Gaming review: Red Faction Guerrilla

Volition surprised many when Red Faction Guerrilla was first announced. In a departure from the first two titles in the Red Faction series, which were first-person shooters (FPS), in Guerrilla, you play from a third-person perspective, and while the previous games were more linear, this one adopts an open-world approach. So they've pretty much flipped the script for this latest iteration, which is a bit of a risk. But does the risk pay off?

The key selling point of Red Faction has always been the destructible environments. It did it as an FPS with the Geo Mod engine and it does it again, and even better, in its third-person shooter avatar with Geo Mod 2. But the fear was always that Guerrilla would end up as a one-trick pony, wowing everyone with the level of destructibility, but unable to match it in other aspects of the game. Unfortunately, that fear has been realised, and I'll explain why a little later in the review.

You can break Red Faction Guerrilla's single-player campaign up into three segments; the first 10 per cent, the last 10 per cent, and the 80 per cent in between. You play Alec Mason, a new arrival on Mars, who joins his brother Dan as a miner on the Red Planet. He soon discovers that Dan is an important member of the Red Faction, a group of Martian settlers leading the resistance against the totalitarian Earth Defence Force (EDF). Dan seeks to induct a reluctant Alec into the movement, and when Dan is killed by the EDF, Alec has no choice but to join the Red Faction to avenge his brother's death.

Destruction is what this game does best and it does it better than any other game ever made. It puts Battlefield: Bad Company's Frostbite engine to shame, and while there will be certain times when the Geo Mod 2 engine does falter (I had a two-storey building standing on just one beam after I had taken out all four walls), it works quite well for most part and watching a giant mix of concrete and metal crumble to the ground before your eyes is pure delight; you can almost hear Mozart playing while it happens. And it's totally unscripted, so if you want you can take down an eight-storey tower with nothing but a sledgehammer. It took me five minutes, and when I was finished, the tower came crashing down on me, killing me in the process. But it was totally worth it.

Besides destroying EDF strongholds, there are also guerrilla missions that help you increase morale in that sector, reduce EDF control, and/or earn salvage, which can be used to buy new weapons and upgrade existing ones. Guerrilla missions include destruction master, where you're tasked with destroying a building within a limited time with a fixed number of tools, EDF convoy interceptions, transporter missions, which are essentially vehicle time trials, and hostage rescues, amongst others.

Salvage earned from guerrilla missions and picked up from sites of destroyed buildings can be used to buy various weapons, including remote charges, which are sticky grenades that can be detonated from a distance, the arc wielder, which shoots electricity, rocket launchers, sniper rifles, pistols, etc. You can also use salvage to upgrade weapons you've already purchased. For example, you can upgrade a rocket launcher to fire multiple rockets and to fire heat-seeking rockets.

Improving morale helps you gain support from other guerrillas and they'll often come out to help you during your missions. But the friendly artificial intelligence (AI) is some of the worst I've ever seen. They just get in your way, more often than not getting caught in the cross-fire, and thus reducing morale. So the morale system is pretty much pointless.

All of the above is revealed and fleshed out within the first 10 per cent of the game, while you're still liberating the first sector of Mars. Needless to say this being the start of the game, everything feels fresh and new. But once you've liberated the first sector and crossed that first 10 per cent, you'll soon find that most of the remainder of the game is just more of the same. The same destruction targets, the same guerrilla missions, and little variation in the story missions.

Being an open-world game, there's a lot of traveling to be done here and there are various vehicles to control. When you're on an open piece of land, it can be quite a lot of fun to drive, especially with the bumpy nature of the terrain, but the floaty vehicle handling gets quite annoying when you're required to negotiate narrow, windy roads, and you'll soon be wishing you could just jump to missions straight from the GPS map.

One of the biggest disappointments of the game however, is its lacklustre shooting mechanics, something the earlier games in the series got spot on. The controls just don't seem tight enough and the useless enemy AI doesn't do the gun combat segments any favours either. To compensate for this, the game just throws more and more enemies at you.

So up until the last 10 per cent of the campaign, you're just doing what you did in the first 10 per cent over and over again destroying EDF buildings, completing the same guerrilla missions, and lots and lots of driving in between. The understandably barren environments of Mars only serve to increase the boredom. If you've played the single-player demo and enjoyed the Walker retrieval bit and the shooting gallery segment that follows, the bad news is that there are few missions in the game as much fun as that, so the demo is pretty much the best the game has to offer.

The game does pick up considerably in the latter stages though and it ends on a high, with some much needed story-telling in there as well. But it isn't enough to make up for the monotonous nature of much of the game before it, and only gives you a glimpse of how this game might have turned out if Volition had paid the same attention to the rest of the game.

As it stands, the single-player campaign just seems like a showcase of the Geo Mod 2 engine, because there really isn't much note-worthy besides the destructible environments. If you do decide to go after all the guerilla missions once you're done with the story, the single-player campaign will last you roughly 20 hours on normal difficulty.

You also have a pass-the-controller mode called Wrecking Crew. As the name suggests, it's all about mindless destruction -- one map, one man, one minute, and unlimited ammo. Your job is to wreak as much havoc as possible, and once you're done, pass the controller to the left and let Player 2 have a go. You can have up to four people in Wrecking Crew and if you ever felt that the campaign didn't provide you with enough ammo to carry out your devilish dance of destruction, this is where you can get your thrills.

You know it's not a very good game when halfway through it you find yourself thinking, "When is this gonna end?". Red Faction Guerrilla promises much, but by the time it picks up, you've been bored out of your mind after having to play through the same missions over and over for close to 10 hours. But while the campaign is less than impressive, online multi-player is quite the opposite. So if you see yourself spending hours online with Red Faction Guerrilla, I suggest you pick it up. If not, save your money.

(+) Destruction like you've never seen before in a game

(+) Some nice weapons, particularly the remote charges

(+) Fun online multi-player

(-) Repetitive single-player campaign

(-) Loose gun combat; poor AI

(-) Annoyingly floaty vehicle handling

Score: 7/10