Red Faction Guerrilla   

I wanna be – your sledgehammer! 

Reviewed by Coxster 

Played on Xbox 360 

At first, Red Faction felt like a million other games I had played, that was until I started swinging my sledgehammer.  Things got very interesting after that.   Red Faction Guerrilla is the third game in a series that many will remember (perhaps not fondly) while newer gamers won’t recall the games that showed up on the PS2.  Shifting from first person to third person makes perfect sense when you take into consideration the amount of damage that can be done to just about any item on screen.  If you could imagine the original Mercenaries set on Mars with a splash of Total Recall and controls kind of like Saint’s Row, you’ll start to get an idea of the kind of game that Red Faction Guerrilla is.   It’s satisfying levels of destruction and often overwhelming combat makes RFG a must have for collectors of fine action games.

 Slow day at the Space Diner

The story is fairly basic, you go to Mars to mine and end up seeking revenge for your brother that gets killed by the fascist EDF (Earth Defence Force) on your first day of work.  Not off to a good start are we?  It’s a fairly routine story that serves it’s purpose, that’s to provide as many situations as possible for your character to steam into battle swinging his big sledgehammer.  

While the main missions deal with your revenge against the authorities, the side missions in Red Faction are varied and quite fun to play.  There are escort missions and on rail moments (don’t groan) but they actually are a lot more fun than you usually come across in other games, the reason behind this is that the combat is fun to play with and the environment is so heavily destructible.   If you want to zip through the main missions, it’s going to take you a good dozen hours or so, but I always end up getting sidetracked on lesser tasks because ever since Fallout, I’ve had this fear that the game would end and wouldn’t let me go back into the city and explore some more.   With RFG, that isn’t the case, once the credit are finished you’re put back into the action so you can go on your merry way and complete all those missions you walked by the first time around.  

Who needs to aim?

Now I will admit that the gameplay can tend to get a little repetitive and the environment of Mars is hardly going to set anyone’s heart aflutter, but with plenty of weapons to upgrade and vehicles to zip around in, there is always something to do, or someplace to go.   Blowing up the foundations of buildings never gets old, so even just going out with some charges ends up being an afternoon of fun.  Watching a bridge fall, or a silo stumble really brought out a nasty little streak in me that I kind of enjoyed.  This is why we have games right? 

Now the hype around Red Faction Guerrilla was that just about everything was going to be destructible.  We have heard that so many times over the years that when I heard it, I was like “Yeah, yeah, believe it when I see it buddy.”  Well I’m eating my own words because RFG actually delivers on it’s promise and most certainly uses the new tech far better than previous efforts.  

Here I was thinking that Mars was a red planet - wrong, it's brown...brown brown brown.

Probably the cream on the cake is that the multiplayer modes in RFG are top notch and some of the best fun you’ll find on Xbox Live.   When you hit the multiplayer games, you’ll lose the open world business, instead you’ll have a more streamlined experience that allows you to fight against other players.   You’ll get various pick-ups along the way, jet packs, x-ray perks, sprinting, you can bust through walls to get at enemies or sneak around using stealth power-ups, it’s really so much fun when you have a heap of guys just going nuts, there is something addictive about it.  Kind of like Left 4 Dead, it’s simple online fun that is polished and leaves you coming back for more.  It took me a while to get a game up and running but I hope this one will continue to be a hit on Xbox Live, because it almost makes the game worth buying on this feature alone.  There is king of the hill, CTF and Deathmatch, it’s all very standard but it’s been put together very nicely.  

The graphics can be a bit of a mixed bag, on one hand the main character is designed pretty nicely (even if he does look like every other character you get to play as these days – scar – bald head – you get the picture) but doesn’t animate the best.  The environment looks pretty good and when you blow up big structures you’ll literally see hundreds of moving parts flying through the air.  It’s impressive I tell you.  Because of this, it looks like the graphics have been scaled back a little, so that the framerate stays stable when big explosions do happen.  I’m cool with that as long as the gameplay is there and RFG has it in spades.  Definitely give this one a run.  

Overall:  

+         Environment is totally destructible!!!! 

+         Swing a sledgehammer through a wall!!!!!! 

+         Blow up every goddamn thing!!!!  

+         Xbox Live multiplayer is heaps of fun that you can play for hours.  

+         Long game with fun side quests.  

-         Graphics are a little under par, repeating textures. 

-          Vehicles handle like tanks, no matter how slick it looks.  

-          Challenge can be a bit unbalanced in certain parts.   

-          Mars is booooring to live on.