The first thing that actually got us warming to Red Faction once we got a copy in our hands was the brilliant full-colour and highly detailed instruction manual inside the DVD box (oh yes, another DVD game)! Most people normally only glance at manuals very briefly in a rush to get the disc running but we spent just a fraction more time with this one cos it looked so well put together and we suggest you at least read the introduction and character bios as they set the scene for the story about to unfold before you.

Red Faction is set on Mars in the near future in and around mineral mines operated by the ruthless Ultor Corporation whose exploitive regime is focussed on profit at the expense of pretty much everything else. Miners lured from Earth to work in the mines by the promise of good money and adventure soon find themselves trapped in a hostile environment of exploitation and mistreatment at the hands of Ultor's vicious guards and cronies. Inevitably the miners decide enough is enough and, spurned on by the mysterious Eos and her band of rebels known as Red Faction, begin a revolt that kicks off right at the start of the game.

This is where you come in. As Parker, one of the luckless miners, you're thrust into the fray after witnessing the beating of a fellow worker and begin a fight for your freedom and your life that finds you battling various enemies and Martian creatures all along the way. What starts out as a simple 'fight your way out and escape' scenario soon turns into a much more intriguing adventure and has you unravelling a conspiracy surrounding the mysterious viral plague that has been infecting many of your workmates. The depth of this storyline with all it's twists and turns plus the huge, sprawling environments of the gameworld, as opposed to set individual levels, are what will keep you hanging onto your controller longer and longer just to see where the game will take you next. It's also why this game has been so favourably compared to Half-Life. They are similar in that they are both epic, story-based, single-player sci-fi adventure games.

Anyway onto the juicy stuff! By no means the only attraction in Red Faction but by far the biggest and most talked about is GEO-MOD which stands for Geometric Modification. Essentially this is the technologically advanced code that allows players to randomly and, in many cases, completely blow up objects and environments in real time throughout the game. As you progress you'll find areas where you need to blow holes in walls, floors and rock faces to find hidden areas, extra ammo, shortcuts or to blow your way around locked doors and sometimes you may even be surprised by hidden enemies ready to mow you down in an instant! It really is a fantastically new way of interacting with the gameworld but whilst GEO-MOD is actually incorporated into the game and vastly enhances elements of gameplay we just felt that it wasn't really exploited anywhere near as much as we would have expected. By far the most fun to be had with it is when you just stop for a while and start experimenting with the almost unlimited possibilities that GEO-MOD offers, especially in the multiplayer game! One thing though while we're on the subject – we found that there is actually a limit to how much environment destruction you can perform in the multiplayer game. Once you reach that limit the environments cease to respond to any further pounding and believe me – we tested it over and over and it happened every time! Anyway you'll have hours of fun playing around with it.

Another thing that Volition has managed to pull off quite miraculously in the finished game is to keep the framerate moving along at a fairly respectable 30fps. Many people who saw early preview builds of Red Faction were critical of the large amount of obvious slowdown and some were sceptical about Volition's ability to correct this in the finished product. While it's not the blistering 60fps of other PS2 games and there is a bit of noticeable slowdown in the splitscreen game during simultaneous environment destruction and the odd very minor example here and there in the single-player one it's great to see that the game generally runs so smoothly that you don't even think about it. Given the fact that GEO-MOD obviously requires all the grunt that your black box can muster Volition have done a marvellous job here! The other major gripe that people have had with recent PS2 games is slow loading times between levels. Well don't worry – Red Faction doesn't really have 'levels' as you know them and the loading that does take place all along the way is only short at around 10 – 25 seconds. The great thing is that the action is seamless and the game just simply pauses while a short load takes place and then resumes.

Gameplay is interesting in Red Faction due to the fact that you have more than one way to achieve goals eg. either going through doors shooting and dodging enemy fire or blowing your way through the side of a room and attacking from a different flank - the possibilities are numerous. However as the game progresses you actually face less and less situations where the blowing up of stuff is actually necessary or even possible. Having said this though there really is such a variety in the gameplay that this is probably a good thing as it doesn't just become a GEO-MOD overkill!