I dunno why these videos make me so happy. But, they do. The idea that some dude about my age on the other side of the globe was enjoying these games as I was 20 years ago is heartening . Cheers from the US.
Same. I had to make due with the Red Faction Prima guidebook since I couldn't afford a PC that could play the first game. Finally being able to play the game blew childhood me's brain.
What baffles me about Red Faction is how Geomod 2.0 was never fully expanded or upgraded. It's the kind of engine that gave Frostbite a run for its money. Guerilla really did push things to the next level in 2009 and is still a massively underrated game. Instead, the series went into obscurity and destructible environments have been regressing since then. Lots of missed potential there.
@LabRat Knatz You'd think so, given the hardware improvements. Though I'm not sure if the engine needs to be licensed to other dev teams. Seeing how lacklustre Battlefield 2042 is with its stripped levolution system makes you wish for Geomod 3.0...
I think developers favor realistic graphics over impressive physics. It would be very difficult to have the graphics you see in AAA games today with detailed destruction. Graphics tends to sell the game more and you could always put in a scripted destruction sequence for the trailer. It's very disappointing.
Its because such a feature that isn't the main selling point of the game (destroying environments) is a huge waste of resources. Unless another game comes along and incorporates environmental destruction as a key part of its gameplay and story, then there really isn't a need for it to be in the game.
@YRU Triggered? That's the story i heard years ago. It would've been too much for whatever system was running it. Keeping track of all the pieces of geometry and all. I loved the Mercenaries games tho. I was hoping games would at least be able to keep up with that level of destruction. But as someone else mentioned, resolution sells.
Fun fact about Red Faction: Guerilla. The building physics that the Devs created were so realistic, that they had to hire on an architect to help them create buildings that didn't just crumble under their own weight.
Interesting! If anyone played the c2000 anime-inspired action game "Oni", it also had its buildings designed by actual architects with much emphasis on how exactingly real they were; down to the dimensions of stairwells and width of hallways and so on. It's pretty obscure, but one of very few such examples I can think of. Anyway, unfortunately it kind of sucked, and the maps were very awkward with many aspects that just didn't play well. Turns out proper real-world architecture and interior design are rarely fun in a videogame. There's actually a *huge* difference between map environments/structures that are strict 1:1 real-world replicas, and maps that are highly _realistic,_ but still designed around player movement, flow and gameplay. It's a balance. Too much emphasis on realism and you end up with examples like Oni; where buildings feel "off" and awkward to navigate in-game precisely because they're designed for the real world and that just doesn't translate well to a game... Although exacting real-world architecture can work for things like walking sims/exploration, it's rarely good for the vast majority of games, particularly action oriented fps. Too little realism in architecture though and you end up with surreal, abstract maps; like Doom 1 and 2 for a couple good albeit dated examples. The maps may flow well and be fun to play, but you'd never mistake them for actual places. They make little logical sense and are not even remotely plausible as real architectural designs; more like the vague idea or concept of a place rather than a place itself, if that makes sense. Any resemblance to some structure that might actually ever exist is merely incidental to their design. Later games like RtCW get much more realistic as plausible structures, but still leaning very heavily toward the gameplay. I like to use the Stalker games as prime examples of excellent balance between very high realism and gameplay; the zone itself, but moreso the actual buildings which are architecturally realistic enough to be plausible and feel genuine (indeed most are direct copies from existing real world structures) but, and this is the key, with their floorplans and dimensions altered and simplified to accommodate the gameplay. Damn this ended up way longer than I intended and went way off on tangents so I'll end it here.
9:51 Hi, I wrote the music and did sound for the first three. Just wanted to say we really really wanted to have ties to the original Descent series because this game started in development as Descent 4. The problem was we were at the time with THQ but Interplay owned the rights. Thanks for making this!
I really appreciate everyone who worked on RF1 and made it what it was. Any chance you remember the RF1 multiplayer Modder debacle (patch 1.3! 1.3!), or the RF2 even being a thing debacle? RF1 is still one of my favorite games. The maps for multiplayer were the bomb. I made maps for RF1 and continued all the way up until about 2014. Some of the highlights of my early life were those maps we played including the one's I built. I've made lifelong friends because of the ability to map.
@@FreelanceDev4life Thanks for those memories! The one stand out memory for me was having to finish Red Faction 2 AND Summoner 2 audio myself within one month of each other!
42:25 pro-tip: use the nano rifle, the nano rifle desintegrates things, literally, if you aim at one of the gunship wings, it gets desintegrated, the gunship immediately loses control and crashes into the ground with entertaining results
Clipping the wing off a gunship with the nano rifle and watching it lose control and crash is one of the most satisfying things you can do in that game. I always relished the opportunity to do it.
Geomod 2.0 is worth an entire 54 minute video on it's own. It's crazy to me that they had this sort of technology running on the Xbox 360, it's incredibly complex and accurate. The entire thing is based on a stress system, I've seen building come down from it's own vibrations, you can hear things creaking almost ready to collapse. It really is incredible. The closest thing I can think of would be Just Cause 3 and 4, teardown might be technically more superior but it's using a whole different type of rendering. Games like Battlefield use an entirely different solution to destruction, where pieces will "disappear" and then the new broken assets will spawn with a physics simulation. Geomod 2.0 is completely dynamic, if you took that sort of simulation and increased the density of objects it would be glorious.
Devils Advocate, you can notice some weird stuff like second floors supported by one corner post, still it was fucking amazing for the time and hell even still today. I bet if they had kept working on it it would make Battlefields destruction look like Lego in comparison.
You can find the old dev diary vids on YT where they talk about the tech, it's pretty amazing. RF:G Engine of Destruction (Red Faction: Guerrilla Dev Diaries) - ua-cam.com/video/Mt-J5FMmy9I/v-deo.html
I'm way late here, but I'll just add that people greatly overestimate how demanding complex physics is on computer hardware. The bottleneck is just about always graphical rendering to try and get light to behave 1% more like reality. I used to program games for a hobby and I could get reliable physics results with hundreds of rigid bodies running smooth as silk on a pitiful laptop in 2004. This is why AAA games and creativity seem to be opposed. You spend all your budget and programming effort just to max out the visuals. And finally one stealth problem with advanced physics like this is that as your world resembles the real world more in complexity, the man hours required to build that world go up tremendously. You introduce whole new kinds of bug problems, design problems, and gameplay problems that don't exist when practically everything is a stationary mesh. Unless the complexity is a serious selling point for your game, it can be way more trouble than it is worth.
It infuriates me how a game from 2009 proved that hardware could handle large open-world destruction with very realistic physics and yet since then only teardown has even come close. A whole 13 years later
i think for a lot of developers its not necessarily a performance issue, but a design issue so that players don't end up turning everything into flatgrass or no man's land and destroy the rest of the the game
@@MrJekken also seems to be a matter of big publishers rushing games out nowadays. I mean, imagine if battlefield 2042 tried to have big destruction in it again amoung all the bugs and glitches it already has lol
I wish we got a map editor and community features that Halo 3 had. The campaign could use some love too, with something as simple as DLC weapons in the main story and the reconstructor. Maybe some day the franchise will get the love it deserves, but I sadly doubt it.
@@alexanderrobins7497 well with gorrilla you DO get its multiplayer stuff in base game b ut ya agreed i want a few of the unique things from the dlc in main.
Guerilla was definitely my favourite game of the ps3 era. Amounts of fun I had destroying the biggest buildings on the map was unmeasurable and made me finish this game at least 3 times in a row first time I got it: on normal, hard and insane gradually and funnily enough first playthrough was hardest for me as later I had much more tricks up the sleeve and much better survivalibity even with difficulty cranked to the max. And honestly being in constant sprint jumping from vehicle to vehicle leaving only burned frames while edf was tearing everything I tried to hide behind, it was best rush I felt playing video games. Unrepeatable experience, all my respects to volition forever ✌
As someone who worked on Red Factin Guerrilla and Armageddon I really am glad to see this. I can maybe shed a little extra light on some of this. First off the guy who made the Geomod 2.0 worked is a wizard, his name was Eric Arnold and that dude spent like 5 years straight making that the best physics system as well, there were many more people who worked on it, but I remember he was the guy kind of at the core of the system. We had guys from Havok, the physics engine coming in every month or so trying to help us push the goal, it was freaking crazy, but the end result speaks for itself. The change from RFG to RFA came from a number of places. A. The land kind of sucked to work in, it could only be done as a height map. B. It was costly to render. C. It was not destructable. D. Because we had massive areas we couldn't have densely packed areas or areas that were really fun to destroy. So the idea was move the game under ground, remove the terrain, make the map out of objects (the rocks and stones all around) and then create better buildings to make a more fun game. You can see how it worked, and judge iif it was the right move. While I worked on removing the terrain, I don't feel that Armageddon is as good., but that's my opinion. (And I wasn't there at the end either). The original story for Armageddon was different as well but then Danny Bilson joined THQ and that's probably a story for another time (Spoiler, he also killed Johnny Gat in Saints Row 3, so... yeah... Booooooo) Hopefully that sheds some light on the story behind the games, I'm sure I could think up more tidbits, but hope you appreciate a look behind the curtain.
Playing Red Faction Guerilla was especially funny in French, because "EDF" is *the* (yes, single) provider of energy in France, and they are assholes :D
There really was actual red faction like expirince .in early 1920s 1930s at some of the mines in Virginia . The mine corporations at that time owed everything houses stores people and only paid in company credits and actual money. And had little to no regard for the miners. Some of those corporations got hostile with striking workers so for retribution blew up the mines and foreman's quarters with dynamite.
