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.

Retrospective - Call of Duty

This multiplayer map was copied almost identically from the real-life location of Carentan, Normandy. That's dedication.

Back in the day, when the Call of Duty franchise was based on the Quake 3 engine, there were no perks or weapon modifications, no ridiculous far fetched Russian world invasions, no online ranking or prestiges, and the series was most definitely rooted in the meticulously recreated reality of World War 2. No matter how addictive or widely selling the current Modern Warfare entries of the franchise are, I miss World War 2. I miss having a bash at taking down the Third Reich single handedly, and the gritty atmosphere of a digitally-rendered occupied Europe.

MOH: Allied Assault - defining the genre

Sometime during the creation of blockbuster movie Saving Private Ryan (1998), Steven Spielberg decided the Second World War would make a pretty cool video game, and if kids were going to be playing games and shooting at things, they should be learning something aswell. His concept was for an action game based on the war with the Nazis, and he set about directing and producing the first Medal of Honor (we English spell it Honour btw) with his own company Dreamworks Interactive. The game was a huge hit on the original Playstation and spawned numerous sequels, including Medal of Honor: Underground, which follows the movements of resistance operatives fighting the Germans in occupied Europe, and the particularly successful PC based Medal of Honor: Allied Assault by game developer 2015, which closely mirrors entire sequences from the aforementioned Spielberg movie. Still under the guidance of Spielberg, it featured groundbreaking gameplay which allowed the player to storm the beaches of Normandy, and became the template for every WW2 shooter to follow.

Call of Duty - clearly using the Allied Assault template

While the Medal of Honor series branched out further, spawning titles for various platforms and delving into the Pacific conflicts, members of the Allied Assault development team at 2015 went on to establish the Infinity Ward studio. Their objective was to continue developing their previous concepts under the Call of Duty name, in an environment where they would have more creative freedom.

The first Call of Duty game from Infinity Ward, released in 2003, plays like a very refined and more realistic version of Allied Assault. It deservedly won numerous Game of the Year awards, and made quite an impact on me as a gamer. I'd been a massive fan of Allied Assault, and to find Call of Duty had improved on such a flawlessly entertaining game was mindblowing. It doesn't matter how many COD or MOH games I've played since, I just can't forget some of the incredibly convincing and atmospheric moments in that game. And as I watch the evolution of the Call of Duty franchise - from the graphically superior but mostly underwhelming sequel Call of Duty 2, to the Zombie Survival modes and Michael Bay-like destruction in Black Ops and Modern Warfare 2 - I wonder what Mr. Spielberg thinks of the latest iterations of the gaming series he helped create back in the late 90s?

Pegasus Bridge - the finest level of the single player campaign

Maybe I'm overly nostalgic, but I genuinely think Call of Duty is the best game in the series, and superior to anything else in the genre. The game features a campaign that flows effortlessly from start to finish. It's one of the only games I've restarted immediately after completion and gone for a second consecutive playthrough - the number of times I've played through the campaign far exceeds any other game.

The multiplayer features the best range of maps the series has ever seen - particular highlights being the wide open hedgerows and fields of Bocage, the trenches and open country of Brecourt, and the narrow town streets of Carentan. The maps are wide open and so well designed, that the developer seems to reskin and revisit atleast one of these maps with every subsequent Call of Duty game.

The game atmosphere is pitch perfect, capturing the unique feel established in Allied Assault and refining it to perfection. Music by Michael Giacchino (Star Trek, Super 8) is possibly the best written for a video game, being every bit as good as the music heard in any Hollywood production. The music underscores the key moments of the game for full dramatic impact, rather than take a redundant ambient role which would have been the more obvious and less exciting route for a composer to take on a game like this. Dynamic and high-profile scores from composers such as Joel Goldsmith, Graeme Revell, Harry Gregson-Williams and Hans Zimmer have since become a staple of the Call of Duty franchise.

