All I want for Christmas is a sledgehammer and a city made on Mars, you almost get that.
Okay, so maybe Red Faction isn't that barren, but it felt like it. The landscape does have it's purpose, you do get the feeling that this is Mars in the future, but it's a boring place to be!
For the first few hours you'll enjoy the missions, knocking various military structures to the ground is awesome, but right from the beginning you'll realize that you wish there were more structures and less open ground. After those few hours, you'll realize that you don't have enough scrap to buy upgrades, and the enemies are only getting tougher. AND THEN when you take some time to get the scrap, (which isn't fun by the fifth hour of knocking over defenseless abandoned useless buildings,) you'll find out that most of the upgrades don't do a whole lot for you anyways!
The fun I derived from this game came from putting together a multiplayer room with some friends, one of those deathmatch ones, and instead of killing each other, we'd take out the tallest structure and work our way down, trying not to be the one inside when the structure fell. This was fun, and I mean laugh my butt off remember forever type fun, but only because my friends were with me.
Alone it's only so so, monotonous, kinda pointless, this is bargain bin, quick fix rental material.