YMMV / Red Faction

• Alternate Character Interpretation: The EDF can be read as a rather brutal Knight Templar organization who genuinely cares about and are fighting for the survival of Earth - and, by extension, the entire species - and see the miners as ungrateful children unwilling to do what is necessary to keep society functioning.
• Annoying Video Game Helper: The reinforcements that you get sent in Guerilla often have this effect, as they will usually just get killed and that will decrease your reputation. This has lead many to feel that this feature is a Scrappy Mechanic.
• Anticlimax Boss:
  • In Guerrilla, General Roth is just a mook in a tank. The final fight is over in seconds. Hell, you can kill him before you even see him if you bring a railgun.
  • Masako, the reportedly badass leader of the Mercs from the first game, is the last person you fight before the finale. She has a boss nanoshield as well as a custom rifle that kills you in 3 hits on Normal difficulty, as well as being the fastest enemy in the game once she loses her nanoshield. Still, she's no Cyberdemon and goes down relatively quickly, especially if you use the railgun.
  • Adam Hale in Armageddon can be finished off in ten seconds. Using the magnet gun, one can send the first generator ball into his walker, which will instantly drop his health down to zero.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: The Major League Gaming Playlist in Guerrilla. No Health Packs. No Remote Charges. No Rail Driver. No Handicapping. No Proximity Mines. No Vision Packs....
• Complete Monster:
  • Red Faction (the first game): Axel Capek is the head of scientific research at the Ultor Corporation. To him, the lives of countless innocents were less important than his scientific curiosity. His experiments created mutants resulting from the animals and humans he tested on, unleashing a plague on Mars mines, killing and crippling innocent people, and awakening an alien race that he let kill his fellow scientists. When confronted by Parker, Capek reveals there is a cure for the plague but refuses to reveal it for no reason other than spite; his last words being "I hope you all die!". A vicious egomaniac, Capek dismisses the deaths of countless innocent people as nothing more than a stepping stone to progress.
  • Red Faction II:
    • Chancellor Victor Sopot is the despotic ruler of the Commonwealth. Desiring Axel Capek's Nano technology for himself, he sends Alias Burke to steal the Nano Cell from the Republic, a mission that kills multiple Republic soldiers and employees. Sopot's experimentations result in the genetically augmented Elite Guard, whom he comes to fear and replaces with thousands of the processed, lobotomized horrors whose only function in life is servitude to Sopot. While escaping from Alias and Shrike through the crowded capital city after the Nano soldiers rebel against him, Sopot uses an office building full of civilians for cover before ordering his security forces and gunship armada to eliminate Alias and Shrike over the city streets, remorseless for any collateral damage. In a last desperate attempt to escape, Sopot plans to detonate a missile while it's still docked at the citadel, uncaring that the blast would incinerate countless men and women who are completely loyal to him.
    • Crate Molov was once a loyal soldier under Victor Sopot and the first of his Elite Guard, before they were replaced by zombie-like soldiers called "The Processed". Wanting revenge, Crate leads the survivors of his team as mercenaries for the Red Faction resistance movement, repeatedly making it clear he doesn't care about the cause or collateral damage, often arguing with the resistance leader Echo for his unwillingness to sacrifice his people. When later told that they are supposed to be fighting for peace, Molov asks what good peace does, stating a soldier lives for war. After Sopot is killed and overthrown, Molov takes over as a new dictator, betraying and declaring war on his former Red Faction allies, and declares Alias Burke and Tangier public enemies for siding against him. Molov continues and enhances the "Processed" experiments to create a truly unstoppable army for him to rule, which he intends on setting loose on Sopot's city, and states his intent to conduct these experiments on Tangier with the expressed purpose of frying her brain.
  • Guerilla:
    • Admiral Lucius Kobel is a high-ranking member of the Earth Defense Force and the architect of their greatest weapon, the EMS Hydra, which he previously used to crush an uprising of East Asian rebels on Earth. Kobel is a shrewd politician who has been arranging for the situation on Mars to be brought into his control when General Roth inevitably fails to rein it in; when Roth is eventually eliminated, Kobel coldly rules all civilians "expendable" and swoops in to exterminate all life on Mars, Red Faction or not.
    • Colonel Joseph Broga is among the most vile of all the EDF. Taking the reins on training soldiers, Broga has instituted a policy of brutal torture on those they encounter. Many are subjected to "enhanced interrogation" at the hands of Broga's soldiers and trainees with many dying from the treatment they receive. One heroine, Carmen Avila, has been given permanent scars all over her body from Broga's own personal attention.
