Retrospective: Red Faction Guerilla

In the space of the next few (?) paragraphs, I'm going to convince you to shell out between £3 and 5 and buy Red Faction: Guerilla on Xbox 360 or Playstation 3, even if you've owned it before.
This is the only game I've ever bought twice. Come to think of it, I can't remember why I got rid of it in the first place (probably to fund some new and disappointing Xbox release). But I've been craving some Red Faction action ever since, and with the hefty price tag of £3 preowned attached to it at my local CEX store, I took a leap and bought the game again.

It feels like forever since I first played through Guerrilla, but in reality it's only been two and a half years, so take the term 'retrospective' in the title lightly. Guerrilla is still a current gen game and it's largely competitive with anything in the game charts. Graphically, it's still above average and it's one of the most technologically innovative games available, even when squared up against the current competition. This game is incredible, and having only great memories of it on the first playthrough, picking it up a second time was a no brainer.

Open World
This is a sandbox game, but unlike other such games the map's not overly large and there's always some degree of story oriented guidance to keep you focused and prevent you from getting bored. There's not much of a reason to stray from the beaten path anyway (unless you want to smash things, which is ridiculously enjoyable), as most of the open terrain is dusty, rocky and generally red. It's the barren surface of Mars, but that's part of the charm. As the sun pans across the sky in an accelerated day/night cycle, real-time shadows shift across the terrain, and at night shooting stars travel from horizon to horizon. This is an open world sci-fi game, and in that sense it's something of a rarity. Small outposts and colonial structures clutter the landscape, and buggies, trucks and military vehicles populate the roadways while EDF gunships patrol the skies. The map is divided into sectors of control which must be fought for, and once your influence in a particular sector has become significant enough, Red Faction soldiers will come to your aid during combat. When you get into a combat situation in this game, a combination of hilarious vehicle physics and low gravity can lead to quite the memorable set piece. But essentially, it's the environment and its ridiculous levels of destruction that make Guerrilla so much fun.

Destruction
Guerrilla has the best destruction system I've ever seen in a game, courtesy of the Geomod 2.0 engine. As you smash your way through walls with the franchise's iconic sledgehammer, it feels like they're coming apart brick by brick. Setting explosive charges and demolishing a building by destabilising its centre of gravity never gets old, watching it crumble like a real world demolition as pieces of the construct topple down in ever more interesting ways. Destabilising a huge industrial chimney and watching it fall through the roof of the next door building to crush your foes is particularly incredible. Nothing is scripted - it's just the unpredictable physics of the game at work. Optional hostage rescue missions, which are usually a chore in any other game, are a particular highlight. Go in all guns blazing, snipe captors from afar, or my particular favourite - ram a dumper truck through the walls and bring half the building down, pick up the hostages and drive off. Child's play. And rather than let your enthusiasm for these amazing physics dwindle over time, destruction has been implemented as a fundamental mechanic of the game. Toppled structures deposit chunks of scrap metal that must be collected in order to upgrade and purchase weapons at a Red Faction headquarters. Smashing things becomes compulsively addictive as you strive to unlock the biggest gun to smash through more buildings. Destruction is such a pivotal feature of the game that a turn based 'wrecking crew' mode can be accessed from the main menu, which challenges you to smash up as much of a particular scene as possible within an allotted time limit.

Drive thru

It makes me feel like a badass
This game is not easy, especially if you ramp the difficulty up to the higher levels. But regardless of the odd game rage inducing moment where several AI controlled EDF vehicles decide to steamroll your corpse until you are dead, it's escapist fun. Weapons are powerful and varied, so blasting your way through hordes of enemies is addictive. Manning turrets on armoured cars (some of which look strikingly like the APC from James Cameron's Aliens) is thoroughly satisfying. When your vehicle gets damaged, simply eliminate the crew of the next one and commandeer another. The low gravity comes into play here, allowing you to take lunging aerial leaps and come down on top of a vehicle, or even on an unsuspecting foe's head with your sledgehammer. And there's a cover system, which isn't nearly as advanced as the one featured in the Gears of War franchise for example, but considering the entirely destructible nature of Guerrilla's battlefield, I'm impressed it works as well as it does. The explosive charges deployed to bring down structures can be thrown and attached to just about anything, including enemy infantry (just like the original Red Faction). Nothing revolutionary here, but the game certainly knows how to let you be creative with your killing. Then there's the jet pack, which allows you to launch yourself skyward for a good 3-4 seconds before coming down in an advantageous location. It's certainly not possible to fly around the map (although the jet pack on the multiplayer modes allows a little more air time), but these minor restrictions feel like they were always supposed to be part of the game design, rather than being shoehorned into the final product to aid with player vs. AI balancing. Mention must also be made of the walkers, both industrial and military. These are mechanical suits, similar in nature to the famous powerloader from James Cameron's Aliens (the influences of popular film on this game are obvious). Usable as vehicles in Guerrilla, they allow you to run, punch, smash and shoot your way through just about every inanimate and hostile object in the game. Using them makes you feel like a badass.

Building + Propane tank + rifle fire = flying man

'Get your ass to Mars'
Yes it's true that Red Faction is as close to 'Total Recall: The Videogame' as we're likely to get. And just to clarify, I'm talking about the 1990 version of Total Recall, where he actually goes to Mars. Red Faction: Guerrilla gives you the red planet and the rebelling force of miners and civilians versus the oppression of a larger military force. It gives you the quaint little bubble cars and Martian vistas. It gives you the lone protagonist and the means to lay waste to everything, Schwarzenegger style. It highlights and utilises a lot of the points that made that film great, but it does it without a movie licence hanging over it, which inevitably seems to ruin everything video game related.

Paul Verhoeven's Mars in Total Recall, 1990

The multiplayer is good aswell
With a lengthy campaign including plenty of side missions to see you through to 100% completion, and a full expansion pack to further extend your solo playtime, Guerrilla is quite a substantial single player experience. But despite this, there's a multiplayer offering too, and it certainly hasn't been tacked on as an afterthought. There are the typical game modes such as deathmatch and capture the flag style matches, but there are also destruction based modes where you must raze your opponent's base to the ground. In turn, your enemy have a 'reconstructor' device they can use to rebuild their structures while trying to destroy yours. It's important to mention that this game mode is very fun, and very unique to this game and its destruction engine. Also featured are different 'backpacks' for different player classes, each offering a specific powerup including the ability to run faster, fly for a short period of time, burst through walls, or send out a damaging shockwave. Playing matches awards the player points which count towards a basic, but effective unlock system.

To sum up...
Now I've told you how amazing it is, I have to be fair and say this game isn't perfect. Some may criticise it for being ugly at times. The Martian vistas can look anywhere from beautiful, to lazy and empty. The visuals themselves can look a little messy in places, like too much has been crammed into one space (the PC version is supposedly superior in this respect). But these are flaws that can easily be overlooked where I'm concerned, as the game is just too much fun to deny. Getting killed by the rampant AI can be irritating sometimes, but I can never be angry with it for long. The destruction system and physics are something to behold, and I'm still surprised that Geomod 2.0 hasn't been used in more game titles since Guerilla's 2009 release. There is ofcourse the sequel to consider - Red Faction: Armageddon - but the linearity of that newer title is somewhat offputting. The destruction of Geomod is so much more entertaining when employed in a open world/sandbox environment.
So really, if you like the idea of smashing things apart, driving around Mars in various vehicles inspired by popular sc-fi movie culture to the vibe of Total Recall (1990), then you can't go wrong. Especially for under £5.