Steam Deal - Red Faction Collection

The first two Red Faction games haven't aged well. It was novel at the time, but neither is impressive anymore. In the original you could give yourself infinite rockets and literally drill a hole in the side of a mountain to gain access to later levels in some places and use the destruction to bypass various puzzles, such as a large metal door being in the way that 'requires' a key card [only if you don't have enough explosives that is].

As it went on the story started to bog things down. The protagonist from the first game is never heard from again, and the second games protagonist vanishes as well. Both were created for the PS2 and look it. You can safely skip both the first games without worry as they aren't really tied to the latter two games. The two main characters in the latter two games are tied together though so you should play them in the proper order. It also went from first to 3rd person in the 3rd game, which isn't necessarily bad, just different.

Unless you're into retro gaming and think that booting up a couple of mid grade PS2 shooters would be just keen, just stick with the two 3rd person games. RF and RF2 have a little bit of nostalgia for gamers like me, but they're too dated to hold the interest of a modern gamer who hasn't played them before. The story is nothing special and the weapons are run of the mill. The destruction isn't as impressive as it was at the time. Recent Dice games running on Frostbite make the feature rather underwhelming to behold and it loses some of the novelty that made it such a big deal when it was first released.

It's still lots of mindless fun blowing tons of stuff up for various reasons you probably won't care about. You can still destroy lots of things with explosions and bullets, but the series went from amazing technological breakthrough to mediocrity in subsequent releases. The later two games have a bad habit of putting you in stretches of game where there's not much to destroy.

The whole of it is worth $12, but you're getting what you pay for as well. Like I said, it is fun to destroy lots of stuff, but entertainment value doesn't extend much beyond that. It's a pretty standard and straightforward shooter for the most part as a series. It lost a bit of its luster but it's still fun to mindlessly destroy things and the latter two games are pretty enough and slightly better looking than their PS3 and 360 counterparts.

One game from Volition I'd like to see show up on Steam is The Punisher. I've got it for the Xbox and it plays in my 360, but I wouldn't mind playing through it again on PC and I'm not really into buying games on disk anymore. [It is available on Amazon, but nah.] I'd snap it up in a heartbeat if it was released through Steam. Not sure if that's possible with what happened to THQ though. Sleeping Dogs [and various other games] totally ripped off the environmental kills system from that game and it was a decent shooter as well. Not great, but decent, which was rare for comic book games at the time.