Red Faction: Guerrilla Review

Red Faction: Guerrilla's story probably won't win any awards for science fiction writing, and the logic behind the game's setting makes Star Trek look realistic. But the narrative provides just enough impetus to pull you along this tale of freedom and oppression, to a new world filled with piles of smoldering wreckage. Set 50 years after the first Red Faction, Guerilla finds the Earth Defense Force, the "good guys" from the first game, abusing their power and generally making life bad for the Martian colonists. You take the role of Alec Mason, an everyday miner who just happens to have an arm like Babe Ruth, and works on making Mars a safer place. 

The degree to which you can destroy the environment is Guerrilla's most prominent feature. Unlike the previous games, you don't spend any time digging into the ground, but you can dismantle pretty much anything man-made, piece by piece. Your prowess with hammers and explosive charges lets you make your own doorways through buildings, and, if a structure takes enough damage, send it toppling over. The wanton explosions you create channel other mayhem-friendly games like Mercenaries 2, but here, you get to see the effects of those explosions. Sure, you won't take down any skyscrapers, but it's more fun to take down a three-story building piece by piece than it is to just watch a larger monument disappear in a puff of smoke. That's what Guerrilla does best: It convinces you that its physics are real. If you take a wall out in just the right place, it can cause the entire structure above to slowly teeter before it eventually crumbles.

But Guerrilla is just as much a third-person shooter as it is a tech demo for Jenga-like feats of destruction. The solid shooting and cover mechanics make picking off enemies from a distance as satisfying as blowing away approaching vehicles with a rocket launcher. At times, though, the game's physics feel a little too floaty, especially in the vehicles. Whether you're driving a big truck or a light jeep, you don't carry much weight; you go careening off ramps and into the air far too easily. But it makes taking shortcuts off cliffs -- where you're able to spin mid-air and firmly land on all four wheels -- pretty exciting. Maybe the Martian gravity just affects things differently.

The game starts off with a breakneck pace, as you can liberate the first two towns very quickly. But after that, the game starts to slow down, and the final area can drag on a bit. You can track your progress through two onscreen meters: Morale and Control. Helping out the rebels raises the Morale meter, and increases the amount of ammo found in resupply boxes hidden throughout the world, as well as giving you allies to fight alongside you whenever you take up arms against the EDF. The Control meter gauges EDF activity in a given area, and recedes as you help out the rebels and destroy EDF property. In each new section, you have to bring EDF control to zero before moving on to the next. But the missions where you must lower EDF control are varied enough to overcome the grind-like qualities.

Standard missions have you protecting rebel outposts from wave after wave of EDF soldiers, or delivering vehicles to rebel checkpoints; other missions give you access to specialized mechs that let you ramp up the chaos. But the most satisfying runs are the simple "blow everything up" missions. Only a few of the quests are game critical; you can pick and choose from the rest, though the rewards you earn (schematics and materials for constructing more advanced weaponry) are well worth it. If you want to focus on one or two particular types of missions, you can make your way through the game only engaging in the battles you like, while avoiding the ones you don't. The world is large and easy to get lost in, but the in-game map handily lets you set a waypoint at any objective, with a yellow dotted line laying out the course for you. And fairly early in the game, you can buy the ability to warp directly to sympathetic rebel safehouses, making travel around the planet that much easier.

Guerrilla's multiplayer is so full of features and modes, it's like a separate game entirely. You don't have to unlock items or abilities from the main story -- as soon as you start the game, you can immediately jump into a match with full access to the game's entire arsenal, plus a series of backpacks not found in the single-player campaign. Multiplayer lets you connect with up 16 players and engage in a series of typical multiplayer modes (deathmatch, capture the flag, etc.). "Wrecking Crew" is Guerrilla's offline multiplayer, where you trade a controller back and forth with friends, trying to rack up more destruction than your opponent in a particular stage while under varied constraints (such as time or ammo limits). 10 assorted backpacks change up the gameplay by adding abilities like invisibility or x-ray vision. Both modes are easy to pick up and jump into, but addictive enough to want you to keep playing "just one more time."

Guerrilla isn't a terribly deep game, but as a "summer blockbuster," it works just right. It doesn't expect you to get lost in a deep, engaging sci-fi world -- you're on a mission to Mars to watch stuff explode. A deeper story might have made it more enjoyable in some respects, but it might also have killed the momentum of the demolition action. As a view of a Martian colony rebellion, the experience feels lot more like something starring Arnold Schwarzenegger than a story penned by Heinlein, but sometimes, that's all you need.