Volition surprised many when Red Faction Guerrilla was first announced. In a departure from the first two titles in the Red Faction series, which were first-person shooters, in Guerrilla, you play from a third-person perspective, and while the previous games were more linear, this one adopts an open-world approach. So they’ve pretty much flipped the script for this latest iteration, which is a bit of a risk. But does the risk pay off?
The key selling point of Red Faction has always been the destructible environments. It did it as an FPS with the Geo Mod engine and it does it again, and even better, in its third-person shooter avatar with Geo Mod 2. But the fear was always that Guerrilla would end up as a one-trick pony, wowing everyone with the level of destructibility, but unable to match it in other aspects of the game. Unfortunately, that fear has been realised, and I’ll explain why a little later in the review.
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You can break Red Faction Guerrilla’s single-player campaign up into three segments; the first 10 percent, the last 10 percent, and the 80 percent in between. You play Alec Mason, a new arrival on Mars, who joins his brother Dan as a miner on the Red Planet. He soon discovers that Dan is an important member of the Red Faction, a group of Martian settlers leading the resistance against the totalitarian Earth Defence Force. Dan seeks to induct a reluctant Alec into the movement, and when Dan is killed by the EDF, Alec has no choice but to join the Red Faction to avenge his brother’s death.
The object of the game is to free Mars from the grips of the EDF sector by sector, and you will perform various tasks to clear the EDF from each sector until Mars is liberated. The two parameters you will need to keep track of while trying to achieve this objective are the EDF’s control over a sector and the morale of other guerrilla settlers in that sector. As I mentioned before, destruction is the focal point, so destroying key EDF establishments is the fastest way to reduce its control over a sector. Destroying EDF buildings will open up story missions; there are 3-5 such missions in each sector. Only once you bring EDF control down to zero and complete the story missions can you liberate a sector.
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Destruction is what this game does best and it does it better than any other game ever made. It puts Battlefield: Bad Company’s Frostbite engine to shame, and while there will be certain times when the Geo Mod 2 engine does falter (I had a two-storey building standing on just one beam after I had taken out all four walls), it works quite well for most part and watching a giant mix of concrete and metal crumble to the ground before your eyes is a pure delight; you can almost hear Mozart playing while it happens. And it’s totally unscripted, so if you want you can take down an eight-storey tower with nothing but a sledgehammer. It took me five minutes, and when I was finished, the tower came crashing down on me, killing me in the process. But it was totally worth it.
Besides destroying EDF strongholds, there are also guerrilla missions that help you increase morale in that sector, reduce EDF control, and/or earn salvage, which can be used to buy new weapons and upgrade existing ones. Guerrilla missions include destruction master, where you’re tasked with destroying a building within a limited time with a fixed number of tools, EDF convoy interceptions, transporter missions, which are essentially vehicle time trials, and hostage rescues, amongst others.
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Salvage earned from guerrilla missions and picked up from sites of destroyed buildings can be used to buy various weapons, including remote charges, which are sticky grenades that can be detonated from a distance, the arc wielder, which shoots electricity, rocket launchers, sniper rifles, pistols, etc. You can also use salvage to upgrade weapons you’ve already purchased. For example, you can upgrade a rocket launcher to fire multiple rockets and to fire heat-seeking rockets. Improving morale helps you gain support from other guerrillas and they’ll often come out to help you during your missions. But the friendly AI is some of the worst I’ve ever seen. They just get in your way, more often than not getting caught in the cross-fire, and thus reducing morale. So the morale system is pretty much pointless.
All of the above is revealed and fleshed out within the first 10 percent of the game, while you’re still liberating the first sector of Mars. Needless to say this being the start of the game, everything feels fresh and new. But once you’ve liberated the first sector and crossed that first 10 percent, you’ll soon find that most of the remainder of the game is just more of the same. The same destruction targets, the same guerrilla missions, and little variation in the story missions.
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Being an open-world game, there’s a lot of traveling to be done here and there are various vehicles to control. When you’re on an open piece of land, it can be quite a lot of fun to drive, especially with the bumpy nature of the terrain, but the floaty vehicle handling gets quite annoying when you’re required to negotiate narrow, windy roads, and you’ll soon be wishing you could just jump to missions straight from the GPS map.
Next page: The verdict