Au Québec ce serait de jouer contre Hydro Québec, l'entreprise nationalisée qui a le monopole de l'électricité ici et qui est aussi une foire aux trous de culs
@@virginiasaintjIt's not a monopoly, it's literally run by the state since they nationalised energy. A monopoly is fine when the government does it apparently
Reading an article about RF3 before it released, the devs had to learn actual architecture because the engine was so realistic the buildings wouldn't stand until they learned how to really make buildings stable.
Learning about that always made me giggle so much, just the idea of loading in the map and watching every building around you immediately become toothpaste.
It id clear the developers were passionate about FRG. I only wish it got more post release support. The remaster does not look like it is worth buying again unfortunately.
@@alexanderrobins7497 its definitely much cleaner looking, I bought it on sale on ps4 for like 5 dollars solely for the multiplayer demolition mode that I just play by myself with 4 characters.
A few years ago Volition did an hour-long live stream with some of the original devs of Armageddon. Definitely worth a watch if you want some question answered about what happened with that game. The short version is: lesser budget (publisher THQ would go bankrupt a short while later), low on time, pivot on story & purpose (an exec wanted aliens).
@LabRat Knatz its a little worse than that - it was a promoted THQ executive that wanted to make an RF cinematic universe - and Aliens and Zombies were in massively in the time period - the guy at THQ sent them a letter about getting Aliens in - Volition took it as a suggestion and carried on working, few months later to the promotion of the THQ guy they got another letter which was basically ''did you think i was fucking kidding about the Aliens'' - and then they took Volitions time to finish the game after demanding a sweeping change to 6 month deadline. Insane
@LabRat Knatz What did Syfy do? I looked them up cause I had never heard of them but it looks like all they did other than Red Faction is De Blob 2. Just curious why they're so hated
@@callumdointhings5 People like to hate on SyFy because it used to be a great sci-fi channel when it was spelled properly and devolved into utter garbage.
I played Red Faction at a young impressionable age. Seeing a building fall apart from abuse and crumble due to physics blew my mind. This and Mercanaries 2 made me really think every game HAD to have destructible buildings.
It was the first and unless there's something else equivalent out there still the only sandbox fps. Red faction 1 let you tunnel out of areas of you just didn't like them and had the explosives to do so.
Mercenaries 2 was subpar to Mercenaries 1 in every possible way, idk why Lucasarts gave the promising franchise away after the success of the first game 🤔
Great to see the Red Faction franchise being covered in such depth. I remember how much I played the first game, and how disappointed I was in the second one when I played that. Going back to RF2 a few years after the first time I played it, I was able to see some of its plus points, like it's sense of humor. Also the magnet gun in RF Armageddon was a simple concept but I had a ton of fun using it throughout the game. This video brought back so many great memories of playing through these games, thank you for making it!
My favorite part about Red Faction on PS2 was the fine aim mode. It had this weird ability to make every weapon hyper accurate, yes including the pistol, but also yes including the shotgun. Yes. By holding "Up" on the D-Pad to enter fine aim mode, it somehow made the pellets of the shotgun condense into a fine spot, effectively giving you "slug" like accuracy and damage numbers. Especially useful during Multiplayer and headshotting across the map with the shotgun lmao
I'm not a big fan of open world games really but Guerilla is one that genuinely feels like it suits the formula so much. I played the game for so many hours just causing chaos and making my own fun. I think that's the sign of a great open world game and it's such a shame that they didn't continue in this direction. I feel like the current market would be way more receptive than people were in 2009.
Hearing someone talk about RF: Guerrilla and NOT mention the shenanigans you can pull off with the singularity bombs just feels like a sin all on its own
Or the unicorn that shot rainbows of death from it's ass while playing a fart sound in Armageddon. Figured that would have gotten an honorable mention. That and the ostrich hammer from RFG MP were two of my favourite wacky weapons from any series.
the first Red Faction game me and my cousin would just go onto the multiplayer mode put a bunch of bots in and go onto that 2fort style level and mess with the destruction, we actually made a large tunnel to see how far we could go and damn even now I'm surprised by how far they let you blow up the rock until you reached the edge.
One of the biggest mysteries in gaming is how Red Faction Guerrilla came out in 2009 and since then another game has not matched it in terms of open world fun and destruction its crazy, proud to say I was the 1st person to platinum the PS4 version back in 2018, well according to PSNProfiles I was anyway.
i never understand people who complain about red faction guerrilla. they complain its too repetive, like bro some of those later missions are insane even on normal mode, let alone higher difficulties. sure its not the lonegest game but holy shit dude every part of it is pretty and choatic and fun. whats not to love
@@Cuckie1996 Though fun RFG fast becomes monotonous rinse and repeat chore, dull color palette only enhances the feeling. I haven't played Saints Row games myself but at least those have color and seemingly a quite lot to do.
Really sad how Armageddon ended up. Going back to Guerilla format with Armageddon's guns and powers (with most notably Magnet Gun) would be a great step forward for the series. Blowing up a chunk of a building then tagging enemy vehicle and watching that chunk hurl towards it never got old for me. And nano forge that allow to completely wreck the place then rebuild it if you gone so far and destroyed something important greatly increased the fun factor. Armageddon was not a bad game. It was just bad successor to Guerilla.
I actually had a metric ton of fun with Armageddon and it remains one of my favorite third-person shooters. It’s dumb, yes, but it’s actually a very well-paced campaign with good weapon, enemy, and objective variety. It’s just the fact that the environments look same-y and it doesn’t really open up often enough that hurt it. Otherwise it’s just plain fun, IMO.
I would love to see a Lost Planet Retrospective. As someone who didn't get to experience the older titles in their prime I'd love to see someone reflect on them.
1 was exceptionally amazing at launch, though it's probably not great now. 2 was one of the best co-op experiences I've ever had, I replayed that one so much. 3 was fun until the story kicked off-- would have been much better as a blue collar space miner simulator imo. As soon as the plot started moving I started losing interest.
1 and 2 were rad as hell. I think 2 wins out because of the different environments/factions and coop, but 1 was still really great too as its own thing. 3 didn't keep my interest and I unintentionally dropped it years ago and just never bothered to get back into it.
If I recall correctly, Armageddon's original premise was that your character could travel between the scattered settlements freely, whether it be above ground or below it, free roam was pretty much on the cards. And whilst at these settlements, you could rebuild/upgrade their defences however you liked, pretty much like a horde mode of sorts. I wish we got that game.
I miss the Red Faction series so much, to this day no shooter has ever blown my mind the way the first two Red Faction games did back in the day, damn i wish they would bring back this series.
I’m shocked you didn’t spend more time talking about how you can attach the remote mines from the first game to people and they run around and panic. I remember laughing way too much at that
Yes! And I remember tossing a mine on a sick miner on a hospital bed and blowing him up from the next room. I felt so guilty which gave me the idea for a guilt-based video game.
I used to do that in multiplayer. I'd stick a bomb to my brother's back, and he'd run around with a shotgun dunking on bots. Then he'd die and I'd detonate the bomb and take his killer out with him.
I replayed the first game last year and what stood out to me is how the entire arsenal changes in the 2nd half of the game, you get harder more annoying enemies but you also get massively powerful weapons of every kind and that's an interesting approach. For a first person shooter guns are the gameplay, so to provide a whole loadout of new gameplay to attack the difficulty with feels unique and rewarding, it's not perfect it's just something that stuck with me.
Red Faction 2 is one of my favorite games of all time. Mainly because of the countless hours me and my family would spend playing. I'll always love this series.
I played the original Red Faction on PS2 as a rental, and fell in love with it. Later, I purchased it for PC and found out that you can dig like 8x as far into the ground/walls. Also, there was a map editor for multiplayer and it was pretty neat, too!
The first red faction is one of my favorite games. I just never cared for any of the sequels. The sequels are all too slow moving for me. I really like the variety of the first game with stealth sections, vehicle sections, zombie sections, escort sections, puzzle sections, and maze sections. I was really impressed with how easy it was to fly the ship vehicle.
Have to say GmanLives It’s without a doubt my favorite channel to watch He replied to a comment I made a few months ago about him reminding me of my brother who is now gone for almost 3 years And watching these videos reminds me of the time where we would play older games or games we grew up on and just pick it apart with it being good or bad Still my favorite video from gman was him going through the 007 first person shooter games Recently picked up some ps2 games and I can’t wait to have the memories fly back at me
When a woman says "You do not get off that easy" I say "You do not know me" I also did like Armageddon a whole lot when it came out. The snarky protagonist was boring, but the mayhem was fantastic. Zero percent horror, one hundred percent power fantasy
Saddened by the lack of mention of incendiary grenades in 2, the people running around on fire before they died and flopped was priceless. Also the troopers in full plate armor are SUPPOSED to not take much damage from bullets.
Campaign aside, me and my friends had so much fun with the RF2 couch co-op. The amount of game setting customization was insane. You could turn on infinite ammo, bots, you had a ton of character models to choose from. It was just a blast.
For me...Red Faction 1...what rubs the nostalgia so well...was the multiplayer. The campaign was okay. The death match with the nuke weapon was epic. The engine allowing you to blow out walls behind campers and stuff like that made it probably the last deathmatch game I enjoyed and haven't looked back at that gameplay type since...
