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Red Faction: Guerrilla
Destruction, its one of life’s simple pleasures and it’s one that Red Faction: Guerrilla provides plenty of opportunities for. The whole game revolves around destroying buildings with a sledgehammer and a variety of other weapons.
As the third game in the Red Faction series, which started in 2001 with the first game: Red Faction. Red Faction: Guerrilla appears to have flipped things on its head. The Earth Defence Force (EDF); the good guys of the first game seem to have, rather ironically become the new tyrannical overlords of Mars, despite their assistance in the fight against the last overlords that ruled the red planet. You play the role of Alec Mason, who has one hell of a hammer swing, seeing as pretty much any building or structure on Mars can be taken down with your trusty sledgehammer. The game begins with Mason landing on Mars, and being greeted by his brother. After a brief tutorial mission, your brother is killed, and this is the catalyst for your entry into the ‘Red Faction’, a small group of rebels who plan to overthrow the EDF. After a few missions they quickly realise that you are their new superstar and so begins the rollercoaster ride towards freedom. The plot isn’t exactly ground breaking, and won’t be coaxing tears from gamers any time soon, however, it is more than enough to keep you interested in the game.
Guerrilla features all of the standard third person shooter mechanics, including a cover system, which, in all honesty doesn’t really need to be utilised. It isn’t that the cover system isn’t useful, but why hide from your enemies when you can bring down a building down on their heads instead? The change to a third person perspective instead of the first person view of the previous games is a welcome one, as it allows for the player to fully appreciate the destruction that takes place around them. Guerrilla also differs from its predecessors due to its open world nature, while the original game had plenty of areas to explore; it was still fairly linear and the sequel was much more confined. The vast world isn’t completely open to you at the start of the game, once you have successfully loosened the EDF’s grip on the sector (this is done by killing EDF soldiers, demolishing key EDF structures and completing side missions) a liberation mission becomes available leading to the release of the sector from EDF control, and thus allowing you to progress to the next sector.
To prevent the game from being a generic third person shooter, Volition made sure that every building you see can be destroyed in a variety of manners. This makes sure that combat is rarely dull, as, if a headshot isn’t good enough for you; you can just blow up the fuel tank next to that EDF grunt and watch as the ragdoll physics take hold. The destruction in the game is one hundred percent pure fun; you will often find yourself ignoring the storyline and any side missions just to reduce a building to debris. The physics in the game are fairly realistic when it comes to the collapse of a building, take out enough of the supports and the building will topple. Occasionally a building won’t fall immediately, giving a fantastic feeling of suspense as you wait for it to collapse. Despite the great physics when it comes to the buildings, the driving in the game feels extremely floaty. This could be blamed on Mars’ gravity, but all of the vehicles feel extremely similar, with large vehicles and small vehicles all carrying very little weight, meaning that it is extremely easy to go flying into the air without much of a prompt.
While the main singleplayer game isn’t particularly long if you focus on completing it instead of indulging in the other activities the game presents. The open world and the multiple side missions help extend the experience. Beyond this, there is an online multiplayer option, and an offline multiplayer option. The online mode keeps the destructible environments that the single player features but it also mixes things up a bit more by giving you various backpacks that enhance your abilities. These backpacks include: a jetpack, the rhino, which allows you to run through walls, fleetfoot, which increases your running speed and several others. These backpacks combined with the variety of weapons and the destructible buildings make for a very interesting and enjoyable online experience. There are a large variety of multiplayer modes, with your standard deathmatch (known as anarchy) being present, and many more complex modes, where you will find yourself either defending or attacking a vital structures. Guerrilla also features a persistent XP system, where you earn points by making kills and winning matches, these points can be used to unlock new variations of your sledgehammer, and various other rewards. The offline multiplayer mode (Wrecking Crew) is a different story altogether, the basic idea of this mode is: blow up as much as you can, as fast as you can. Wrecking Crew forces you to pass the controller between players, but despite having to wait to play, watching your opponents blow everything up is still enjoyable, but is nothing compared to destroying everything yourself. Both of the multiplayer modes add countless hours to the experience.
Despite the amazing fun that the destructible environments present, the game is let down by several issues. Some of the missions soon become repetitive, as you can only rescue so many hostages before it gets old, normally these missions would be much more enjoyable due to the large amounts of destruction, but as bringing down a building on the hostages will cause you to fail the mission, you have to be much more reserved, removing one of the most enjoyable parts of the game, leaving a standard third person shooter in its place.
The game’s graphics aren’t going to dazzle you, this might be because of the game’s setting, as there is only so much you can do with Mars, but environments outside of towns often look similar, with nothing but red to see for miles. The plot is also fairly weak, with forgettable side characters, some collectible items mean you can take a peak at the world’s history, but there is no real prompt that these items exist, and because they’re hidden a player could easily go through the whole game without knowing they exist.
Volition have successfully created a game based on a fantastic mechanic, allowing for hours of fun and as you progress through the game unlocking new ways to bring buildings to the ground, the premise only becomes more interesting. While the plot, graphics and voice acting are far from outstanding, the gameplay more than makes up for their shortcomings. The multiplayer only adds to an already great overall experience, making Red Faction: Guerrilla a fantastic game to play during the summer drought.
8.5/10
same scenario as the battlefield review, crit please. I think I improved a bit with the commas and full stops (not peroids, you disgusting perverts) and got a date, and the developer's name in there.
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