RED FACTION GUERRILLA

Who doesn’t like blowing stuff up? I think there’s a demo man in each and every one of us who loves watching things go BOOM. That guy is in for a real treat as developers Volition have taken the term environmental destruction to the next level with their latest game, Red Faction Guerilla (RFG). As you might have heard or seen by now, the Red Faction series has now made the transition to third person as opposed to the first person shooters the first two games were. The reason is so that players can experience the true power of their Geo-Mod 2.0 engine. But before we talk about blowing stuff up, let’s take a quick look at the game’s plo

In RFG you play as Alec Mason, a miner who’s come to Mars to earn an honest living. Upon arrival you find out that the Earth Defense Force (EDF) aren’t the good guys they once used to be and they’re now using their power and resources to oppress the locals. Fighting this oppression is an organization called the Red Faction and your brother just so happens to be a part of it. He persuades you to join his noble cause but you politely decline at first and it’s only once he ruthlessly gets gunned down that you pick up your sledgehammer in revenge.

If you’ve played the Saint’s Row series, gameplay in Red Faction will seem vaguely familiar. Unlike the linear corridor shooters the first two games were, RFG has now gone the open-ended way which means you’re given a free reign as far as progression is concerned. Of course like the Saint’s Row series you’ll have to undertake and successfully complete a certain number of side quests to unlock story-based missions. During both, side quests and main missions, there are two things you have to keep an eye out for—EDF presence in a particular area, and the morale of the locals there. To recruit more people or have them fight by your side you’ll have to increase their morale by driving out the EDF presence in their locality. You can do so by destroying random EDF structures (denoted in red on your map) or by undertaking Guerilla missions. Reduce EDF presence to zero and a story-based mission pops up that allows you to liberate the entire sector once and for all. But Mars is a huge planet and you’ll have to liberate five distinct sectors in this way. The big problem here is that liberating every sector is pretty much the same experience. You have a handful of Guerilla missions such as rescuing hostages or driving vehicles back to your base within a certain amount of time that get repeated all the time. As you progress, enemies become tougher and they’ll wield more powerful weapons but gameplay essentially stays the same.

Story-based missions are variations of the side quests (or vice versa) so you’ll be craving variety by the time you hit the halfway mark. This comes as a bit of a disappointment since Volition’s last game, Saint’s Row 2, offered a tremendous amount of variety. But then again, the game does such an awesome job of letting you blow everything up with reckless abandon, you might just about excuse it. Each and every structure, be it a building, bridge, tower or garage can be blown up in this game and how you go about doing that is up to you. You can either drive your vehicle into a structure taking out all its supporting beams in the process or you can run around planting sticky mines on all four sides. If you prefer taking a more direct approach, roll up and just blow it to kingdom come with your rocket launcher. If you’re really bored, it’s possible to take it down using nothing but your sledgehammer—time consuming, but satisfying as hell!

The way each and every structure crumbles in the game is a sight to behold; slabs of concrete fly all over the place, glass shatters violently, walls start crumbling in real time and once you damage a structure enough you’ll hear it creaking and groaning while your controller vibrates. This is an indication to get out of there before the roof quite literally comes down on your head. Certain structures like billboards crumble in a scripted way no doubt, but all said and done no other game has done environmental destruction this well, so some serious props go out for that.

Besides blowing stuff up you can melee objects/people with your sledgehammer or use a plethora of rifles, shotguns and rocket launchers. The more stuff you destroy, the more scrap you earn, which can be used to buy armor and weapons or even upgrade existing ones. On the flip side gunplay is a tad weak and customization is limited.

Even so you’ll find your arsenal more than sufficient to bring the whole of Mars down, but there's not much else that’ll grab you. The plot’s horribly clichéd, voice acting is bad and AI—both friendly and enemy—is downright braindead. Thanks to retarded AI, even simple tasks like hostage rescues become exercises in frustration.

Once you’re done decimating Mars to your heart’s content, hop online for a number of entertaining multiplayer modes that benefit from all the environmental destruction of the single player campaign. Before you go online you’ll have an offline mode to choose from called Wrecking Crew that basically hands you the weapon of your choice with unlimited ammo and encourages you to blow up all the buildings in a level within a set period of time. Up to four players can share a console making it one awesomely destructive party game.

As far as online modes are concerned, you have Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Capture the Flag, Damage Control (a variant of King of the Hill) and Siege modes. In Siege one team has to destroy the other team’s structures while defending their own. Every team member is fitted with a device called a reconstructor (for some reason this device is available in multiplayer only) that can repair broken structures. With the ability to destroy entire buildings in multiplayer, things do get pretty intense online but thankfully frame rates stays rock solid 90 percent of the time. It's in the single player version; frame dipped only when unleashing some serious vengeance on a bunch of structures at the same time.

Mars on the whole looks a bit bland and after a while you’ll get sick of the shades of red and brown all over. Granted, it isn’t the most picturesque of planets to begin with, but it still wouldn’t have hurt to put in a bit of variety. So even though it gets a bit boring in the middle, Red Faction Guerilla is visceral, satisfying and is one awesome stress buster. Mission structures get repetitive but play the game in short bursts and you’ll learn to love it. You even have a healthy multiplayer component to increase longevity. It’s no Modern Warfare but you’ll stick to it for a while since it’s always fun to bring an entire building down on your friends. If you like blowing stuff up; Red Faction Guerrilla deserves a spot in your collection.