I had dial up internet back when I played this game so I probably couldn’t have played much online either way but I’d didn’t even know there was online 😂 I remember playing with my brother though and we’d always just end up mining tunnels to eachother and make little bases lol, good times.
Surprised you never even mentioned the magnet gun from Armageddon once. It's definitely my favorite gun to use with the destructible environments. Imagine Guerilla's open world style gameplay, but with Armageddon's weapons and powers, would have been so much fun! Sad we never got another game, destructible environments of this scale is heavily missing from the current AAA market of today.
Thankfully Teardown has gain enough attention to get people wanting destruction in their lives. AAA games dont like to take risks anymore, so we can only sit and wait for indie devs to create new and exciting games with fun mechanics - then AAA would use those mechanics if they become popular enough, that seems to be the game industry circle of idea-life these days lol
Love the Red Faction series, which peaked in epicness with Guerrilla. I want a new one with modern tech, more verticality, and better/bigger physical destruction. I cant believe more games haven't tapped into that. Teardown is pretty wild, but I want higher fidelity graphics and a more fleshed out campaign like a Red Faction game could bring.
This was the first and about the only FPS where I had fun in vehicle sections. Especially the sub combat was superb, slow moving torps and enemy subs imploding, incredibly immersive.
multi-player in RF 1 was the best, me and mates spent hours finding secret areas. I remember one map having windows looking out over a canyon, using the rocket launcher you could dig round a window, then make holes down the side to get to the bottom of the canyon.
@@kupokinzyt In exchange, one of the last areas in Guerilla is called Mt. Vogel, named after the CEO of Ultor who acts as the main antagonist of Saints Row 2. You can also find a dark audio file where Shaundi is distressed and freaking out as police sirens and gunfire ring out in the background.
I always thought they took place in the same universe especially after SR2 because the Ultor corporation and those spec ops dudes who kinda look like EDF troops
Actually loved Armageddon. It's a simple but really, really fun guilty pleasure shooter. The magnet anchor gun was so fucking entertaining - flinging chunks of buildings at enemies and demolishing even more of the level in the process never got old. The one thing it undeniably got over the Guerilla is that you always had stuff to destroy, no need to go find it, it's always right around the next corner. Though the original would ever be in my heart as THE Red Faction game. Also the music in OG Red Faction is one of my favourite OSTs ever made.
Red Faction Guerrilla was a hidden gem. When you think about proper destruction and respective physics in a game environment RF:G is exactly what comes to mind, not "levolution" in BF4 that is essentially one big script to change the environment or tearing down individual programmed "chunks" of wall like the type of destruction we see in most modern day shooters, not just battlefield. It's sad that we've moved away from free-form destruction ala Crysis/BF:G and more into scripted destruction that doesn't look natural yet is regarded as visually stunning nonetheless because it's all that exists in mainstream gaming.
RED FAAACTION! This game was my shops love when we were deployed. I managed to get on a t1 line to get this downloaded when I was put in the Baghdad airport. I spread the game among my company like wildfire. We would have like 16 person deathmatches with this game. I think anyway. It was over 16 years ago.
I remember my dad played through the OG Red Faction as well. When he got to the disguise part, I didn't understand how he was able to maintain his cover for so long. He said all you have to do is look down at your feet when you have to get close to a guard and they won't be able to recognize your face. I didn't believe him (it sounded ridiculous to me at the time) but sure enough it seemed to work for him!
I went through very much the same experience, my friend had a lot of random PS2 games that he picked up from pawn shops for dirt cheap and this was one of them. Although in my case I'm confident it took me at least two dedicated sittings to beat, there were parts where my stupid ass who had basically nothing but Goldeneye and Perfect Dark as far as genre experience (at the time) definitely struggled to figure out what to do... Hell, my most distinct memory of it is getting stuck somewhere and making use of the destructible environment to tunnel my way through a building. Not sure if the floor I needed to reach was above or below but I'm fairly certain there was verticality involved because of the insane amount of time/explosives it took. All because there was probably one door leading to a stairwell or something that I just couldn't be bothered to find, and I think it's safe to say that if not for the engine allowing me to do what I did to progress I probably would have given up on finishing it entirely.
Ain't that the truth. I managed to spend the better part of a year beating Star Wars Racer when it came out, and on a revisit this year I had it done in an afternoon...LOL
I remember playing the first one back in the day, and they still had the tech demo level in there. The glass house. I was so amazed at the glass details back then I played that a fair bit... and ofc blew a tunnel under it.
I used to multiplayer Red Faction with mates back in the day. They never knew about the railgun scope. Took ‘em a few sessions to figure it out how I was killing them halfway across the map 😝
Man, I played the hell out of the Red Faction games, the first one easily has my favourite railgun out of any FPS I've ever played and the local co-op on the PS2 back in the day was immense fun. I remember a friend of mine was kind enough to buy the first game for me as well.
Do you remember the one MP map that if you blew up certain walls you could find hidden power weapons? I remember it being a factory setting or something like that 🤔
@@Pudding175 Yeah, it had a central hall with corridors running above it on the sides and stairs on each end. I remember blowing the smallest hole I could in one of the cavities and just hiding with the railgun, sniping my brother with it through the walls.
48:22 Trying to find out what this game was lead me and my Google search history on a very strange path. It's called *Castle Knatterfels: Curse of the Zombie Krauts* for the curious out there.
There's a bit of horror near the start of the first game when you realize all the guards keeping the miners working really are equipped with high-tech cattle-prods. And judging by what Parker says in that intro they weren't exactly afraid to use them. The engine and probably some assets for Red Faction 1 were actually originally designed to be a part of the Descent series before Interplay canned it, and if you look closely throughout the game you can see a lot of textures and assets that look like ones from Descent 3. Considering how Outrage and Volition still had close ties, it's certainly possible some art could have been lifted right out of it when they were still developing the game as Descent 4. Personally I really loved the music in the first two games with that really eclectic, experimental mix of electronic and symphonic parts, and a few elements of prog-rock thrown in too. Not always the sort of thing you'd expect to work (especially in the second game) and yet it never seems to miss a beat. It kinda stands out for me even compared to other soundtracks from the time, just because of how well it manages to mix all those influences, and still have them heard. The third game still had good music but by going in a different direction it kind of lost some of that special-ness the first two soundtracks had just from having such good execution. And the fourth game's soundtrack kinda fades into the background a little too much for my taste, but it's actually a really good listen if you listen outside of the game. Some truly bizarre stuff going on, especially with percussion.
I played Red Faction 2 as a kid. It was one of the first games on my first PC and I remember having a great time with it. It was possible to destroy quite a large part of the environment, there were a lot of weapons, sections with vehicles and multiplayer with bots - then it made a huge impression on me. If I remember correctly this game reqired disc in PC to start and once I had a session so long that cd broke. Unefortunately my parents refused to buy another copy of game and it was the last time I have played this it. When I read rewievs I was shocked that people are thrashing this game. Years later, I decided to never come back to Red Faction 2 to keep my positive memories of this game.
RF2's Multiplayer was amazing, that's what made it good. The singleplayer was campy and rather forgettable, but the MP was lit. Moreso on the console versions because of the splitscreen. But even if you played by yourself the bots were pretty decent.
Honestly, I don't think there's another game series out there that shifted so dynamically with each entry and I think it's what killed it. The series just kept changing it up so much that the destruction factor, albeit hugely central finally to the third, just never took it far enough as an amazing concept.
Darksiders might be a good contender for that "Shifting so dynamically with each entry". It can be a double-edged sword, and that series has been very divisive because of it.
Yo I appreciate this video so much man!! This franchise is so underrated and deserves more love. Shout out to the dedicated RF community on discord and steam!
Love this series. Red Faction 1 is a solid single-player FPS campaign, Red Faction 2 had an alright campaign but I really loved the multiplayer against the bots that you could customise, and Guerilla is just fantastic with its destruction and open-world nature. Never played Armageddon, though. Ido hope to see this series be picked back up in the future at some point.
I had Red Faction 1 on the PS2 and I have good memories. Especially split screen. There was a multiplayer map that was 2 towers with rocket launchers and an open level below with more weapons for traditional shooting. My friend and I would shoot through the tower roof and try to arc rockets into the other tower since the towers were far enough the rockets couldn't reach before falling if shot straight. It was great fun making explosives rain down enough to destroy the ceiling and then into the small area the player spawns in
When my brother and I got a PS2 the first Red Faction was the first game we got. For some reason we didn’t also buy a memory card so we couldn’t save, meaning we had to try and play through the entire game without dying once. I can say it added to the stress level of random railgun shots being fired at you.
It's videos like these ones that make me hopeful people will pick it up on PSN. It goes for pretty cheap on PS4 and even PS3. I remember the ps3 online days were so fun in this game. Completely destroyed buildings and flat maps of rubble at the end of most games.
I remember rebuying this game on steam when it was on sale for nostalgia sake and it took me 6 hours to beat, same day I bought the game red faction 2 to be exact. I really did enjoy replaying it.
Red Faction on PS2 was one of my favorite shooters of all time! I wish they'd bring this series back. Since they got ported with trophy support it's a great time to be alive!!! Nothing beats Parker sticking remote explosives to an enemy and listening to them scream non stop, running around, arms flailing until you detonate it! 😂
Red faction 1 (PS2) multiplayer GEO mod was incredible- making tunnels in all the maps etc - but for some reason, this was completely removed in the PC version.