    • Captain Halvar Gunnarsen, the "Butcher of Chryse", is the EDF's "pit bull". Gunnarsen has already gained infamy by putting down a miner revolt with violence in Chryse, leading to 300 deaths, and is currently tasked with enforcing the EDF's rule over Dust with slavery and indiscriminate violence. Gunnarsen tries an exceptionally vile means of putting down rebellion: broadcasting a message through the town that dozens of disaffected miners can peacefully rally, only to order his EDF goons to open fire and kill them all.
  • Red Faction: Origins has Stroller. See that page for more details.
  • Armageddon (includes Origins): Adam Hale was originally a young soldier and second-in-command of in the White Faction, overseeing and supporting their war plans and massacring civilians. When his lover Lyra Mason realizes the truth of her past, and rejoins her family, Adam attempts to callously leave Mars uninhabitable by destroying the Terraformer. By the time of Armageddon, Adam reemerged twenty years later as a cult leader, destroying the Terraformer, and causing widespread death and destruction. Learning of a ravenous alien race called the Plague, Hale has his cultists trick Darius Mason into releasing the plague on the people of Mars, overrunning the colonists, and later announces to his cult his plans to enslave these creatures as an army in his conquest. Having given up any care he could have had for Lyla, Adam is ultimately shown to be an ambitious madman, motivated by his claims of destiny and revenge against the Masons.
• Demonic Spiders: The railgun-wielding Merc Commanders in Red Faction, who could kill you with 1 shot. From behind a wall. Those darned Elite Guards, too, who are Made of Iron and dodge your shots like it's The Matrix.
• Ending Fatigue: Armageddon can feel this way with multiple bosses and cutscenes that feel like finales, yet the game keeps going.
• Fan Nickname: In Guerilla, Mason is capable of using a sledge hammer to tear gaping holes in solid concrete, dislodge steel girders, and send people hurtling through the air. They are jokingly referred to as Thor and Mjölnir respectively.
• Game-Breaker: In online multiplayer, the eponymous sledgehammer of Guerrilla. There's a known bug in the game where the hammer's reach extends far beyond what it should ever be. Also Heal Packs: designed to keep you alive in the heat of combat by speeding up the rate you regenerate health, or as lot of players like to do, exploit its ability to make you invincible for its 30 second duration. There are also mods that include an assault rifle that shoots the explosions from singularity bombs.
• Goddamned Bats: The Creepers in Armageddon, fast, weak vermin that leap around the caverns to try and slash at you up close.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • In the PlayStation 2 version of the original, using fine aim mode with the Shotgun caused all pellets to hit the same exact spot, turning the balanced shotgun into an overpowered sluggun.
  • In the original game, loading screens made it necessary for story required followers to be respawned. Normally killing them caused a Nonstandard Game Over, but if you shot and killed them right before a loading screen, it wouldn't cause a game over since the game doesn't have enough time to register their deaths. They spawned back in whole as normal after the game reloaded the next area. It is oddly humorous to kill these characters over and over again and not be punished for it.
• Polished Port:
  • The PC version of the first game drastically improved upon the PS2 version, added a weapon switching UI similar to Half-Life, as well as online multiplayer, modding tools, and an exclusive sandbox map to experiment with Geo-Mod. The only downside is that the bots from the PS2 version were removed for some reason. A shame the PC version of its sequel ended up being the opposite.
  • How the PC version of Red Faction: Guerrilla is since 2014. When the Red Faction IP switched over to Nordic Games, Nordic began releasing a series of patches for the PC release to finally fix what Volition never did. The hated Games for Windows Live DRM was removed and replaced by Steamworks (along with all multiplayer servers being switched to Steam), a new DirectX 11 graphics option was added which allowed players to use all the graphical improvements of the DirectX 10 mode (such as sun rays and ambient occlusion) without the major performance loss, many bug fixes to make the game much less crash prone (though it's not quite crash proof yet on certain computers), and to top it all off they released a series of new multiplayer and Wrecking Crew maps for free.
  • And then comes Re-Mars-tered, where not only the graphics are improved, but remaining technical issues are fixed along with adding new features such as the ability to swap shoulders, use MP backpacks in singleplayer and unlock other MP exclusive equipment like the Reconstructor/alternative hammers and even the ability to repair buildings on a New Game Plus so you can blow it up all over again while keeping your upgrades. Best of all, those who already own the original Guerrilla on Steam got Re-Mars-tered for free, and buying either version now grants you both. Its only issue is how the Re-Mars-tered edition need more drive space (upwards of 30gb, twice the size of the original).
• Porting Disaster:
  • Though actually a pretty polished port for the most part (it supports widescreen resolutions out of the gate, a rarity for a game of its age, and runs really well on most all modern computers), the PC version of Red Faction II is missing one major aspect: multiplayer. For some reason the multiplayer is only present in the console versions of the game, while PC players are left out. A very strange omission too given the first game had online multiplayer on PC. Another complaint is that the PC specific QOL changes in the original game, such as the Half-Life-style weapons UI, were removed, and as a result the game often feels like a straight console port.