Call of Duty was created back in a time when Infinity Ward was free to make whichever game it wanted to, and as a newly formed company they really had something to prove to the gaming community. They were trying to make the definitive WW2 action game, and the first time round they succeeded. While Gray Matter Studios handled the United Offensive add-on (the last time Call of Duty saw a full expansion pack if I remember), Infinity Ward worked on Call of Duty 2, in which we received a nice new graphics engine developed in-house by IW. The visuals were a huge upgrade from the first game, but there was just something missing from this installment in terms of the feel of the overall package. Notably, the best maps in the multiplayer here were the re-textured ones from the first Call of Duty.

With Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, IW delivered the goods again with a modern era campaign that felt convincingly real, but didn't resort to the action movie cliches that would later blight the series. The game here uses an even more advanced Infinity Ward Proprietary Engine that made the series look better than ever. I enjoy COD4 immensely, and would happily rate it as a close contender for best Call of Duty game, but regardless of how highly many other people rate it, I still prefer the ironsights and bayonets of the classic Call of Duty to the laser targeting and chopper strikes of the newer games.

Call of Duty 4 - the sniper level

Call of Duty1 and 4 have something in common - they're rooted in reality. They both strive to achieve a convincing approach to their depiction of warfare, and this feel of authenticity adds to the gameplay experience in spades. Anything beyond Call of Duty 4 brings far fetched ideas such as Russians (most overused modern era villains) trying to take over the world (again), resulting in American forces fighting them off in downtown burger bars and on the front lawn of the ruined White House. I couldn't stomach this, and the upcoming Modern Warfare 3 looks about as over the top and fantastical as a real-world shooter can get, responding to the demands of the competition by trying to make each subsequent game bigger and more explosive.

It seems that these days, Infinity Ward is merely part of the Activion money-machine which involves routinely releasing a new Call of Duty game every year, juggling the load between Infinity Ward and Treyarch. The newest entries in the COD series feel manufactured and created out of contractual obligation, wheras the original Call of Duty feels like a game with some real heart behind it.

There was a point when the games market was so overcrowded with World War era shooters that gamers everywhere cried out for something new, and they got the Modern Warfare games, modern era Battlefield games and the Medal of Honor reboot (developed by Danger Close, a reformed division of Spielberg's Dreamworks Interactive). Now it feels like the same is happening all over again, and I'm genuinely getting tired of the hi-tech contemporary action games that are flooding the market as every developer takes a crack at being the best. Right now, I'd really quite like to see somebody go back to basics and make a WW2 shooter that ups the ante again, and does it better and more convincingly than ever before.

Modern Warfare 3 - Michael Bay would be proud

In late 2010, Activision fired key members of Infinity Ward for apparent 'insubordination,' and as a result 46 members of the key development team upped and left for undisclosed reasons, all but disbanding the company that had been designing our favourite military shooter for 7 years. This has caused Activision to contract developer Sledgehammer Games to co-develop Modern Warfare 3 alongside the remainder of the Infinity Ward team. For this reason, I don't hold out a lot of hope for the Call of Duty franchise. The key ingredients which made it so successful are slowly being watered down to a rag-tag Activision team, and the not so talented Treyarch.
As far as I'm concered, Infinity Ward is no longer the games developer it used to be, but merely a name printed on the cover of a game to help Activision convince us to buy it.

For anyone who hasn't played the game before, the original Call of Duty is highly recommended and is also available to download from the Xbox Live Arcade. For those fixated on cutting edge graphics, perks, weapon attachments and killstreaks, the game may seem primitive in comparison to what's available now. For me, Call of Duty is the definitive title in the history of WW2 action games, and a striking effort from a group of developers who had been working to perfect the formula for many years. It's a classic bit of gaming which is in many ways superior to the subsequent efforts in the genre.

Music from the Pegaus Bridge level by Michael Giacchino - the most memorable section

of the game and possibly one of my all time favourite gaming moments.

Interestingly, Dave Mirra Freestyle BMX developer Z-Axis was working on a Call of Duty game between 2007 - 2009 when it was cancelled by Activision. Call of Duty: Devils Brigade would have been set entirely in Italy during World War 2, and would have been Call of Duty 4 had Activision seen the project through to completion. By this point though, the World War 2 setting had become overused and stale due to such an overabundance of WW2 games on the market, so Activision returned to Infinity Ward and decided to move the game setting to present day. Below are screenshots of the Devils Brigade in development.