@@Ponaru I have both versions and can 100% confirm it was... multiplayer maps were 90% destructible on PS2 - on PC they completely removed the GEO mod, aside from small key areas, and a bonus level.
Damn for real? There is a MP map that you actually NEED to do the geo mod destruction to get to the secret! (that office map and you go to second floor with rocket launcher and carve out a tunnel up to the roof. Up there is a mega rocket launcher)
The geomod engine was pretty cool in multiplayer maps, you could make yourself a foxhole with a quick rocket to the floor, hide there and get railgunned through the wall :-)
I liked when somebody was camping on the top of a building or structure and you would knock it down with them on it or your the one in the building as it's being destroyed
I dont care what anyone says, red faction 1 is one of the single best shooters ever made, and the destruction in that game is what made me fall in love with video games as an art form.
Following up Guerrilla with Armageddon is definitely one of the more baffling things I remember in gaming. But then the same company is responsible for the tone of the Saints Row reboot, and following up the originals with Agents of Mayhem. So... ??
Apparently the reason for the massive town shift is higher ups decided that with about 6 months left of development that they needed aliens in their game.
I played this game in middle school and I have such good memories. The destruction was so much fun and pretty ground breaking stuff considering when this came out
Absolutely agree with you on RF1. One more thing that pisses me off in the second half is that at one point you're find yourself in a prison cell with lowered health, no armor against all those one shotting mercs. I hated this when I played.
Guaranteed recipe for success: The engine and combat/weapons from Armageddon in an open world like Guerilla with all the tech and upgrades from both games with a sandbox mode with toggleable enemies after you beat the game once (or use a cheatcode to bypass). I don't understand how this is so hard for Volition to grasp.
16:40 Yes, that part of disarming the bomb was the worst. I lost track of the number of times I attempted it. I never was successful, and I am glad you talked about it in this video. I barely beat the final boss, and then the game developers hit you with this. What? 🤯🎮🔫
@@sayedistrending Yea it took me like 4-5 attempts I eventually said fuck it and used cheat engine and slowed the game down to 0.2x speed like holy fuck I played that bastard and on hard and they throw that curve ball? Wtf.
I have a real soft spot for Armageddon, i love the soundtrack and destruction, and all the weapons were fun to use, i don't understand why it gets the hate!
I like how they went from ”libertyyyyyy” to something else pertaining to the planet. The horde mode was slightly disappointing for being short but otherwise fun. The only gripe would be lack of replayability, you play it once and…..that’s it.
Two things 1) I always had success with the pistol on deathmatch. Point, click a lot, dead people, done. 2) I played the first game when it came out and haven't been back to it since, and you are entirely right. I remember the inner sanctum being the last boss, the tiny old man kicking my arse a bit, but winning and in my memories, that was the end of the game. Weird.
I know it's tough to add weight to in current times, but when Red Faction 2 came out it was far and away the best local multiplayer game I had played. Its a shame you didn't add anything about it because there was so much to it. Bots that leveled up, good arenas, online multiplayer capable. Literally no one played the campaign, we knew it was shit but the amount of hours we spent playing RF2 multiplayer honed our skills for later FPS games.
My friends and I played RF2's local multiplayer religiously, I don't think I've ever seen anyone else do AI leveling like that in multiplayer! It made for some crazy deathmatches!
Absolutely loved the multi-player in the first game with geomod you could knock new holes and change the map dig channels was really unique at the time.
As a console kiddie for that part of the era, I played all 3 in multiplayer like it would go out of fashion. 2 was probably one of my most played console games.
100% agreed. In its time it was one of, if not THE best local multiplayer experience available on PS2. Absolutely god tier. I mean you could even make your own custom bots, and actually level up their skills by playing matches with them. Amazing lol
The red faction multi-player for 1 was pretty amazing, 2 had bots that were customizable and could gain skill points to build your own team how you wanted and guerrillas online multi-player was pretty awesome as well
The dancing pooch at 9:00 to that absolute banger is why I can't ever trust you to let me enjoy a tasty beverage during your videos. So unexpected and cracked me up so hard I almost spit my beer
So wait we're not going to talk about red faction 2's multilayer. I remember putting so many hours into that game and timesplitters 2. I never even tried the single player but i used to love putting the bots on the highest levels and playing with my one friend. There were specific bots that were better than others and you'd slowly form grudges. Plus the destructibility and map design made it really fun.
all the red faction games were there when i went through some horrid times in my life. 1 when i went through a nasty breakup 2 when i almost got hit by a drunk driver guerilla when i learned some truly horrific things about a "friend" and was trying to distance myself armageddon as i was entering a new stage in my life
I dunno why these videos make me so happy. But, they do. The idea that some dude about my age on the other side of the globe was enjoying these games as I was 20 years ago is heartening . Cheers from the US.
exactly how I feel
Same. I had to make due with the Red Faction Prima guidebook since I couldn't afford a PC that could play the first game. Finally being able to play the game blew childhood me's brain.
I love that Gman and I are a similar age as each retro review is basically liquid nostalgia from my childhood and teens, put straight into my veins!!!
I second this, exactly how I feel too
Same, bisous from France !
What baffles me about Red Faction is how Geomod 2.0 was never fully expanded or upgraded. It's the kind of engine that gave Frostbite a run for its money. Guerilla really did push things to the next level in 2009 and is still a massively underrated game.
Instead, the series went into obscurity and destructible environments have been regressing since then. Lots of missed potential there.
@LabRat Knatz You'd think so, given the hardware improvements. Though I'm not sure if the engine needs to be licensed to other dev teams.
Seeing how lacklustre Battlefield 2042 is with its stripped levolution system makes you wish for Geomod 3.0...
I think developers favor realistic graphics over impressive physics. It would be very difficult to have the graphics you see in AAA games today with detailed destruction. Graphics tends to sell the game more and you could always put in a scripted destruction sequence for the trailer. It's very disappointing.
Its because such a feature that isn't the main selling point of the game (destroying environments) is a huge waste of resources.
Unless another game comes along and incorporates environmental destruction as a key part of its gameplay and story, then there really isn't a need for it to be in the game.
Yeah indeed. I remember getting this game on realese and was meh/ok but the engine had lots of potential
@YRU Triggered? That's the story i heard years ago.
It would've been too much for whatever system was running it. Keeping track of all the pieces of geometry and all.
I loved the Mercenaries games tho. I was hoping games would at least be able to keep up with that level of destruction. But as someone else mentioned, resolution sells.
Fun fact about Red Faction: Guerilla.
The building physics that the Devs created were so realistic, that they had to hire on an architect to help them create buildings that didn't just crumble under their own weight.
They did a good job, but some of the structures were standing like, "How?"
Then you know how good the engine is.
Interesting! If anyone played the c2000 anime-inspired action game "Oni", it also had its buildings designed by actual architects with much emphasis on how exactingly real they were; down to the dimensions of stairwells and width of hallways and so on. It's pretty obscure, but one of very few such examples I can think of. Anyway, unfortunately it kind of sucked, and the maps were very awkward with many aspects that just didn't play well. Turns out proper real-world architecture and interior design are rarely fun in a videogame. There's actually a *huge* difference between map environments/structures that are strict 1:1 real-world replicas, and maps that are highly _realistic,_ but still designed around player movement, flow and gameplay.
It's a balance. Too much emphasis on realism and you end up with examples like Oni; where buildings feel "off" and awkward to navigate in-game precisely because they're designed for the real world and that just doesn't translate well to a game... Although exacting real-world architecture can work for things like walking sims/exploration, it's rarely good for the vast majority of games, particularly action oriented fps. Too little realism in architecture though and you end up with surreal, abstract maps; like Doom 1 and 2 for a couple good albeit dated examples. The maps may flow well and be fun to play, but you'd never mistake them for actual places. They make little logical sense and are not even remotely plausible as real architectural designs; more like the vague idea or concept of a place rather than a place itself, if that makes sense. Any resemblance to some structure that might actually ever exist is merely incidental to their design. Later games like RtCW get much more realistic as plausible structures, but still leaning very heavily toward the gameplay.
I like to use the Stalker games as prime examples of excellent balance between very high realism and gameplay; the zone itself, but moreso the actual buildings which are architecturally realistic enough to be plausible and feel genuine (indeed most are direct copies from existing real world structures) but, and this is the key, with their floorplans and dimensions altered and simplified to accommodate the gameplay. Damn this ended up way longer than I intended and went way off on tangents so I'll end it here.
@@Kinos141 Whoever was in charge of building the structures knew exactly what they were doing lol
Is that why you can have the buildings stay standing after you've destroyed like 3/4 of the walls...?
9:51 Hi, I wrote the music and did sound for the first three. Just wanted to say we really really wanted to have ties to the original Descent series because this game started in development as Descent 4. The problem was we were at the time with THQ but Interplay owned the rights. Thanks for making this!
Thanks for the info!
Interesting! Fantastic job on the music and sound by the way!
Thanks so much dude, I must've played RF1 a thousand times, your music is etched in my brain.
I really appreciate everyone who worked on RF1 and made it what it was.
Any chance you remember the RF1 multiplayer Modder debacle (patch 1.3! 1.3!), or the RF2 even being a thing debacle?
RF1 is still one of my favorite games. The maps for multiplayer were the bomb. I made maps for RF1 and continued all the way up until about 2014. Some of the highlights of my early life were those maps we played including the one's I built. I've made lifelong friends because of the ability to map.
