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
One of the biggest disappointments of the game however, is its lackluster shooting mechanics, something the earlier games in the series got spot on. The controls just don’t seem tight enough and the useless enemy AI doesn’t do the gun combat segments any favours either. To compensate for this, the game just throws more and more enemies at you.
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So up until the last 10 percent of the campaign, you’re just doing what you did in the first 10 percent over and over again – destroying EDF buildings, completing the same guerrilla missions, and lots and lots of driving in between. The understandably barren environments of Mars only serve to increase the boredom. If you’ve played the single-player demo and enjoyed the Walker retrieval bit and the shooting gallery segment that follows, the bad news is that there are few missions in the game as much fun as that, so the demo is pretty much the best the game has to offer.
The game does pick up considerably in the latter stages though and it ends on a high, with some much needed story-telling in there as well. But it isn’t enough to make up for the monotonous nature of much of the game before it, and only gives you a glimpse of how this game might have turned out if Volition had paid the same attention to the rest of the game. As it stands, the single-player campaign just seems like a showcase of the Geo Mod 2 engine, because there really isn’t much note-worthy besides the destructible environments. If you do decide to go after all the guerrilla missions once you’re done with the story, the single-player campaign will last you roughly 20 hours on normal difficulty.
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You also have a pass-the-controller mode called Wrecking Crew. As the name suggests, it’s all about mindless destruction – one map, one man, one minute, and unlimited ammo. Your job is to wreak as much havoc as possible, and once you’re done, pass the controller to the left and let Player 2 have a go. You can have up to 4 people in Wrecking Crew and if you ever felt that the campaign didn’t provide you with enough ammo to carry out your devilish dance of destruction, this is where you can get your thrills.
Having skipped the multi-player demo, the game’s online competitive multi-player component came as a pleasant surprise to me. For online, the game ditches the open-world setting for more focused maps, and while you have many of the weapons from the single-player campaign, you also get various backpacks as perks. The jetpack is there from the single-player campaign, and in addition you have backpacks that let you see through walls, make you temporarily invisible, give you short speed bursts, and my personal favourite – the rhino pack, which makes you indestructible and allows you to run through walls.
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Game types are your standard multi-player fare – deathmatch, capture the flag, king of the hill; they’re all there. But the destructibility adds a new dimension to these games. Not only can you break through walls to create new paths, but you can also bring down entire buildings, killing its occupants. There’s also a weapon exclusive to the multi-player that let’s you rebuild an under-attack structure that you’re designated to protect. It’s a comprehensive online mode complete with stat-tracking, leaderboards, etc, and in many ways, it overshadows the disappointing single-player campaign.
I imagine it would be pretty hard to make a game world set in Mars look anything but bland. It’s mostly just shades of yellow and brown, so visually the game isn’t all that outstanding. While in-game character models are serviceable, the cut-scenes, the few that are there, are quite impressive, even if they are pre-rendered. In some missions, particularly towards the end, there’s a lot of destruction and chaos happening on screen and the framerates really start to crawl at these times, almost ruining the experience. It’s not going to win any awards for graphical excellence, but it certainly holds it’s own against other sandbox titles. There isn’t much to speak of in the sound department either. Voice acting is pretty decent, whatever little there is of it. And I can’t really recall hearing much of a score either, so if there was any, it certainly didn’t stand out.
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Conclusion
You know it’s not a very good game when halfway through it you find yourself thinking, “When is this gonna end?” Red Faction Guerrilla promises much, but by the time it picks up, you’ve been bored out of your mind after having to play through the same missions over and over for close to 10 hours. But while the campaign is less than impressive, online multi-player is quite the opposite. So if you see yourself spending hours online with Red Faction Guerrilla, I suggest you pick it up. If not, save your money.
(+) Destruction like you’ve never seen before in a game
(+) Some nice weapons, particularly the remote charges
(+) Fun online multi-player
(-) Repetitive single-player campaign
(-) Loose gun combat; poor AI
(-) Annoyingly floaty vehicle handling
Title: Red Faction Guerrilla
Developer/Publisher: Volition Inc/THQ
Genre: Third-person shooter
Rating: 16+
Platforms: Xbox 360 (Rs 2,199), PlayStation 3 (Rs 2,499)
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