By now you've probably read a slew of Best Of lists (including our own) from E3, but now GameSlice is ready to unveil our Surprise Game list.   A yearly tradition, we round up a handful of products from E3 that truly caught us off guard – games that either looked a lot better than we thought they would or came out of no where and make a mark on the show.  While many of the games on this year's list are early in development, keep them on your gaming radar maps.

Destructible 3D terrain in Red Faction.   Screenshot Gallery

Red Faction
Developer: Volition
Publisher: THQ
Today most 3D action games look like cookie-cutter copies of each other -- at least on the technical front. But Volition, the team responsible for Descent and Descent: Freespace is planning to enter the FPS market with a new game, Red Faction, and a new engine, Geo-Mod.  While this game is really nothing more than a technology demo at this point, the sheer design potential of a fully destroyable environment coupled with Volition's reputation easily put this game on our list.

What sets Red Faction apart from other games is the ability for players to actually destroy the environment.  For instance if there was a pipe protruding from a wall, the player could fire rockets at the area where the pipe abuts the wall, eventually causing the pipe to detach.  This feature can be extended to allow players to blow up walls or using rocket blasts to tunnel through walls.

Of course such freedom in the game environment introduces a host of game design issues – If the player can destroy any part of the environment, those red key-card puzzles become obsolete.  So while destroyable terrain is an impressive technical feat, there is still a lot of work to be done on the game design side to make such a feature an asset and not a liability to gameplay.

Volition also unveiled a number of other features at E3, including controllable land, air and sea vehicles – only an APC was shown – and a great looking particle-effects system is also planned with flowing lava and billowing clouds of smoke.

Red Faction makes this list based on sheer potential and a forward-thinking concept, but there's no question that Volition has its work cut out if it hopes to truly realize the immense potential of building gameplay where the environment can become a tool, not an obstacle.  Red Faction is slated for Winter 2001 – which means it's not coming out anytime soon.