@@FreelanceDev4life Thanks for those memories! The one stand out memory for me was having to finish Red Faction 2 AND Summoner 2 audio myself within one month of each other!
Fun to see someone talking about this after so long. I was the voice of Parker on this game. Had a blast working on this game.
Wow, holy shit I loved this game. Super surprised no one responded to this.
Dude no way👋🏻
NICE!
RF1 is still my favourite, Parker was a great character
Thank you
I know this comment is a year old but I can't imagine how it would feel to be a part of people's childhood like that. Hope you're still doing well!
42:25 pro-tip: use the nano rifle, the nano rifle desintegrates things, literally, if you aim at one of the gunship wings, it gets desintegrated, the gunship immediately loses control and crashes into the ground with entertaining results
Yeah... best way.. love the nano rifle.. I always bring it with me for mostly that reason.
I'm surprised he didn't mentioned that rifle - it's a great gun.
Clipping the wing off a gunship with the nano rifle and watching it lose control and crash is one of the most satisfying things you can do in that game. I always relished the opportunity to do it.
No effort to destroy the ships with that gun.
It's like the final boss in Just Cause 3, there's always a way to cheese the fight
Geomod 2.0 is worth an entire 54 minute video on it's own. It's crazy to me that they had this sort of technology running on the Xbox 360, it's incredibly complex and accurate. The entire thing is based on a stress system, I've seen building come down from it's own vibrations, you can hear things creaking almost ready to collapse. It really is incredible. The closest thing I can think of would be Just Cause 3 and 4, teardown might be technically more superior but it's using a whole different type of rendering. Games like Battlefield use an entirely different solution to destruction, where pieces will "disappear" and then the new broken assets will spawn with a physics simulation. Geomod 2.0 is completely dynamic, if you took that sort of simulation and increased the density of objects it would be glorious.
I've played red faction and JC3 and 4, red faction beats them both by miles.
Devils Advocate, you can notice some weird stuff like second floors supported by one corner post, still it was fucking amazing for the time and hell even still today. I bet if they had kept working on it it would make Battlefields destruction look like Lego in comparison.
You can find the old dev diary vids on YT where they talk about the tech, it's pretty amazing.
RF:G Engine of Destruction (Red Faction: Guerrilla Dev Diaries) - ua-cam.com/video/Mt-J5FMmy9I/v-deo.html
Geomod 2 ran on the PS2 an generation lower then the 360
I'm way late here, but I'll just add that people greatly overestimate how demanding complex physics is on computer hardware. The bottleneck is just about always graphical rendering to try and get light to behave 1% more like reality. I used to program games for a hobby and I could get reliable physics results with hundreds of rigid bodies running smooth as silk on a pitiful laptop in 2004.
This is why AAA games and creativity seem to be opposed. You spend all your budget and programming effort just to max out the visuals.
And finally one stealth problem with advanced physics like this is that as your world resembles the real world more in complexity, the man hours required to build that world go up tremendously. You introduce whole new kinds of bug problems, design problems, and gameplay problems that don't exist when practically everything is a stationary mesh. Unless the complexity is a serious selling point for your game, it can be way more trouble than it is worth.
It infuriates me how a game from 2009 proved that hardware could handle large open-world destruction with very realistic physics and yet since then only teardown has even come close. A whole 13 years later
@L0RDFR3NCHY Teardown isn't open world, it's a sandbox with a campaign mode and it was mentioned by OP. So Deep Rock Galactic also counts in my book.
@@rogerphone481 Sandbox means "open world".
i think for a lot of developers its not necessarily a performance issue, but a design issue so that players don't end up turning everything into flatgrass or no man's land and destroy the rest of the the game
@@bra1nc417d No, sandbox does NOT mean open world.
@@MrJekken also seems to be a matter of big publishers rushing games out nowadays. I mean, imagine if battlefield 2042 tried to have big destruction in it again amoung all the bugs and glitches it already has lol
I'm so mad Red Faction Guirella's destruction engine was never brought to other games. The amount of fun, creative moments to be had is insane.
Agreed! Geo-Mod 2.0 was a technical masterpiece and has so much potential to be used in so many other games!
I wish we got a map editor and community features that Halo 3 had. The campaign could use some love too, with something as simple as DLC weapons in the main story and the reconstructor. Maybe some day the franchise will get the love it deserves, but I sadly doubt it.
@@alexanderrobins7497 well with gorrilla you DO get its multiplayer stuff in base game b ut ya agreed i want a few of the unique things from the dlc in main.
Guerilla was definitely my favourite game of the ps3 era. Amounts of fun I had destroying the biggest buildings on the map was unmeasurable and made me finish this game at least 3 times in a row first time I got it: on normal, hard and insane gradually and funnily enough first playthrough was hardest for me as later I had much more tricks up the sleeve and much better survivalibity even with difficulty cranked to the max. And honestly being in constant sprint jumping from vehicle to vehicle leaving only burned frames while edf was tearing everything I tried to hide behind, it was best rush I felt playing video games. Unrepeatable experience, all my respects to volition forever ✌
I always wanted them to bring this tech into Saints Row.
As someone who worked on Red Factin Guerrilla and Armageddon I really am glad to see this. I can maybe shed a little extra light on some of this.
First off the guy who made the Geomod 2.0 worked is a wizard, his name was Eric Arnold and that dude spent like 5 years straight making that the best physics system as well, there were many more people who worked on it, but I remember he was the guy kind of at the core of the system. We had guys from Havok, the physics engine coming in every month or so trying to help us push the goal, it was freaking crazy, but the end result speaks for itself.
The change from RFG to RFA came from a number of places. A. The land kind of sucked to work in, it could only be done as a height map. B. It was costly to render. C. It was not destructable. D. Because we had massive areas we couldn't have densely packed areas or areas that were really fun to destroy. So the idea was move the game under ground, remove the terrain, make the map out of objects (the rocks and stones all around) and then create better buildings to make a more fun game.
You can see how it worked, and judge iif it was the right move. While I worked on removing the terrain, I don't feel that Armageddon is as good., but that's my opinion. (And I wasn't there at the end either). The original story for Armageddon was different as well but then Danny Bilson joined THQ and that's probably a story for another time (Spoiler, he also killed Johnny Gat in Saints Row 3, so... yeah... Booooooo)
Hopefully that sheds some light on the story behind the games, I'm sure I could think up more tidbits, but hope you appreciate a look behind the curtain.
Nice!
Cool!
Thank you for your work on Red Faction Guerrilla, easily one of my top favourite childhood games
Why was guerilla so good but armageddon so bad?
Very cool, dudev
Playing Red Faction Guerilla was especially funny in French, because "EDF" is *the* (yes, single) provider of energy in France, and they are assholes :D
Many areas in the United States suffer legal monopolies for utilities such as electricity. We all suffer the same it seems.
There really was actual red faction like expirince .in early 1920s 1930s at some of the mines in Virginia . The mine corporations at that time owed everything houses stores people and only paid in company credits and actual money. And had little to no regard for the miners. Some of those corporations got hostile with striking workers so for retribution blew up the mines and foreman's quarters with dynamite.
Au Québec ce serait de jouer contre Hydro Québec, l'entreprise nationalisée qui a le monopole de l'électricité ici et qui est aussi une foire aux trous de culs
@@virginiasaintjIt's not a monopoly, it's literally run by the state since they nationalised energy. A monopoly is fine when the government does it apparently
That is funny
Reading an article about RF3 before it released, the devs had to learn actual architecture because the engine was so realistic the buildings wouldn't stand until they learned how to really make buildings stable.
Oh my god
Learning about that always made me giggle so much, just the idea of loading in the map and watching every building around you immediately become toothpaste.
It id clear the developers were passionate about FRG. I only wish it got more post release support. The remaster does not look like it is worth buying again unfortunately.
@@alexanderrobins7497 its definitely much cleaner looking, I bought it on sale on ps4 for like 5 dollars solely for the multiplayer demolition mode that I just play by myself with 4 characters.
@@foodank_atr817you know that mode was hardly played but i really did love it.
A few years ago Volition did an hour-long live stream with some of the original devs of Armageddon. Definitely worth a watch if you want some question answered about what happened with that game. The short version is: lesser budget (publisher THQ would go bankrupt a short while later), low on time, pivot on story & purpose (an exec wanted aliens).
@LabRat Knatz its a little worse than that - it was a promoted THQ executive that wanted to make an RF cinematic universe - and Aliens and Zombies were in massively in the time period - the guy at THQ sent them a letter about getting Aliens in - Volition took it as a suggestion and carried on working, few months later to the promotion of the THQ guy they got another letter which was basically ''did you think i was fucking kidding about the Aliens'' - and then they took Volitions time to finish the game after demanding a sweeping change to 6 month deadline. Insane
@LabRat Knatz What did Syfy do?
I looked them up cause I had never heard of them but it looks like all they did other than Red Faction is De Blob 2. Just curious why they're so hated
@LabRat Knatz ua-cam.com/video/DCXQIUJKPeM/v-deo.html i recommend this (timestamped) - it tells you what happened to RF:A
@@callumdointhings5 People like to hate on SyFy because it used to be a great sci-fi channel when it was spelled properly and devolved into utter garbage.
