it. And not only that, it also shoots through walls! I don't know how many times I got one shotted during the game, maybe 20ish times? I hope you like to constantly quick save/load! Those mercs aren't cannon fodder even without that gun, they are accurate, have quick reflexes and do plenty of damage with other weapons too.
As such I soon noticed I was playing the game like I was playing Counter Strike, constantly twitching and moving around. Not something I personally enjoy, in fact I kinda hated the last third or so. Luckily it's not a long game, I think my save had about 4h 30min at the end. It doesn't count the reloads though, plenty of those. Somehow I finished the game on PS2 back in the day, that's something I wouldn't pull off anymore.
So yeah, as an FPS from 2001 it has its ups and downs and there is something about it that makes me more forgiving towards it than normally, but I think it's time for me to put this one down for good.