Review: Red Faction Guerrilla

Your brother's dead, you're stranded on Mars and the occupying government is evil. Time to pick up your hammer and destroy some stuff. Beneath the sci-fi trappings though is a story with a real resonance. No publisher is brave enough to release a game where you fight against western forces in Iraq, but Red Faction Guerrilla is one heck of a brave metaphor.

Away from the politics there's plenty of fun to be had. But after the first hour or so as you learn to get to grips with the weaponry, physics and features on offer you'll start to think - hey these play areas are small, dull and ugly, this isn't as much fun as it should be. Plough on friends, get past the lacklustre start and there's plenty of fun to be had in them thar red hills.

Don't worry about the dip. Red Faction Guerrilla may have been pushing a score of nine without it, but the dip that occurs at the beginning of the game shouldn't prevent your overall enjoyment of what is one of the best console releases this year.

Revolution

Geomod really has come of age. The first Red Faction games promised more than the silicon could really deliver back then. Now Volition has made good on the promise made years ago about game worlds where you really could tear the scenery apart.

The technology behind Red Faction Guerrilla is not just good, it's game changing. It makes the games I've played since feel like a pale shadow of their former selves. I felt so free in Liberty City, but since playing RFG I feel a sense of loss the scenery is so static, so immune to my powerful weaponry.

Red Faction Guerrilla is about destruction. Along the way you'll be shooting at some bad guys - often too many bad guys due to over-the-top spawning - but the main gameplay is about destroying the enemy's buildings in a variety of entertaining ways.

Bring the house down

Planting explosives is a simple thrill in of itself, watching the carefully planted charges take out a supply base's supports and waiting for Mars' low gravity to work its magic is one of my gaming highlights of the year.

Volition realises how cool this simple pleasure is - so there's a whole multiplayer game based around it called Wrecking Crew - a pass the pad game not unlike Burnout's crash junctions. Even the campaign features missions that require to do nothing other than play around at demolition.

Explosives are joined by plenty of other exciting options such as thermobaric rockets and a gun which uses nano-particles to devour structures in its path. At the other end of the scale is the sledgehammer - a weapon which is more fun to wield than you might ever expect. Don't discount using what comes to hand too - fling a heavy construction vehicle off a cliff onto your target building below and watch all hell break loose. Stick a few bombs to it first for even more fun. Or stick a bomb onto an enemy soldier and wait until he's near a valuable target before detonating it. You can play RFG in a number of ways and all of them add up to a lot of entertaining emergent gameplay.

You'll need to learn plenty of demolition methods early in the game. Once it opens up and presents more variety in missions, locations and targets you'll really need your wits about you to destroy much more massive buildings and structures.

Balance

The game is not without its faults. Those first few areas give the impression of a small game that confines the player, however RFG gets much better after a couple of hours.

Also the massive number of respawning EDF enemies are a real irritant. While demolition requires a rather stealthy pursuit the waves of EDF troops makes such guerrilla tactics rather difficult and it's not until you earn some better weaponry that you can be more creative about taking out enemy structures without being interrupted. At least there's a difficulty option which does not penalise the player for reducing the EDF annoyance.

The multiplayer modes are surprisingly well balanced. Online modes add a variety of backpacks which can cause local earthquakes, boost the player high into the air and other features. Some modes even add a building repair weapon for matches where teams are at odds on whether they'd like a building to stay up or not. The Wrecking Crew mode offers a neat local multiplayer option - more levels for this in DLC please Volition. In fact take it further, offer a Wrecking Crew single player mode too.

Despite some niggles, I have had - and continue to have - a lot of fun with Red Faction Guerrilla. Volition's game is an excellent and worthwhile resurrection of an old franchise. One hopes its success results in Volition returning to an extremely well-loved space shooter series.