Red Faction: Guerilla

Destruction. We all love it right? There's few things as satisfying in a game than blowing the crap out of stuff, and it coming down in a way that obliterates as much around it as possible. No doubt this is the selling point in Red Faction's third installment, and it does it damn well.

Ok, the whole game isn't just 'blow this up, and this, and this, and you're done. But it was fun right?'. It's a sandbox game based on Mars and you're a new member of the Red Faction, overthrowing the fascist Earth Defense Force who are oppressing your people. The game works in a very similar way to Mercenaries 1, just with a slightly more bleak landscape and more futuristic weaponry. The feeling of a tense, harshly dominated country is there; the civilians go about their business and manual labour quietly whilst EDF patrols of armoured cars fly past regularly. Your job is to help the Red Faction take all the sections of colonized Mars and eventually throw the EDF off the planet, which will be no easy task considering the lack of weaponry the Red Faction own. This means you have to resort to guerilla tactics as the title suggests, and at the beginning of the game you definitely get the feel of this as you haven't much more than your rifle, sledgehammer and charges but as you get upgrades - a system this game has done VERY well with ways to upgrade just about everything about you and everything you carry - this becomes less of a need as you become able to blow the crap out of most things they can throw at you. This is a bit of a disappointment considering the title, as there are plenty of one-man-army type games out there but not so many Fidel Castro-type ones, but you shouldn't find this hampers the game's enjoyability too much. The game should take you about 20-30 hours to complete the whole storyline - yes, a sandbox game released in recent times with appropriate length!

And now I come to the highest point and what everyone knows the game for: its glorious physics/destruction engine. Remember when Pandemic said for Mercenaries, 'blow up anything and everything?' They were lying. Yep, damn good as it was for its time, trees remained indestructible and buildings were destroyed in scripted ways and would leave the same rubble every time. That was all well and good considering it was on PS2, but we're in the 7th generation now, and it just gets better and better. Take a swing at a wall with your sledgehammer and you'll smash a hole in it, and plates and shards of metal will fall away. Place charges around the foundations of a building, blow them up and watch it collapse in on itself, or drive the biggest truck you can find through the ground floor of a building and watch it slowly lose balance on the remaining supports it has left, until it inevitably tumbles, crushing everything near it and leaving thousands of individual pieces of rubble on the floor and remains of pillars, furniture, EVERYTHING. This is the most realistic destruction simulation you'll have ever seen, Geomod 2.0, and it will undoubtedly blow you away, if it doesn't crush you first.

It’s worth noting that whilst Red Faction does make a good impression with the impressive physics and bringing a new ‘guerrilla’ type gameplay which has not been done many times before, it has a fair amount of problems which tend to make some of the experience less enjoyable. The most notable of the problems is the difficulty; I played through the whole campaign on Normal and many of the missions took far too many tries and did not have anywhere near enough checkpoints. Even when you upgrade your armour and get more and more powerful weapons, the amount of enemies you are put against in some of the later missions gets simply ridiculous, and it becomes very tempting to knock the difficulty down to Easy. I like a challenge in games, which is why I don’t play on Easy, but this got plain frustrating. The particular example I have in mind is the final mission, and though I believe this should be difficult, there is one checkpoint in the whole mission, AFTER which you have to drive a tank for five minutes just to reach the final boss which you then have to defeat. If you fail, do the driving again and try to beat him again. Doesn’t help one bit that the loading screens are about 30 seconds, even if you install it on the Hard Drive (for you good old Xbox 360 users out there...).

Apart from this which will generally affect the gameplay all the time, there are a few things that could have been fixed with a bit more work, such as the sparse cut scenes making the storyline sometimes hard to keep up with. There is also very little character in any of the people involved in the storyline, so really what you're left with is a visually impressive action game with a fair amount of playtime, but only running on a skeleton of a storyline. As such, it's never worth knowing WHY you're doing a mission and how it advances the storyline, you'll just want to know what you have to do.

So Red Faction:Guerilla did a good job, especially for the physics engines of future games, here's hoping this kind of technology will be used in something else soon. 7/10 for an explosive experience, albeit with little depth.