The Year is 2158. Humans have exhausted the Earth’s minerals and have turned to mining operations on Mars. The mining on Mars is run by Ultor Corporation, and you are but a petty miner by the name of Parker. After witnessing a security guard kill a miner in cold blood, you decide that it’s time for the miners to revolt and you take up arms against Ultor.

The original Red Faction was released for the PlayStation 2 on May 22nd, 2001. When the game was released, it was hyped as having the most interactive game engine ever seen, and at the time it was. The GeoMod game engine was the first to allow players to truly alter their environments. Sure, other games would allow you to blow up walls to unveil hidden passages, but these had always been pre-scripted events. With Red Faction, if you had enough grenades you could theoretically burrow your way through a mine wall and go, really, wherever you wanted.

You could tell that the team at Volition was very proud of their technology, too. In the early parts of the game there are several “hidden” areas, such as an underground lake, that serve absolutely zero purpose and are there solely to show off the impressive GeoMod tech.

While many complained that there wasn’t enough of an opportunity to play with the GeoMod tech in the single-player campaign, the online multiplayer included in the PC port of the game was met with wild praise. As you can imagine, being able to burrow a tunnel into the enemy’s base is highly useful in a Capture the Flag match.

It is interesting to note that the GeoMod engine wasn’t originally meant for Red Faction. Originally, Volition was working on Descent 4, a prequel to the original Descent. Sadly, the game was canceled (and I weep quietly). However the GeoMod technology and many of the proposed game’s plot points, including the main character of Parker, did make their way to Red Faction.

A year and a half later, Volition and THQ released Red Faction II. Picking up five years after the first game, you take up the role of “Alias”, a genetically enhanced supersoldier who was created using the nanotechnology that caused the plague in the first Red Faction. Fearing that supersoldiers such as yourself could rise up and crush him, Chancellor Sopot of the military state referred to only as “The Commonwealth” sets out to have you, along with the rest of your squad, eliminated.

Fleeing from Sopot, the squad teams up with the much more organized “Red Faction” that we first saw in the original game. However, after a coup in the Red Faction hierchy, you are forced to flee and regroup before trying to heroically retake command of the group.

Red Faction II was, in many ways, a far more polished game than it’s predacessor. The story is far more developed with an added emphasis on the characters and several engine-based bugs from the first game had been fixed. The multiplayer was also much improved. Red Faction II features several different modes of play, with Capture the Flag mode having it’s own set of levels seperate from the rest of the game. Players could also create bots that would actually save their own statistics and, over time, the player could upgrade the bots stats to make the multiplayer more of a challenge.

Oddly, Red Faction II featured no online component of any kind. Considering the first game had online play on the PC, the lack of any online component was most peculiar.

Another big complaint came from the fact that there were fewer opportunities to play with the GeoMod engine. Because the second game takes place in the cities on Earth instead of the mines of Mars, there weren’t as many opportunities to exploit the game engine to create your own path.

Even with these complaints, both Red Faction and Red Faction II were critical successes. This leads us to Red Faction: Guerrilla.

As of now there isn’t too much that is known about Red Faction: Guerrilla. However, we know that the story will take place 50 years after the original Red Faction (making it 2208), and the Earth Defense Force will be the bad guys. In fact, players will be able to revisit some of the locations from the original Red Faction, such as the Ultor labs — although it’s not known of Ultor Corporation, the primary antagonists of both the Red Faction and Saints Row series, will be in the game.

Red Faction: Guerrilla is a departure for the series in that it is a third-person shooter, as opposed to the previous games which were both in the first-person. The decision to go to the third-person was made in order to further show off the redesigned GeoMod engine, briefly known as RED (Realtime Environment Destructoin) before being renamed GeoMod 2 (Ed Note: “Son of GeoMod!”). The new game engine promises for even more lifelike real-world destruction and, according to Volition’s Rick White, will allow you to “tear the EDF presence down brick by brick”.

Red Faction: Guerrilla will be released on the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC on June 9th, 2009. Will we review it?

You bet your sweet ass.

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