Liked Armageddon out of all them and wanted a remake of the game liked how the aliens looked
I played Red Faction at a young impressionable age. Seeing a building fall apart from abuse and crumble due to physics blew my mind. This and Mercanaries 2 made me really think every game HAD to have destructible buildings.
And yet here we are in almost 2023 and still a small fraction of games have destructible environments :(
It was the first and unless there's something else equivalent out there still the only sandbox fps. Red faction 1 let you tunnel out of areas of you just didn't like them and had the explosives to do so.
Same
Mercenaries 2 was subpar to Mercenaries 1 in every possible way, idk why Lucasarts gave the promising franchise away after the success of the first game 🤔
Great to see the Red Faction franchise being covered in such depth. I remember how much I played the first game, and how disappointed I was in the second one when I played that. Going back to RF2 a few years after the first time I played it, I was able to see some of its plus points, like it's sense of humor. Also the magnet gun in RF Armageddon was a simple concept but I had a ton of fun using it throughout the game. This video brought back so many great memories of playing through these games, thank you for making it!
My favorite part about Red Faction on PS2 was the fine aim mode. It had this weird ability to make every weapon hyper accurate, yes including the pistol, but also yes including the shotgun. Yes. By holding "Up" on the D-Pad to enter fine aim mode, it somehow made the pellets of the shotgun condense into a fine spot, effectively giving you "slug" like accuracy and damage numbers. Especially useful during Multiplayer and headshotting across the map with the shotgun lmao
I forgot about that, actually. Really OP, and pretty much required if you wanna beat the highest difficulty lol
Wonder if its still in the PC version and could be modded back in lmao.
God damn you already got that covered :D just did a comment telling him the same "exploit"
I never noticed that, didn't use it because I think it forced you to stay immobile, or maybe I'm confusing with another game ?
yeah lol
I'm not a big fan of open world games really but Guerilla is one that genuinely feels like it suits the formula so much.
I played the game for so many hours just causing chaos and making my own fun. I think that's the sign of a great open world game and it's such a shame that they didn't continue in this direction. I feel like the current market would be way more receptive than people were in 2009.
@FANAZA:⭕️ ZAMN!
Hearing someone talk about RF: Guerrilla and NOT mention the shenanigans you can pull off with the singularity bombs just feels like a sin all on its own
Truer words have never been spoken
still not a better destruction game
Or the unicorn that shot rainbows of death from it's ass while playing a fart sound in Armageddon. Figured that would have gotten an honorable mention. That and the ostrich hammer from RFG MP were two of my favourite wacky weapons from any series.
@@ragnarok7976 Yeah we are talking about Volition Games after all, they are well versed with wacky weapons
the first Red Faction game me and my cousin would just go onto the multiplayer mode put a bunch of bots in and go onto that 2fort style level and mess with the destruction, we actually made a large tunnel to see how far we could go and damn even now I'm surprised by how far they let you blow up the rock until you reached the edge.
Me and my bro did exactly the same 😂
Oh, hey, my and my friend did the exact same thing lol.
One of the biggest mysteries in gaming is how Red Faction Guerrilla came out in 2009 and since then another game has not matched it in terms of open world fun and destruction its crazy, proud to say I was the 1st person to platinum the PS4 version back in 2018, well according to PSNProfiles I was anyway.
That's actually awesome
i never understand people who complain about red faction guerrilla. they complain its too repetive, like bro some of those later missions are insane even on normal mode, let alone higher difficulties. sure its not the lonegest game but holy shit dude every part of it is pretty and choatic and fun. whats not to love
What about Saints Row games?
@@realtsarbomba Saints Row’s destruction is nothing compared to Red Faction Guerrilla’s
@@Cuckie1996 Though fun RFG fast becomes monotonous rinse and repeat chore, dull color palette only enhances the feeling. I haven't played Saints Row games myself but at least those have color and seemingly a quite lot to do.
Really sad how Armageddon ended up. Going back to Guerilla format with Armageddon's guns and powers (with most notably Magnet Gun) would be a great step forward for the series. Blowing up a chunk of a building then tagging enemy vehicle and watching that chunk hurl towards it never got old for me. And nano forge that allow to completely wreck the place then rebuild it if you gone so far and destroyed something important greatly increased the fun factor.
Armageddon was not a bad game. It was just bad successor to Guerilla.
IIRC there's a mod for Guerilla that put the magnet gun in it.
I actually had a metric ton of fun with Armageddon and it remains one of my favorite third-person shooters. It’s dumb, yes, but it’s actually a very well-paced campaign with good weapon, enemy, and objective variety. It’s just the fact that the environments look same-y and it doesn’t really open up often enough that hurt it. Otherwise it’s just plain fun, IMO.
My favourite thing to do in Armageddon was destroy shit and then rebuild it and destroy it all over again
@@El-Burrito agreed Especially in a new game plus when you can use the special weapons like the napalm laser though out the whole campaign
You're the only channel that can give me nostalgia for games I've never played before
I would love to see a Lost Planet Retrospective. As someone who didn't get to experience the older titles in their prime I'd love to see someone reflect on them.
1 was exceptionally amazing at launch, though it's probably not great now. 2 was one of the best co-op experiences I've ever had, I replayed that one so much. 3 was fun until the story kicked off-- would have been much better as a blue collar space miner simulator imo. As soon as the plot started moving I started losing interest.
Played the hell out of Lost Planet 2. Had so much in multi with my friends, and we'd always try to outdo each other with the crazy outfits.
1 and 2 were rad as hell. I think 2 wins out because of the different environments/factions and coop, but 1 was still really great too as its own thing. 3 didn't keep my interest and I unintentionally dropped it years ago and just never bothered to get back into it.
All 3 were fun!
@@faceless2302 3rd game gets really good later on.
If I recall correctly, Armageddon's original premise was that your character could travel between the scattered settlements freely, whether it be above ground or below it, free roam was pretty much on the cards. And whilst at these settlements, you could rebuild/upgrade their defences however you liked, pretty much like a horde mode of sorts. I wish we got that game.
I miss the Red Faction series so much, to this day no shooter has ever blown my mind the way the first two Red Faction games did back in the day, damn i wish they would bring back this series.
I’m shocked you didn’t spend more time talking about how you can attach the remote mines from the first game to people and they run around and panic. I remember laughing way too much at that
I had the same feeling about incendiary grenades in 2, not even mentioned. people running around screaming on fire, is just too amusing.
Yes! And I remember tossing a mine on a sick miner on a hospital bed and blowing him up from the next room. I felt so guilty which gave me the idea for a guilt-based video game.
Throw them on there butts and watch hilarity ensue
Can be done in Guerilla too!
I used to do that in multiplayer. I'd stick a bomb to my brother's back, and he'd run around with a shotgun dunking on bots. Then he'd die and I'd detonate the bomb and take his killer out with him.
I replayed the first game last year and what stood out to me is how the entire arsenal changes in the 2nd half of the game, you get harder more annoying enemies but you also get massively powerful weapons of every kind and that's an interesting approach.
For a first person shooter guns are the gameplay, so to provide a whole loadout of new gameplay to attack the difficulty with feels unique and rewarding, it's not perfect it's just something that stuck with me.
I also played last year and enjoyed all the campaign. I don't agree with gmans
Red Faction 2 is one of my favorite games of all time. Mainly because of the countless hours me and my family would spend playing. I'll always love this series.
Split screen multiplayer and bot matches were glorious in that game.
Same. The campaign was super fun too. It always felt like you could find new things in the game.
Shame that the PC version didn't have any multiplayer at all.
@@JounLord1 💯
My father, sister, and I played the hell outta this game together. It was this one and Black Hawk Down: Delta Force. Good memories....
I played the original Red Faction on PS2 as a rental, and fell in love with it. Later, I purchased it for PC and found out that you can dig like 8x as far into the ground/walls. Also, there was a map editor for multiplayer and it was pretty neat, too!
Digging 8x as far into the ground/walls???
I'm convinced that Mars is made out of cheese.
The first red faction is one of my favorite games. I just never cared for any of the sequels. The sequels are all too slow moving for me. I really like the variety of the first game with stealth sections, vehicle sections, zombie sections, escort sections, puzzle sections, and maze sections. I was really impressed with how easy it was to fly the ship vehicle.
The first one was the best
I remember throw c4 on the guards of the first level and watch them run
@@stevemx2778Sounds fun.
Have to say GmanLives
It’s without a doubt my favorite channel to watch
He replied to a comment I made a few months ago about him reminding me of my brother who is now gone for almost 3 years
And watching these videos reminds me of the time where we would play older games or games we grew up on and just pick it apart with it being good or bad
Still my favorite video from gman was him going through the 007 first person shooter games
Recently picked up some ps2 games and I can’t wait to have the memories fly back at me
Nice.
When a woman says "You do not get off that easy" I say "You do not know me"
I also did like Armageddon a whole lot when it came out. The snarky protagonist was boring, but the mayhem was fantastic. Zero percent horror, one hundred percent power fantasy
Saddened by the lack of mention of incendiary grenades in 2, the people running around on fire before they died and flopped was priceless. Also the troopers in full plate armor are SUPPOSED to not take much damage from bullets.
Campaign aside, me and my friends had so much fun with the RF2 couch co-op. The amount of game setting customization was insane. You could turn on infinite ammo, bots, you had a ton of character models to choose from. It was just a blast.
For me...Red Faction 1...what rubs the nostalgia so well...was the multiplayer. The campaign was okay. The death match with the nuke weapon was epic. The engine allowing you to blow out walls behind campers and stuff like that made it probably the last deathmatch game I enjoyed and haven't looked back at that gameplay type since...
