Red Faction for the N-Gage is simply a buggy, broken mess that you should stay away from.
Gameplay is reminiscent of the original Wolfenstein 3D. In the earlier levels, you can play it like you played Wolf3D, which is open doors, go down hallways, and blast bad guys without thinking about aiming, because they're all on the same plane as you. However, you will have to aim to hit enemies above or below your sight in later levels, and this is very difficult with the N-Gage controls. It doesn't help that the hit detection is downright atrocious. It's like the developers forgot to do some basic hit detection. There's an auto targeting feature, but it doesn't work half of the time. While targeting, you may be slightly to the left or right, but when you compensate, you'll find your crosshair on the other side of the enemy. Combination of the choppy frame rate and the N-Gage's tiny screen. An all too common occurrence while playing is that you'll struggle to get a lock on to a lowly security guard, while he's perfectly on target with his shots. By the time you establish a lock and kill your enemy, you will have lost about half your health in the process. Worse, what could happen is that you do get a lock on, but the awful hit detection kicks in, you empty your entire clip into the direction of the enemy, and you die because you weren't able to score ANY hits on the lowly guard. (see beginning of Inner Sanctum, part 2)
However, there is a glitch that you can use to your advantage. It seems that if you're aiming on the left side of an enemy, even if your crosshair is perfectly aligned, you'll still miss. But on the right side, you'll get the hit. Probably the best use of this is to peek out behind walls and shoot at the right side of an enemy that's sticking out. To do this, strafe against a wall, heading right, until you hit the edge, peek out slowly, and aim at an enemy that's half visible. Since enemies won't react to being shot, you'll be able to kill them without taking damage. Note, due to the non existent hit detection, this doesn't work if you try to peek out from behind walls heading left.
The arsenal available to you is pretty large, and consists of the usual pistol, machine guns, a shotgun, grenades and remote charges, and rail driver. You can get pretty creative with the use of the weapons, and this would be a strong point of the game, if not for the targeting problems. In the early going, ammunition is rather sparse, and this is really a poor game design flaw, but if you keep playing, you'll build up your arsenal. There's no limit to the number of weapons you can carry.
As for graphics, the gun models look good for a handheld game, but enemies are rather generic looking. There are guards and other humans wearing different kinds of suits, and that's about all. The levels are average, and you'll swear you've seen the textures in later levels earlier in the game.
There are many other glaring problems with the game. One is the long load times whenever you load a saved game, or even when you want to retry after dying, which will be frequently, since you only have one life, and can only save in between levels. It doesn't help that this game is extremely difficult. In the later stages, the mercs will kill you before you have a chance to target them, and even if you manage to kill them, you'll most take a huge amount of damage in the process. There really is no room for error, and you'll just be playing through the levels, memorizing where the enemies are, and hoping that you can get a good run through before having to reload your saved game.
Just as badly overlooked by the developers is the silly enemy AI. All too often guards will become stuck on corners, allowing you to get into a good position to just shoot whichever half protrudes, assuming the hit detection at that point in time is functioning correctly. Also, enemies will simply fall off bridges to their death...need I say more?
Also very laughable and very Wolf3Dish is that the guards utter the same phrases whenever you're spotted, most of the time "Die miner!"
There are a couple of things that break the monotony of this game. There are a couple of vehicle levels, one in which you pilot a sub that shoots ineffective torpedoes (hint: don't try to shoot the enemy subs, just zip past them) and a level in which you drive a buggy equipped with a machine gun. Other than that, there are a couple of levels where you can sneak around.
Perhaps first person shooters aren't meant to be played on handheld systems, and Red Faction for the N-Gage doesn't indicate otherwise. With clumsy controls, targeting problems, buggy AI, and an extremely high difficulty level, this is simply a broken mess that you're better off passing on.