Red Faction: Guerrilla

"Unschedualed demolitions are the best kind"

Remember that game? You know, the one where you could blow up walls and drill through dirt and stuff? No? Well, its no wonder, it was not very popular at the time. One game that had innovation years ago was Red Faction, a game which introduced the idea of being able to alter the world around you. Door in the way? Blast it open. Door to heavy to blast open? Blast open the wall next to it that's not armored. It gave a new way of gameplay to those used to the standard FPS of the time. Well after a lack luster sequel, we now have a third installment to the usually under-appreciated series. But is it enough to get this game series into the limelight?

Red Faction takes place many years after the events of the first game. The first games involved you fighting against a corporation which had taken over Mars and was abusing the miners there who were trying to mine the resources needed to feed the ever-starved Earth industries. Eventually the miners could not take the abuse anymore and rebelled, with the help of the EDF (Earth Defense Force). Well years later the EDF is in control of Mars and for some reason thought it was a good idea to abuse and kill the miners in much the same fashion that the evil corporation did in the first game, so to no one's surprise the Red Faction rebel group springs up again to fight for miner's rights. You play as Alec Mason, a man who came to Mars in hopes of a new job and a new life, meeting up with his brother who, rather predictably, lives for about 10 minutes before he is gunned down by the EDF for suspicion of being a Red Faction Member. Needless to say, you are designated for execution due to the proxy, but luckily the Red Faction shows up in time to save your butt. Now its up to you to help the Red Faction fight the EDF and force them off the planet.

The game play is situated in a simple 3rd Person Shooter style with an open world set up, the main world divided into several zones that are designed to be like ‘levels' in an open world setting. Each area consists of at least one Red Faction base which acts as your support hub, and several other locations that are either spots for missions, or targets. The object is to either flat out damage and destroy EDF buildings and fortifications or do missions which revolve around the same idea. There are demolition missions, escort missions, run-and-gun missions, and others. Some missions just pop up as you roam around, including ones where you have to head to a Red Faction stronghold and defend it from EDF attack, ambush a convoy, stop a currier, hijack a vehicle, and the like. The random missions can be ignored, but completing them offers you the chance to reduce the influence of the EDF's presence in the area, raising Red Faction moral, and gaining salvage. If you want to go free-form, you can also simply go around and destroy EDF buildings as you wish, doing so reducing their grip on the area, and usually yielding salvage from the rubble of the buildings. You can also destroy EDF propaganda which increases moral.

Destroying EDF buildings and doing missions lowers the EDF hold on an area. The less hold they have the harder they fight to keep their positions. You need to get them down to 0 before you can move on to the next area. Increasing moral allows for you to occasionally get backup from nearby miners when the EDF start turning up the heat on you. Getting salvage from destroyed EDF equipment and buildings acts like getting currency. You turn the salvage into a mechanic at the various Red Faction bases in order to unlock new weapons and equipment, such as better health, more ammo for weapons, new special abilities, and the like. The hide outs usually also spawn vehicles you can use (Sometimes even modified ones, like transports with automated machine guns on them), and also provides you with a means of escaping pursuit, as the hideouts are the only places you can go to reduce EDF alerts.

Really the whole game revolves around one thing in particular, and that's the geo-mod technology. What that means is that the buildings and structures react to your actions fairly realistically. Now the original game had this as a new thing so it was more of altering the landscape to get around obstacles, but here it's the whole set up of the game as you knock down buildings and structures. This was probably so the game could show case it, as most games now at days have some form of physics engine. What sets it apart here is things like strategic demolition. You can take out a building by destroying every last bit of it, or you can take it down fast by knocking out the main supports to it. You can also take out enemies this way, such as blowing the bottoms out of bridges and having them collapse out from under them, or knocking out the struts on one side of a smoke stack so it tilts and falls down in the direction of your enemies, crushing them. This also means you have to be careful as you can easily kill yourself in this way.

The game is fun to a point but ultimately flawed. For one, its just not easy to go it alone. Doing any type of action will immediately result in you having to deal with a ton of EDF soldiers. They can generally take a lot of damage before going down, and as you progress they just get tougher and better armed. It can sometimes take half a clip of machine gun ammo to take down one trooper. They always seem to spawn in, something like 4 to 8 soldiers at once, and they constantly pour in. Running does not help because they endlessly spawn in your path, so your only option is to run to the Red Faction hideout. It stinks when you die because you cannot just continue from your last auto-save, as the game auto-saves every time you die requiring you to suffer the death penalties or re-load your last normal save. The vehicle physics are also a little off, all the vehicles driving about the same save for speed. They all seem rather light too, even ‘heavy' vehicles bouncing around at the slightest bump taken at high speed, making it easy to bounce upside down or generally incapacitate your ride. The enemy AI is also a little strange. Sometimes the EDF will ignore you even when you are walking by them on foot. Sometimes you will be 10 yards away doing nothing and they will suddenly start shooting at you for no reason. It's hard to tell when they will decide to attack or not.

The game is fun but has its moments of frustration. The long loading screens and the constant deaths by swarms of bullets from all directions are a little much to bare. But still, being able to take down buildings that actually come down like real ones is fun. As mentioned earlier, other games such as Pain Killer have used destructible environments before but this game focuses on it. The ability to take out enemies by destroying the floors they are standing on or caving in a building around them, or simply leaving them stranded by forcing them up onto a second story building and then destroying the stairs leading down, all these things are fun experiences in the game. If only they had made the game a bit more forgiving it would appeal to more gamers. As it stands, even hardcore gamers will find this game endlessly frustrating but rewarding when you do manage to pull off a nice unscheduled building demolition.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 06/23/09

Game Release: Red Faction: Guerrilla (US, 06/02/09)