I had dial up internet back when I played this game so I probably couldn’t have played much online either way but I’d didn’t even know there was online 😂 I remember playing with my brother though and we’d always just end up mining tunnels to eachother and make little bases lol, good times.
RF1 was such a classic... the sounds, the weapons, the atmosphere...
That fucking death sound never gets old
JUST YOU AND ME MINER!
Surprised you never even mentioned the magnet gun from Armageddon once. It's definitely my favorite gun to use with the destructible environments. Imagine Guerilla's open world style gameplay, but with Armageddon's weapons and powers, would have been so much fun! Sad we never got another game, destructible environments of this scale is heavily missing from the current AAA market of today.
Thankfully Teardown has gain enough attention to get people wanting destruction in their lives. AAA games dont like to take risks anymore, so we can only sit and wait for indie devs to create new and exciting games with fun mechanics - then AAA would use those mechanics if they become popular enough, that seems to be the game industry circle of idea-life these days lol
Love the Red Faction series, which peaked in epicness with Guerrilla. I want a new one with modern tech, more verticality, and better/bigger physical destruction. I cant believe more games haven't tapped into that.
Teardown is pretty wild, but I want higher fidelity graphics and a more fleshed out campaign like a Red Faction game could bring.
@Keith Simpson Nah, I don't think voxels are the way to go with destruction games.
This was the first and about the only FPS where I had fun in vehicle sections. Especially the sub combat was superb, slow moving torps and enemy subs imploding, incredibly immersive.
multi-player in RF 1 was the best, me and mates spent hours finding secret areas. I remember one map having windows looking out over a canyon, using the rocket launcher you could dig round a window, then make holes down the side to get to the bottom of the canyon.
red faction is hella underrated, realized they were the guys who developed the first saints row.
@@kupokinzyt In exchange, one of the last areas in Guerilla is called Mt. Vogel, named after the CEO of Ultor who acts as the main antagonist of Saints Row 2. You can also find a dark audio file where Shaundi is distressed and freaking out as police sirens and gunfire ring out in the background.
@@kupokinzyt i like to think that saints row is in the past and redfaction taking place in the distant future yknow?
I always thought they took place in the same universe especially after SR2 because the Ultor corporation and those spec ops dudes who kinda look like EDF troops
@@joshuaedwards235 always thought that,I'm sure they knew what they were doing
Actually loved Armageddon. It's a simple but really, really fun guilty pleasure shooter. The magnet anchor gun was so fucking entertaining - flinging chunks of buildings at enemies and demolishing even more of the level in the process never got old. The one thing it undeniably got over the Guerilla is that you always had stuff to destroy, no need to go find it, it's always right around the next corner.
Though the original would ever be in my heart as THE Red Faction game. Also the music in OG Red Faction is one of my favourite OSTs ever made.
Red Faction Guerrilla was a hidden gem. When you think about proper destruction and respective physics in a game environment RF:G is exactly what comes to mind, not "levolution" in BF4 that is essentially one big script to change the environment or tearing down individual programmed "chunks" of wall like the type of destruction we see in most modern day shooters, not just battlefield. It's sad that we've moved away from free-form destruction ala Crysis/BF:G and more into scripted destruction that doesn't look natural yet is regarded as visually stunning nonetheless because it's all that exists in mainstream gaming.
14:49 honestly they should have had the scientists be the final boss since he uses these. It works as a final boss not as regular enemies you can see.
RED FAAACTION! This game was my shops love when we were deployed. I managed to get on a t1 line to get this downloaded when I was put in the Baghdad airport. I spread the game among my company like wildfire. We would have like 16 person deathmatches with this game. I think anyway. It was over 16 years ago.
I remember my dad played through the OG Red Faction as well. When he got to the disguise part, I didn't understand how he was able to maintain his cover for so long. He said all you have to do is look down at your feet when you have to get close to a guard and they won't be able to recognize your face. I didn't believe him (it sounded ridiculous to me at the time) but sure enough it seemed to work for him!
As a gruff looking dude with a shaved head, I find this video totally offensive.
Red faction 2 being 3 hours long is hilarious, i played it as a kid and remember it feeling like a 20 hour long game
I went through very much the same experience, my friend had a lot of random PS2 games that he picked up from pawn shops for dirt cheap and this was one of them. Although in my case I'm confident it took me at least two dedicated sittings to beat, there were parts where my stupid ass who had basically nothing but Goldeneye and Perfect Dark as far as genre experience (at the time) definitely struggled to figure out what to do...
Hell, my most distinct memory of it is getting stuck somewhere and making use of the destructible environment to tunnel my way through a building. Not sure if the floor I needed to reach was above or below but I'm fairly certain there was verticality involved because of the insane amount of time/explosives it took. All because there was probably one door leading to a stairwell or something that I just couldn't be bothered to find, and I think it's safe to say that if not for the engine allowing me to do what I did to progress I probably would have given up on finishing it entirely.
Ain't that the truth. I managed to spend the better part of a year beating Star Wars Racer when it came out, and on a revisit this year I had it done in an afternoon...LOL
Thanks for the amazing video Gman! What a blast from the past!
41:07 Sir, you just killed that man in the back of your dumptrunk RIP
I remember playing the first one back in the day, and they still had the tech demo level in there. The glass house. I was so amazed at the glass details back then I played that a fair bit... and ofc blew a tunnel under it.
I used to multiplayer Red Faction with mates back in the day. They never knew about the railgun scope. Took ‘em a few sessions to figure it out how I was killing them halfway across the map 😝
Man, I played the hell out of the Red Faction games, the first one easily has my favourite railgun out of any FPS I've ever played and the local co-op on the PS2 back in the day was immense fun. I remember a friend of mine was kind enough to buy the first game for me as well.
Do you remember the one MP map that if you blew up certain walls you could find hidden power weapons? I remember it being a factory setting or something like that 🤔
@@Pudding175 Yeah, it had a central hall with corridors running above it on the sides and stairs on each end. I remember blowing the smallest hole I could in one of the cavities and just hiding with the railgun, sniping my brother with it through the walls.
48:22 Trying to find out what this game was lead me and my Google search history on a very strange path.
It's called *Castle Knatterfels: Curse of the Zombie Krauts* for the curious out there.
There's a bit of horror near the start of the first game when you realize all the guards keeping the miners working really are equipped with high-tech cattle-prods. And judging by what Parker says in that intro they weren't exactly afraid to use them.
The engine and probably some assets for Red Faction 1 were actually originally designed to be a part of the Descent series before Interplay canned it, and if you look closely throughout the game you can see a lot of textures and assets that look like ones from Descent 3.
Considering how Outrage and Volition still had close ties, it's certainly possible some art could have been lifted right out of it when they were still developing the game as Descent 4.
Personally I really loved the music in the first two games with that really eclectic, experimental mix of electronic and symphonic parts, and a few elements of prog-rock thrown in too. Not always the sort of thing you'd expect to work (especially in the second game) and yet it never seems to miss a beat.
It kinda stands out for me even compared to other soundtracks from the time, just because of how well it manages to mix all those influences, and still have them heard.
The third game still had good music but by going in a different direction it kind of lost some of that special-ness the first two soundtracks had just from having such good execution.
And the fourth game's soundtrack kinda fades into the background a little too much for my taste, but it's actually a really good listen if you listen outside of the game. Some truly bizarre stuff going on, especially with percussion.
The original red faction will always and forever be my favourite video game. It absolutely captivated my pre teen brain.
Same
I played Red Faction 2 as a kid. It was one of the first games on my first PC and I remember having a great time with it. It was possible to destroy quite a large part of the environment, there were a lot of weapons, sections with vehicles and multiplayer with bots - then it made a huge impression on me.
If I remember correctly this game reqired disc in PC to start and once I had a session so long that cd broke. Unefortunately my parents refused to buy another copy of game and it was the last time I have played this it. When I read rewievs I was shocked that people are thrashing this game. Years later, I decided to never come back to Red Faction 2 to keep my positive memories of this game.
RF2's Multiplayer was amazing, that's what made it good. The singleplayer was campy and rather forgettable, but the MP was lit. Moreso on the console versions because of the splitscreen. But even if you played by yourself the bots were pretty decent.
Honestly, I don't think there's another game series out there that shifted so dynamically with each entry and I think it's what killed it. The series just kept changing it up so much that the destruction factor, albeit hugely central finally to the third, just never took it far enough as an amazing concept.
Darksiders might be a good contender for that "Shifting so dynamically with each entry". It can be a double-edged sword, and that series has been very divisive because of it.
@@jurtheorc8117 Funnily enough, both games were THQ owned series at one point.
@@motherurck7542 ooh good point!
Yo I appreciate this video so much man!! This franchise is so underrated and deserves more love. Shout out to the dedicated RF community on discord and steam!
Love this series. Red Faction 1 is a solid single-player FPS campaign, Red Faction 2 had an alright campaign but I really loved the multiplayer against the bots that you could customise, and Guerilla is just fantastic with its destruction and open-world nature. Never played Armageddon, though. Ido hope to see this series be picked back up in the future at some point.