  • This was originally the case with the PC port of ''Red Faction: Guerrilla" (see Polished Port for how it is now). The PC port was very buggy and prone to random crashes, the DirectX 10 graphics mode would really slow the game down and make crashing more frequent, used the dreaded Games for Windows Live DRM, and the PC version was barely patched during its years under THQ and Volition.
• Rooting for the Empire: The Earth Defense Force occasionally gets this. Partly because their brutality is so insanely overplayed that it just becomes implausibly hilarious, and partly because they get cool uniforms.
• Scrappy Mechanic: Guerrillas joining the fray in Guerrilla. While they can sometimes add to scraps against the EDF, more often than not, they just get themselves killed and drop morale. This makes them a gradual, yet highly consistent drain on the Red Faction’s morale.
• Scrappy Weapon:
  • In the first game, many of your weapons become useless when you start fighting the mercenaries. Best mention goes to the pistol, submachine gun, and shotgun.
  • In Red Faction II, since you start the game with a grenade launcher (the NICW in the prologue), the pistol is pretty useless. Not to forget that soon after, you get the machine pistol and silenced submachine gun. The assault rifle is also useless in the first mission, as you have the NICW (you obtain it again at the end of the Underground mission, but it becomes obsolete when you get the NICW in the next two missions). As you get more powerful weapons, even the nanotech grenade launcher becomes forgettable.
• Sequelitis: Red Faction II is considered to be the black sheep of the franchise, and is overall a mediocre game, since it suffered from lackluster gunplay and not anywhere near the amount of destructive environments the first game had.
• So Okay, It's Average: The general reception for Armageddon is that it's a fine enough game in its own right and it is at the very least viewed in a better light than Red Faction II, but it falls short compared to the first game and Guerilla due to its story abandoning the series stable La Résistance theme in favor of focusing on a cliched Bug War and for having a gameplay style many found too similar to other third person shooters at the time. (Such as Gears of War.)
• "Stop Having Fun" Guys: The online mode once the Major League Gaming Playlist was added.
• Stress-Relieving Gameplay: Guerilla offers this in spades. There's no feeling quite like bringing down an EDF base with only your trusty sledgehammer and gratuitous amounts of explosives. Armageddon offers up a bit more, though not nearly as much due to its linear storyline. You can't fault it for trying though, especially when it gives you the option of reassembling what you just blew up with the Nano Forge... so you can destroy it again.
• Surprisingly Improved Sequel: Although the first Red Faction was considered a small hit in 2001, the 2002 sequel sold poorly, and fans found the game disappointing, which caused the series to go dormant for years. Then Guerilla came out of left field and made everyone aware of just how much fun the series' environmental destruction gimmick could be when properly utilized, not to mention abandoning the run-of-the-mill first-person-shooter formula in favor of an open-world third-person format that essentially amounted to Grand Theft Auto on Mars, with lots of explosions.
• Take That, Scrappy!: Due to the poor reception of Red Faction II, it is revealed in a small Easter egg in Guerrilla that Alias Burke died alone, trapped on Mars.
• That One Sidequest: Ever wonder why Oasis is the most-requested sector for Demolition Master walkthroughs? Getting the pro time on one Demolition Master there involves demolishing a watchtower by hitting it with a batted exploding barrel. You have, at most, two shots before the pro time elapses and both of them need to have the precision of guided missiles to actually knock the tower down. With no consistent way to control the variables, especially the flight path and direction of the barrels, this is a nigh impossible Luck-Based Mission. Combined with the fact it takes more than twice as long to reset it as it does to fail it and you have an ideal recipe for frustration.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: In Armageddon, the concept of the Nanoforge is wonderfully realized in gameplay, but the plot almost entirely neglects it. The focus is entirely on the painfully unoriginal Bug War concept instead. The Nanoforge is the most scientifically advanced and ridiculously useful devise in the whole of creation, yet the Faction lets Darius run around with it. A power struggle between the new government, Darius and the cultists all over the Nanoforge and its seemingly limitless power would have made for a much more compelling plot. It would also have been more in keeping with the primary theme of the series: government oppression and civil war.
• Tough Act to Follow: You could argue that the popular Guerilla would be setting up any sequel for a disappointment, but frankly, considering Armageddon was the polar opposite of its predecessor in terms of game design this was probably not the way to endear fans.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not Political?: The first game is a bit guilty of this. A group called Red Faction, fighting for the rights of workers, against a megacorporation more concerned with making profit than with the well-being of their employees, and which sports a particularly communist-looking symbol? The implications are baffling.

---