Red Faction...

So I got the game yesterday...and in the two hours that I played it I have to say that it's everything I hoped it would be. I liberated the first section of Mars that you have to liberate...but I think that whole section was set up more or less as a tutorial, because as soon as you move into the next section things get quite a bit tougher.

The damage system in the game is amazing. In case you didn't know, "Red Faction" features a damage engine called GeoMod. What it does is makes it so that you can destroy ANY "man made" structure in the game world...no matter how huge it is. Bridges?? Bring them down. Buildings?? Watch them crumble.

This part of the game showed itself as being insanely cool to me in one of the first missions I did last night. I was tasked with destroying one of the enemy refinery smoke stacks. I was told this would make it more difficult for them to process metals. Well, when I got to the smoke stack area, I uncovered what in the game is considered a "High Priority Structure." This is a building that if destroyed will do much more damage to the EDF (that's the enemy) than most other buildings. So I killed all the morons guarding the place and got to work on the smoke stack. I had it destroyed with only a few remote charges, but it was still standing. That doesn't matter though, because the building was destroyed enough to be considered destroyed. So then I went inside the OTHER building and started placing charges. When I came out and detonated them, nothing happened. I mean, there was an explostion but the building still stood relatively intact. So I went back in to look for more supports to blow up, and while I was inside I heard what sounded like things falling on the roof of the building. So I ran back outside just in time to notice that the smoke stack I had destroyed was no longer standing straigh up. Instead, it was leaning well over the other large building that I needed to destroy. I just stood and watched in awe as the smoke stack continued to lean, then finally, fell on top of the large building, destroying the entire thing in a cloud of dust. Amazing.

I haven't played the multiplayer yet...sort of. See, I was in the beta for the multiplayer for this game about 7 months ago. I was waiting for my friend Alex to get online so that we could explore the maps together.

I'm really liking this game so far though...it's awesome.