When your former saviours become oppressors, who do you turn to?
In past Red Faction games the Earth Defence Force (EDF) fought to free the population of Mars from a military regime. Now, an arbitrary number of years on, it is they who govern the planet with an iron fist, imposing military rule on the world. As Alex Mason, a demolitions expert, you witness their brutality first-hand as your brother is viciously gunned down in front of you. Narrowly escaping death yourself and looking for revenge, you and your explosive skill set join the planet’s rebels, The Red Faction, in a bid to bring the EDF to their knees.
Unlike previous games in the series, Red Faction: Guerrilla leaves the FPS genre behind and embraces the third-person alternate. Mars is now a large, open world where you are free to roam as you wish, similar in style to GTA and Crackdown. Your missions send you all over the planet; recovering vehicles, raiding weapon caches and destroying key EDF targets, each one edging you closer to freedom.
Whilst this may sound quite standard fare for open-world-come-sandbox games, what sets Red Faction apart becomes apparent during your very first mission. Armed with a powerful sledgehammer and a backpack full of explosives, the task is to raze an abandoned research facility to the ground. There is no stored animation for this, no sleight of hand that replaces a once grand structure with a pile of dust. Instead, what Red Faction: Guerrilla has achieved is gaming’s first truly breathtaking and complete implementation of destructive physics.
Some players may barrel through the building, swinging their sledgehammer wildly until it collapses around you. Others might be more strategic, carefully identifying the support structures and planting charges on them before retreating to a safe distance to watch the fireworks. Both are equally effective but the latter is overwhelmingly satisfying; seeing a three storey enemy barracks billow with flame from carefully placed explosives and slowly collapse into a cloud of dust and scrap metal has yet to grow old.
The flexibility of the destruction is to be admired. Placing explosives to bring down a towering smoke stack on to smaller structures will see them shatter under the force. Likewise, borrowing the locals’ mining vehicles and driving at full speed through buildings can be equally effective. Those looking for a way to flatten a target should never be short of options.
This feature alone has been enough to hook me into Red Faction. On numerous occasions I have pulled off the road at the sight of a temptingly large building, and the missions that revolve around destruction I absolutely revel in – especially the “puzzles” where objects need destroying with limited ammunition. It is a childlike joy similar to that of pulling a foundation stone out of your brother’s freshly built block tower when you were younger.
However, to achieve destruction on such a level comes at a price. The process is hugely computation heavy and for comparison’s sake GTA’s Liberty City could never be leveled in such a way, its sheer number of buildings would cripple all bar the most powerful of systems. As a result Mars is sparsely populated. When driving through the red-tinged landscape, communities are few and far between with only a handful of buildings ever found huddling together. The slight exception are enemy outputs with their guard towers, barracks, walkways and HQ, but their appearance is infrequent and only serves to remind you further how desolate the rest of the planet’s surface is.
As much fun as blowing up EDF structures can be, they’re not going to let you get away with it for long and their troops will go to great lengths to bring your destructive streak to an end. Soldiers will pile out of barracks and patrol vehicles career madly towards you. It’s very much like the “wanted” system in GTA, but with far less granularity. The EDF seemingly operate either an “ignore” or “shoot-on-sight” policy, often with the latter meaning whole waves of battalions are sent against you.
This wouldn’t be a problem if it wasn’t for the combat. Most basic weapons lack weight and satisfaction and it is as if you are fighting the tide most of the time; no matter what you do you’re putting off the inevitable and you might as well run. Sticking around for a gunfight only gives the EDF more time to call in reinforcements leading to death as a common sight. Groups of rebels do fight alongside you and your more explosive weapons buy you time, but the odds are so heavily stacked against you it’s usually best to punch a hole in a wall and leg it. Maybe later on I’ll become a supersoldier, but at this early stage I am severely tempted to kick the difficulty down a few notches in a bid to get combat over more quicker and instead get down to the parts of the game that don’t feel like a chore. Like blowing things up.
The standout moments of Red Faction: Guerilla are personified in its Wrecking Crew mode. A single-box multiplayer feature where you and your friends pass the controller around, each trying to cause more damage than the last in a series of scenarios. Here no one will try and take you down, it’s just you, a selection of potent weapons and a collection of very shaky looking buildings ripe for flattening. Personally, I get so much out of this mode in particular that I quite happily sit there passing the pad to myself, the various options and gametypes open to player making it as satisfying as any lengthy story mode.
I make my living as a programmer at a British games developer. In my spare time I try and spread myself between writing, gaming, goalkeeping, rolling dice and keeping my hair blue. Somewhere around that my wife and rabbits fit in.
Disclaimer: the views expressed are my own and do not neccessarily reflect those of my employer
It's definitely enough to sustain interest to the point where I am now, some 6 or 7 hours in. Don't get me wrong, though, I'm still advancing through the missions and am currently in the third of six regions, but whenever I need a distraction or have a choice of objectives the ones that involve explosives and collapsing towers generally are always enough to keep me going.
Whether it lasts until the end of the game is another question. I'll keep you posted.
Sold! I was non-plussed about the demo, but this actually sounds like fun. I’ll add it to the Lovefilm queue.
So is the destruction decent enough to sustain interest then? My gripe with the demo was that everything felt a little lightweight, sort of cardboardy.
It’s definitely enough to sustain interest to the point where I am now, some 6 or 7 hours in. Don’t get me wrong, though, I’m still advancing through the missions and am currently in the third of six regions, but whenever I need a distraction or have a choice of objectives the ones that involve explosives and collapsing towers generally are always enough to keep me going.
Whether it lasts until the end of the game is another question. I’ll keep you posted.
Hi guys, i have also been playing this and you have summed it up pretty well, it is very satisfying knocking those buildings down
i dont mind the fact that the buildings are spread out the way they are, for me it was a more believable mars colony rather than looking like liberty city with a red tinge, and while playing it i was fondly reminded of total recall, which i then went and watched again hehe
That’s a good point, I suppose I was just so into the destructive elements that I was just a little disappointed that great buildings were few and far between.