Blowing shit up is fun. Therefore Red Faction Guerrilla, with the best in-game destruction system ever to grace an open-world of pixels and polygons, should be bloody entertaining. And for the most part, it is.
Taking place 50 years after the PS2 FPS games, former liberator 'The Earth Defence Force (EDF)' is now an evil empire occupying Mars. After terraforming the surface to give the red planet blue skies, the EDF's gotten cocky and is now kidnapping the planet's inhabitants to put in its work camps, and then sticking up propaganda posters to tell everyone how wicked it is. It's time to rebel... again.
You play as newcomer Alec Mason who's thrust into the Red Faction's war when his brother - a known guerrilla - gets filled with military lead. Bruised and craving revenge, it's up to you to disrupt the corporation's grip on Mars and rally the civilisation to your cause. in gameplay terms this means blowing lots of things up.
Red Faction: Guerrilla
Official trailer
3:45Blow stuff up. It's fun
Red Faction: Guerrilla
Official trailer
3:45Blow stuff up. It's fun
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The magic behind Guerrilla's bangs is a true physics-based destruction system, which sees individual bricks and support beams dynamically falling to the might of your weighty sledge hammer.
It looks impressive and feels all the more satisfying; ploughing a truck through a load-bearing corner of a three-story building will send brick and mortar collapsing to the ground - and crushing whoever might be loitering underneath it. It's instantly gratifying and lots of fun.
You'll probably spend the first few hours of Red Faction knocking things down just to watch them fall, which is a pretty good proof of concept if we've ever seen one. If you want to be clever about your destruction, you can. Placing remote charges on the load-bearing pillars and arches save ammo.
You're rewarded for blowing up buildings with collectable salvage, Guerrila's answer to cash. Using salvage collected from your sledge hammer carnage you can purchase new weapons, upgrade old ones are toughen up your armour.
The destruction is a refreshing foundation for an open-world game and Volition's decided to keep it simple.
Mars is split into different sectors with everything accessible from the off, similar to Realtime World's Crackdown. Completing missions and blowing up government property lowers the evil EDF's hold on a sector, while performing sidequests (rescuing hostages, destroying propaganda) will increase local resistance.
There aren't any closed bridges restricting the next area, and neither is there a barrage of narrative and cut-scenes forcing you down a specific path. This suits the themes of Guerrilla well and again, like Crackdown, it can be enough fun just running around the sandbox having your own fun.
That said, Guerrilla's missions are a real highlight. There isn't an abundance of tasks on offer (three or four per sector) but this means Volition's been able to be a bit more creative.
No two missions feel the same; one moment you'll have to kidnap an EDF leader and lob him into a canyon, in another you'll go ballistic in the driving seat of a giant mechanical walker.
Red Faction Guerrilla is a great example of having fun in a sandbox environment. One mission saw us having to destroy what could have been Tower Bridge. Remote charges weren't going to do it and so commenced an hour of strategically eliminating girders and even smashing inside the bridge's innards to take out pieces with a sledge hammer.
The excellent destruction system is what makes these missions, granted, but you don't have to be Shigeru Miyamoto to tell that Voltion's benefited from its years of Saints Row gameplay lessons.
You never feel marooned on foot because your character runs at the speed of a medium-powered go kart. The cover system hardly ever fails you. Thanks to an on-the-road GPS, your eyes are always on the environment and navigation is crystal clear. Vehicles are also bouncy and fun to drive.
And if the destruction is fun in single-player, it can only be more satisfying when you bring a building down on another player's head online.
Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch and Capture the Flag are fair enough, but the real worthwhile additions online are Siege, which has one team attacking and one team repairing a base, and Damage Control, which has two teams fighting to destroy and then repair three target buildings.
Smashing through concrete runs just as well with other players and as you can imagine, it's fairly addictive too. Plus (and here's a blast from the past) it's also playable via system link, which is a welcome, often-overlooked addition.
As much fun as Guerrilla is the experience doesn't go as deep as we would've liked. The plot, although paper-thin to allow for more player freedom, could've been far more cleverly integrated into the world.
Instead we're left with a Mars that's only half as immersive and atmospheric as it could've been (see Total Recall), and we don't really care if the rebellion wins or not.
The sectors themselves aren't different enough from each other visually (one has a thin layer of grass, another's a bit more rocky...).
There's also the odd rare hallmark of an unpolished game, such as the invisible Great Wall of China that unashamedly borders Mars' colonist sectors. Tsk, tsk.
Red Faction Guerrilla is a refreshing and very enjoyable sandbox game that offers an alternative to the Saints Rows, GTAs and Godfathers out there. Don't expect anywhere near the insight and polish found in GTA IV, but do expect a rollicking good time.
The physics witnessed in some of the video footage of this game are extremely impressive. However, I did at times think it was a bit too easy to demolish entire reinforced building structures from what I saw. I do think it would be a lot of fun to raise hell for a few hours, yet I was, and continue to remain, concerned about the thin story underpinning the game. In light of the fact that "Crackdown 2" will also be an open sandbox game, and that I find it's brief intro premise more appealing, I think I'd rather wait for that one.
The story missions do have some amazing set pieces, and some of the bigger buildings are satisfying to kill.
I'm getting really annoyed at how buildings keep staying up long past they ever should though. I mean, I've had a watchtower standing purely on the ladder used to reach its top.
The weapons are awesome and varied, but you can only carry 3 +sledgehammer at any one time, which is nowhere near enough when they're so specialised. And ammo needs to be restocked very frequently.
Online is pretty awesome, especially the backpack system, but it seems fairly unpolished and doesn't have much in it.
"Guerrilla" is a little misleading, since as soon as you're detected, which you always will be immediately, all the bad guys in the base converge on you. So your attack angle doesn't matter at all, except to try for the higher ground.
The primary missions are well paced and fun, but the difficulty shoots up on some of the side mission types, while not rising at all for other types.
All in all it is a bloody awesome game, with a fair bit of replayability. It just seems to have small problems right across the board.
Also, bad form with the lateness of this review CVG. I use you as my main source of game info, and was disappointed by the lack of review.
I am seriously tempted with this game. I think that once I have finished with Infamous (really addictive!), I will pick Red Faction up. Looks like good fun and has gained some decent scores too.
I received it from Lovefilm.com over the weekend and although I've not really given it more than an hours play I can safely say it's Mercs 2 in space, but maybe slightly better.
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Best destruction system EVER!