I had Red Faction 1 on the PS2 and I have good memories. Especially split screen. There was a multiplayer map that was 2 towers with rocket launchers and an open level below with more weapons for traditional shooting. My friend and I would shoot through the tower roof and try to arc rockets into the other tower since the towers were far enough the rockets couldn't reach before falling if shot straight. It was great fun making explosives rain down enough to destroy the ceiling and then into the small area the player spawns in
I have such fond memories of the first red faction. One of the first FPS games I had at home
Red Faction 2 will always be special to me because it was the game my brother and I played the night before he died.
When my brother and I got a PS2 the first Red Faction was the first game we got. For some reason we didn’t also buy a memory card so we couldn’t save, meaning we had to try and play through the entire game without dying once. I can say it added to the stress level of random railgun shots being fired at you.
I have a lot of fond memories of Red Faction as a series. had fun deathmatching and the destruction elements always stuck in my mind as being so cool.
Red Faction Guerrilla is the best of the franchise. Who doesn’t love the destructible environments?
yeah i agree with you there
@Norman *opinions
@Norman The destruction in Minecraft wasn’t as cool as Red Faction Guerrilla was. How are you not satisfied with buildings crumbling apart in pieces?
I love guerrilla so much, i wish that there weren’t online trophies so i could platinum it
It's videos like these ones that make me hopeful people will pick it up on PSN. It goes for pretty cheap on PS4 and even PS3.
I remember the ps3 online days were so fun in this game. Completely destroyed buildings and flat maps of rubble at the end of most games.
The multi-player was fun too. Played enough of it to unlock the ostrich
Who cares you fucking loser?
I remember rebuying this game on steam when it was on sale for nostalgia sake and it took me 6 hours to beat, same day I bought the game red faction 2 to be exact. I really did enjoy replaying it.
I love that the shotgun in red faction 2001 is the halo shotgun sound. I mean it is a spas 12 stock sound effect but still love it
Red Faction on PS2 was one of my favorite shooters of all time! I wish they'd bring this series back. Since they got ported with trophy support it's a great time to be alive!!! Nothing beats Parker sticking remote explosives to an enemy and listening to them scream non stop, running around, arms flailing until you detonate it! 😂
Such a nostalgic trip,I remember having a blast with the OG red faction despite its flaws & shortcoming... An underrated gem imo. Thanks Gman.
Red faction 1 (PS2) multiplayer GEO mod was incredible- making tunnels in all the maps etc - but for some reason, this was completely removed in the PC version.
No it wasn't...
@@Ponaru I have both versions and can 100% confirm it was... multiplayer maps were 90% destructible on PS2 - on PC they completely removed the GEO mod, aside from small key areas, and a bonus level.
My friends and I put a million hours into the MP for PS2 we loved it.
Damn for real? There is a MP map that you actually NEED to do the geo mod destruction to get to the secret! (that office map and you go to second floor with rocket launcher and carve out a tunnel up to the roof. Up there is a mega rocket launcher)
@@kickboxerphil That's crazy cause there is an office MP map that you have to geo mod your way to the roof for a secret area/weapon
Loved Red Faction back in the day. Spent hours on multiplayer just creating tunnels with rocket launchers.
Same for me. Building Tunnels, pretending wo build a new house and so on.... We basically played Minecraft before there was Minecraft
8:55 sounds like it would be in invader zim, which i love
I love how he keeps his fuck ups in dialogue in sometimes. Makes the videos even more entertaining than they already are
The geomod engine was pretty cool in multiplayer maps, you could make yourself a foxhole with a quick rocket to the floor, hide there and get railgunned through the wall :-)
I liked when somebody was camping on the top of a building or structure and you would knock it down with them on it or your the one in the building as it's being destroyed
I dont care what anyone says, red faction 1 is one of the single best shooters ever made, and the destruction in that game is what made me fall in love with video games as an art form.
The multi-player was bad ass man!
@@sumdewd bro! The ctf games with rail guns. Madness!
The first was good...Just not the 2nd, 3rd or 4th
@@lutherheggs451 Guerilla was great. I can understand not liking 2 or 4 but there isn't a lot wrong with the third one.
Battlefield 4 has some fantastic destruction.
Following up Guerrilla with Armageddon is definitely one of the more baffling things I remember in gaming.
But then the same company is responsible for the tone of the Saints Row reboot, and following up the originals with Agents of Mayhem. So... ??
Apparently the reason for the massive town shift is higher ups decided that with about 6 months left of development that they needed aliens in their game.
I played this game in middle school and I have such good memories. The destruction was so much fun and pretty ground breaking stuff considering when this came out
Absolutely agree with you on RF1. One more thing that pisses me off in the second half is that at one point you're find yourself in a prison cell with lowered health, no armor against all those one shotting mercs. I hated this when I played.
Guaranteed recipe for success: The engine and combat/weapons from Armageddon in an open world like Guerilla with all the tech and upgrades from both games with a sandbox mode with toggleable enemies after you beat the game once (or use a cheatcode to bypass). I don't understand how this is so hard for Volition to grasp.
16:40 Yes, that part of disarming the bomb was the worst. I lost track of the number of times I attempted it. I never was successful, and I am glad you talked about it in this video. I barely beat the final boss, and then the game developers hit you with this. What? 🤯🎮🔫
On hard mode you have such little time you basically have to go full speed runner mode.
@@iiinterpreter I was playing this game on dumbass easy mode and still failed. Lol
@@sayedistrending Yea it took me like 4-5 attempts I eventually said fuck it and used cheat engine and slowed the game down to 0.2x speed like holy fuck I played that bastard and on hard and they throw that curve ball? Wtf.
@@0Synergy Wow. I never even knew there was a way to cheat in this game. I am sure I would have found a way to fail even with cheating. Lol
I loved the ability to dig through the walls in the game. I really wish more titles had this ability.
Try deep rock galactic
Pick driller and make as much tunnels as you want
@@weaponizedautism3269 I preferred the more laid back digging in RF to constantly having to battle bugs, but thanks for the info.
@@Phaota Basic mining mission are pretty chill
Horde just every few minutes
Best kind of mission
Red Faction: Armageddon is actually super fun and I loved the multiplayer, too.
me too, I lost the game and Im planning on buying it again. Are there still players in multiplayer?
@@MisterCatMan from what I can tell the game is broken on PC and trying to play on Windows 10 or 11 doesn't work
I remember seeing Red Faction 2 gameplay back in the day and it looked next gen to me. RF2 is so fun in local multiplayer.
I have a real soft spot for Armageddon, i love the soundtrack and destruction, and all the weapons were fun to use, i don't understand why it gets the hate!
Yeah I love it the most from the entire series
I like how they went from ”libertyyyyyy” to something else pertaining to the planet. The horde mode was slightly disappointing for being short but otherwise fun. The only gripe would be lack of replayability, you play it once and…..that’s it.
I also really liked it.
Can't forget the unicorn gun.
@@ShadowLibrarian Mr Toots :)
I love that AVGN Easter egg lol
6:35 "I think you would do more damage if you farted in there face" LMAOOOOOOOOOO
1:54 that expression and shirt: AVGN with a gun.
A fun series that shouldn't be buried and forgotten. That's what I think.
This got me right in the nostalgia feels.
Two things
1) I always had success with the pistol on deathmatch. Point, click a lot, dead people, done.
2) I played the first game when it came out and haven't been back to it since, and you are entirely right. I remember the inner sanctum being the last boss, the tiny old man kicking my arse a bit, but winning and in my memories, that was the end of the game. Weird.
I know it's tough to add weight to in current times, but when Red Faction 2 came out it was far and away the best local multiplayer game I had played. Its a shame you didn't add anything about it because there was so much to it. Bots that leveled up, good arenas, online multiplayer capable. Literally no one played the campaign, we knew it was shit but the amount of hours we spent playing RF2 multiplayer honed our skills for later FPS games.
My friends and I played RF2's local multiplayer religiously, I don't think I've ever seen anyone else do AI leveling like that in multiplayer! It made for some crazy deathmatches!
Absolutely loved the multi-player in the first game with geomod you could knock new holes and change the map dig channels was really unique at the time.
As a console kiddie for that part of the era, I played all 3 in multiplayer like it would go out of fashion.
2 was probably one of my most played console games.
Truth. Out of all the games I ever played multiplayer at home. Red faction 2 is up there in top 3 of all time
100% agreed. In its time it was one of, if not THE best local multiplayer experience available on PS2. Absolutely god tier. I mean you could even make your own custom bots, and actually level up their skills by playing matches with them. Amazing lol
The red faction multi-player for 1 was pretty amazing, 2 had bots that were customizable and could gain skill points to build your own team how you wanted and guerrillas online multi-player was pretty awesome as well
Alright, this mini game joke at 48:20 is going way past my head. What is this a reference to?
yeah, I don't get it either...
The dancing pooch at 9:00 to that absolute banger is why I can't ever trust you to let me enjoy a tasty beverage during your videos. So unexpected and cracked me up so hard I almost spit my beer
So wait we're not going to talk about red faction 2's multilayer. I remember putting so many hours into that game and timesplitters 2. I never even tried the single player but i used to love putting the bots on the highest levels and playing with my one friend. There were specific bots that were better than others and you'd slowly form grudges. Plus the destructibility and map design made it really fun.
all the red faction games were there when i went through some horrid times in my life.
1 when i went through a nasty breakup
2 when i almost got hit by a drunk driver
guerilla when i learned some truly horrific things about a "friend" and was trying to distance myself
armageddon as i was entering a new stage in my life
R.I.P. Volition
RIP Volition
For real... lol