Red Faction: Guerrilla Review

Red Faction: Guerrilla takes place in a futuristic universe where Mars has been colonized by miners mining valuable materials for Earth. You play as Alec Mason, a miner with a specialization in explosives, who is traveling to Mars to work with his brother and make a living mining. Much to Alec's surprise, the EDF (Earth Defense Force) has been exploiting the colonist for the personal benefit of Earth and when they kill Alec's brother and try to arrest Alec, he decides to join the Red Faction, a group dedicated to bringing down the EDF.

So the main point of this game is its revolutionary physics engine which uses countless calculations to simulate real life physics on every building in the game. This means that every building has an entire interior with support beams and foundations and everything else a building needs to stay standing. And when you knock out some of the main supports you'll hear the metal as it slowly flexes from the weight and with enough stress it will snap. Very realistic. So what does this do for the actual gameplay? When you are a guerrilla fighter who is constantly outnumbered and outgunned the ability to destroy any building is amazingly fun. The whole point of the game is to lower the EDF's control in each of the colonies on Mars forcing them to fallback. So this engine allows you to take out key EDF buildings and 'bring down the man' like the terrorist you always wished you could be. And the physics engine allows for amazing strategies and creativity. For example, let's say you just entered a building to steal a key piece of intelligence and the EDF have caught on and encircled the building. Most games would make you fight through countless enemies to escape. But in Red Faction you don't have the ammo to take on countless enemies so instead you can take your sledgehammer, the standard tool of any miner on Mars, and smash a hole in the wall and jump through a window into the building next to you and escape through there. Or let's say you have to kill some EDF that are walking around on the floor above you. Instead of going up the stairs and trying to take them all on, you can plant explosives and blow out the floor so you can take them all out with your sledgehammer while they're all confused and pinned under rubble. And unlike games like Call of Duty, if there is a turret sitting on a balcony you don't have to deal with the frustration of killing the gunner only to have another enemy take their place; instead you can just blowup the balcony and the emplacement along with it. It makes the game so much fun and gives you such a rush when your crazy plans actually work. And this kind of gameplay allows for tons of variety because every gamer will handle every situation differently. I love replaying the missions just to try a different plan. It's also important to note that the enemies in this game are pretty smart too. They will use grenades to flush you out of places and they will always try to flank you from as many sides as possible. The only real downside to the game is that the side missions, which you will have to play if you want to free the colony and move on to the next main mission, get repetitive and sometimes you'll want to just rush through them to get to the cooler main missions.

Despite the fact that multiple buildings can be exploding at the same time with bits and pieces flying everywhere, this game ever skips a beat. The frame rate is very consistent and the game will never lag from too much stuff going on. What's even cooler is that the game has good textures and will look beautiful while everything is exploding. The only downside to the graphics is that while the buildings are awesome and unique the landscape of Mars is very boring. Also, the fact that you can rip apart entire buildings with a massive walker and yet not even leave a footprint in the ground is kind of disappointing. I can see why they wouldn't want you to be able to blow holes in the ground, but a tiny bit of landscape destructibility would have been nice.

Overall I enjoyed this game. It wasn't my favorite game, but it was unique and refreshing. If you are the kind of person who gets very excited about being able to destroy anything and use that ability to create hundreds of imaginative strategies specific to each mission, go get this game. Also, if you have a friend you two will not only have fun playing the multiplayer but you will also get tons of enjoyment out of putting your heads together to come up with plans for beating particularly hard missions. Just make sure to take your time with the side missions otherwise they'll get very repetitive and you'll get very annoyed.