Rapid Review - Red Faction: Guerrilla

Buying Red Faction: Guerrilla is like getting two games for the price of one. One game is an absolutely terrible third-person shooter where you die every 5 fucking minutes and quickly damn an oppressed Mars to a life of misery because you really don't give a shit about their clumsily hashed out sorrows. The other game is an incredibly fun, ultra destructive game where you still don't give a shit about the down trodden, but you don't care that you don't care. The only difference between these two games is the difficulty setting. While your natural tendency may be to play on normal or even trying to challenge yourself to something harder, don't fucking do it. Suck up your pride, flip it to "Casual" (a.k.a. Pansy Ass) and prepare to fall in love with the common sledge hammer. Yes, the greatest weapon in the battle for Martian Freedom is a sledge hammer. On anything but casual it's a 5/10, but drop that baby down to the wussy setting and it's a good 8/10. For details, hit the jump

Red Faction: Guerrilla is an odd mixture of a little bit of Crackdown and a little bit of Mercenaries which results in a sci-fi open world game of mass destruction and bringing down buildings with bombs and a sledge hammer - learn to love the sledge hammer, it's a thing of beauty. The premise is that it's x-number of years after the original uprising in the first Red Faction and the Earth Defense Force, Mars' governing body and your ally in the first game, is now a military dictatorship-slash-consortium that are beating down and killing miners to feel better about themselves and push them harder to drive profits higher. You play Alec Mason, who arrives on the planet searching for work and are met by your brother who quickly dies, long before you could even possibly give a shit, and then somehow you are unwillingly enlisted in the resistance army known as the Red Faction that it seems your brother was a part of. How being conscripted into a fight to overthrow oppression is any better, I'm not sure. The story is pretty flimsy, but if you play it for the right reasons - that being the pure joy of killing and blowing shit up - you won't really care.

While there's nothing terribly wrong with the graphics in the game,they aren't exactly stellar either. The world is divided up into several districts, which you have to liberate individually, each with their own unique look and feel. By unique I mean they all look pretty utilitarian and sparse except for the capital district, which looks really gray, slightly futuristic (actually it looks more European Modern than futuristic), and still kinda sparse. There aren't very many structures taller than 3 or 4 stories, which leave everything feeling rather small, and the population clusters are very far apart leaving the planet feeling very empty. There's no attempt to even try to explain the planets sparse, squat habitation, which would be relatively easy to BS away - just throw some crap about high winds from dust storms or something. If I can do it ad lib, people who get paid to sit around and write this shit can do it too. Lack of variety isn't just in the buildings, it's pretty much everything. Actually, sparsity is probably the games overall biggest flaw as it's not just graphics but lack of variety in missions, music, and so on that keep this from being a phenomenal game.

The issue with missions is the same argument that has been made with Assassin's Creed. There are only a handful of mission varieties where the goals and mechanics remain the same, only the location changes. Much like Assassin's Creed, Guerrilla has story progressing missions which directly affect the plot, and then what they call Guerrilla Missions that lower the governments control over an area and act as filler in between the plot elements. However, where Assassin's Creed was severely stunted in it's variety, Guerrilla is only moderately stunted as there are about 10 types of missions. On paper that sounds like quite a lot, but after you play them all once or twice you realize they are very cookie cutter. The varieties include defending targets against EDF attacks, tracking down defectors and returning the seized information to random places across the plant, tracking down vehicles that need to be returned to random places across the planet, tracking down convoys that need to be seized and delivered the random places across the planet, tracking down "house arrested" compatriots that...yep, need to be delivered to random places across the plant. Each of these is considered to be a different type of mission, however it's basically just swapping out one premise for another with the same mechanics and end result. Now there are others like challenges to destroy certain structures with certain weapons and limited ammo, and ridding gunner on a vehicle where you are tasked with causing a certain amount of destruction within the confines of the mission, but in the end there are really only about 4 mission types.

Despite the short comings, the missions really only serve as a vehicle to get you to the next location when you run out of shit to destroy in the current location. Even though destroying one building is much like destroying another building, the act of taking down a skyscraper, bridge, or even a flimsy wind turbine with remote controlled bombs and a massive sledge hammer never seem to get tiring. Throw in some vehicular destruction and taking out an army with a hammer and you just feed an ever growing fire of testosterone fueled aggression. It's been enough fun that even though I beat the games story in about 12 hours, I keep jumping into the single player to go blow shit up. And then there's the multiplayer.

Guerrilla's multiplayer basically takes the very successful mechanics that were started in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and transplant them on mars. You have a similar XP ranking system that grants you minor bonuses, that have no effect on actual gameplay, as you advance. The game sports the normal array of team and free-for-all style game modes, as well as those that take advantage of the games destruction mechanics, the favorite of which is Siege. Siege is basically a just that, a siege. One team holds a group of structures as their base while the opposition comes in and tries to take out the buildings while dealing with the besieged troops. In addition to the on-line mutliplayer modes, there is an offline only mode called Wrecking crew where 2-4 players compete individually to wreak the most havoc using a limited number of weapons and ammo. Multiplayer games also implement packs that act to augment a certain style or element of playing or fighting such as stealth, jet packs, a tremor pack that shakes the ground to bring buildings down and more. While it's not necessarily going to stay in my staple of multiplayer games (like Modern Warfare has) it is definitely a fun distraction and helps make the game more worth your money.

One thing I would like to make a note of in regards to anyone who played one of the previous games - the only destructible elements of the game are the vehicles and buildings. Despite the large "GeoMod 2.0" logo on the box and splash screen, you can't actually do any Mod'ing to the Geo. While previous games had special types of terrain that could be blown up and played a key role in progressing through a level, no such thing exists in Guerrilla. While some of it could be seen as balancing, since tunneling through a mountain and completely bypassing a bases defenses could easily make the game a total pushover, I don't see why there couldn't be counter measures to prevent tilting that balance so heavily.

Final Verdict: I really hope developers Volition read the reviews and learn from their mistakes because I'd actually love to see a sequel. Make a more densely populated world of skyscrapers and shopping malls with throngs of people and a terrain that you can actual mutate and destroy. Regardless, the pure joy of causing death and destruction in the game far outweighs its other rather mediocre elements, but that only stays true if you keep the game on the casual difficulty level. As soon as you raise it up a notch (and I'm actually afraid to play the insane level that is unlocked after finishing the game) the game instantly starts to piss you off. You will never live long enough to enjoy the true fruits of Volition's labor. With that in mind, I give Red Faction: Guerrilla an 8/10 (but for you idiots out there who can't bring yourself to drop the difficulty level for fear of being deemed a total pussy, it's only a 5/10).