"Viva!"

Blowing things up has, and always will be fun. “Red Faction: Guerrilla” is, at its core, a game about blowing stuff up. Volition’s mastery of the sandbox genre, combined with the incredible amounts of destructive freedom delivered by the Geo Mod 2.0 engine make for a stellar experience.

Volition’s experience with open world games is very apparent here. The map is intuitive and easy to read, the controls are very tight, and the game has a very high level of polish.

Placed in the generic, shaved head of Red Faction’s protagonist, Alec Mason, (not to be confused with prototype’s generic shaved head protagonist Alex Mercer) the player is charged with freeing mars from the oppression of the Earth Defense Force (not to be confused with the other Earth Defense Force). Volition did a good job of making the player actually feel oppressed by the EDF. Their checkpoints are everywhere, their scouts constantly patrol the roads, and they will come down on you in a heartbeat.

The only way to effectively fight the EDF is hit and run guerrilla attacks. Run in, blow something up, run out. Staying in any one place for a long period of time is a guaranteed way to get yourself killed. Each time you, a colonist, or a Red Faction member dies, the peoples morale is slightly decreased. Morale is gained by completing guerrilla actions, blowing up EDF property and destroying propaganda. Higher morale means more ammo in Red Faction supply crates, more frequent guerrilla reinforcements, and most importantly, it means that colonists will be more willing to fight alongside the Red Faction.

There are six sectors of Mars to liberate from the EDF, and each sector has its own unique feel to it. From the slums of Parker, to the rolling grassy hills of the terraformed Oasis, Volition managed to bring a lot of variety and color to the Red Planet. Each sector has its own set of story missions, side missions (called guerrilla actions) and high value targets. Everything you do effects the world around you, either dropping the EDF control level, raising morale, or both. I was happy to find that there were very few dull missions throughout the single player campaign, and there was enough variety to keep me playing to the end.

Pretty much every building, wall, supply crate, bridge and vehicle can be blown up, smashed or torn apart at the sub atomic level by Alec. There are few things more rewarding than watching a six lane bridge crumble into a mess of rubble and debris thanks to a few well placed shots from the nano-rifle and a crap-ton of remote charges. Buildings explode and crumble into ruin just as you would expect them to. A few strategic remote charges on the load-bearing beams and a good swing or two of Alec’s trusty sledgehammer are generally all it takes to demolish a building.

The weapons and vehicles are a literal blast to use. Remote mines, rocket launchers, Gauss cannons, and rifles that tear matter apart at a molecular level are just a few tool of the trade. The vehicles range from tiny mars rovers to enormous industrial walkers that can plow through a building without even slightly slowing down.

Aside from the lengthy single player campaign, Red Faction also features online multiplayer. Although I only played a few matches, I was very impressed by the games ability to handle 16 player online matches in such a destructible environment with little to no lag.

“Red Faction: Guerrilla” is by far my favorite game of 2009 so far, and i strongly recommend a purchase, and at the very least a rental.

Tags: Alec Mason, Earth Defense Force, EDF, open world games, ps3, Red Faction, Red Faction: Guerrilla, third person, Volition, Xbox 360

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 9th, 2009 at 11:05 am and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.