I realized after posting that I left a major sore point out of my diatribe regarding Red Faction. It’s true that I found the game to be somewhat difficult (even compared to the similar Saints Row) for reasons mentioned, but honestly that wouldn’t have been such an issue if the game had a better system in place for checkpoints and mission restarts.

When I fail a mission/objective in a game, my first thought is okay, how much progress did I lose? In some instances I am pleasantly surprised, but Red Faction is not one of those instances. I can recall exactly two times where failing a mission allowed me to restart from a checkpoint instead of at the beginning. In all other cases, the game doesn’t even quickly revert to the beginning of the mission, but to your pre-mission status. I suppose it does this to let you (re-)prepare adequately for the mission (assuming you weren’t the previous time), but I don’t think that option is important enough to justify this as the default behavior.

I wrote about this a looooong time ago, but a big gripe I had about Gran Turismo 3 was that when you failed a licensing objective (admittedly a small part of the game), you were unable to immediately retry. I disagree with this (and apparently so did the GT time because they fixed it in Gran Turismo 4), and will continue to assert that the default option after mission failure is to immediately restart from the last checkpoint (or the beginning, assuming no points have been checked). Games difficult enough to require multiple efforts to complete an objective (ie. all of them) that don’t follow this rule are generally stupid and wrong.

Minor secondary forgotten gripe: the load times are pretty painful.