The latest IndieGala bundle is a big offering of all the Red Faction games for the price of $3.99 – although that price will start going up in an hour or two.
Pay a minimum of $1 to get Red Faction and Red Faction 2, or pay what’s currently $3.99 to get both of those as well as Red Faction: Guerrilla, Red Faction: Armageddon, and the Path to War DLC for the latter. In case you don’t know what you’re getting into, Red Faction was a first-person shooter series set on Mars that was built around the idea of wholly destructible terrain, which is quite a nice idea until you realise that “wholly destructible terrain” and “linear first-person shooter” isn’t really a combination that works too well together. Then it went a bit third-person. Here, have some capsule reviews:
- Red Faction was a first-person shooter in which enemy guards said “Just you and me, mine scum!” and would then shout “Don’t shoot! I’m unarmed!” before pulling out a gun and saying the first line again. This cycle would repeat until you glued a mine to their face, at which point they would run around screaming until you detonated it. Which might be half an hour later, depending on how sadistic you were. It was a bit rubbish but I’ve clearly got a soft spot for it.
- Red Faction 2 was just really, really bad.
- Red Faction: Guerrilla was really, really good, and swapped the linear first-person face-shooting for a third-person open-world game that let you smash up buildings with a sledgehammer.
- I haven’t played Red Faction: Armageddon, but the general reaction to it was an exasperated sigh. I get the feeling it was an alright third-person game which still had plenty of stuff for you to smash up, but was very linear.
For $4, it’s not a bad bundle. Guerrilla is worth that by itself, Armageddon is probably worth the price, and the first two games are certainly worth a look for sheer historical value if nothing else. You can pick it up on the IndieGala website here for the next seven days.
