About this series:
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1) Write review.
2) Squash it down to under 600 words for the paper.
3) Feel unsatisfied with the final product.
So I'm taking this opportunity to share my full, un-edited reviews with you guys, complete with every facet of the games that I feel are worth discussing. Hope you enjoy!
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There's something exciting about the prospect of a virtual world that people can affect and interact with directly. With Red Faction: Guerrilla, developer Volition has gone back to the fundamentals of what makes open-world games so fun: the interactivity. Instead of saying "Here's a massive world; go build relationships and do chores to make a living," Guerrilla says "Here's a massive world; now blow it to pieces."
You'd never guess by looking at Guerrilla, but the Red Faction games used to be corridor-heavy first-person shooters. They all take place on Mars, but Guerrilla is the first game in the series that places players outside on the dusty surface of the red planet. It's a superb re-boot for a middling and oft forgotten franchise.
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Mars comes back to bite Guerrilla in the ass as well. Buildings and civilians only sparsely populate the world, leaving nothing but miles of sand and rocks in between. It's not particularly interesting to look at, but thankfully you'll be too busy blowing stuff up to seek out some scenery to admire. The plot stays mostly down to earth (pun intended) despite taking place on Mars in 2033. No beady-eyed aliens or mysterious monsters to be found here. The Red Faction is out to liberate the planet from the oppressive military might of the Earth Defense Force, and even the third wild-card faction ? the Marauders – consist entirely of humans, just of the more primitive and tribal variety. Long story short: this game could have taken place in the Sahara Desert, and it would have been just as great. I just wished it had taken advantage of its Mars setting more creatively.
Between the sorts of open-world games starring "everyman" characters with no extraordinary traits and the ones letting players run amuck with crazy superpowers, Guerrilla finds a solid middle ground. Main character Alec Mason is just a human being, but arm that human being with a sledgehammer and a few kilotons of explosives, and he can do extraordinary things.
The hallmark of a great open-world game is the desire to roam and explore it, and the prospect of smashing things to bits with your trusty sledgehammer is more than enough incentive to search for secrets. Treading into Marauder territory gives you a great "Oooh, I'm not supposed to be here; I wonder what's hiding around here" feeling. Not only will your curiosity usually pay off in some way, but the sound drops to near silence in Marauder territory to lull players into a false sense of solitude. And fifteen minutes later, about twenty Marauders appear out of fucking nowhere, surrounding you from all sides for a challenging battle. For an open-world game, where predicting the player's behavior is next to impossible, Guerrilla feels surprisingly well-paced.
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The world opens up to you gradually by clearing story missions, with smatterings of optional missions along the way to buff your total cash – standard fare for open-world action games. The difference here is that most of these optional missions are worth playing for the opportunity to break more stuff. The mundane point-to-point driving missions notwithstanding, none of the missions felt like chores to complete for the sake of earning more money. Some provide instant gratification by dropping a mech suit or rocket-mounted roadster at your feet and just ask you to go nuts. My personal favorites were the deviously challenging destruction puzzles. Knocking down a silo with one propane tank and three bullets seems impossible until you find just the right weak spot.
"Finding the weak spot" actually requires some practical knowledge of physics, which is one of the game's more fascinating mechanics. Every structure in the world is governed by a physics engine that constantly calculates the force and stress placed upon each piece of geometry. So instead of destroying every inch of a structure piece by piece, you can save time and ammo by "taking it out at the legs" and destroy the bare essentials that keep the building erect. Knocking out bridges' support beams is the simplest example, but the more towering buildings won't go down without a fight. Since many of the mission objectives involve tearing down enemy bases, manipulating the physics engine to your advantage is a valuable tactic from start to finish.
The single-player ride lasts long enough and stays fun throughout to make a worthy full-priced purchase on its own, but the game doesn't offer anything to do after the final conflict except the opportunity to mop up the remaining side missions. Thankfully, the Gears of War style of controls and combat lends itself very well to competitive multiplayer, and Volition have capitalized on this by creating a variety of online gametypes, complete with the full suite of playlists, party matchmaking and unlockable perks.
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But just because the multiplayer is feature-complete doesn't necessarily make it exceptional. For a game where everything except the ground you walk on can fall apart, the destruction doesn't significantly affect the moment-to-moment combat (except in the gametypes where destruction and the victory requirements are one in the same). Theoretically, players should have nowhere to hide if the walls around them could cave in at any moment, but knocking down the wall that separates you and your enemy does take time, and by then he has probably already ran away.
One thing that kept me from enjoying the multiplayer as much as I should have (and this is true of all online shooters, but it feels more prevalent in Guerrilla than most) is those annoying moments where you appear to have gotten to safety, and one last bullet manages to finish you off through a wall. Some of the weapons can actually penetrate through most forms of cover (namely the sniper rifle variants), but the common assault rifle cannot, though you'd be inclined to disagree given how often cheap-looking deaths with that gun occur.
The versatility of Guerrilla's weaponry does bring a lot of flavor to the multiplayer, even if most of that versatility comes from having two different kinds of shotguns, two types of sniper rifles, and so forth. What makes the multiplayer exciting and unpredictable every time, however, are the backpacks. Jetpacks are just the tip of the iceberg; one gives players and invisibility cloak, one doubles your damage output, one gives players x-ray vision, and my personal favorite – the Rhinopack – makes the player charge forward a few feet, demolishing anything in their path. With ten different types, the backpacks bring an important level of unpredictability to the action and give players a chance to get more creative with their kills. My only complaint is how similar they all look, and the game doesn't specify which backpack you have when spawning with a random one, so you'll have to memorize the minor differences in their appearance to tell them apart and get the most use out of them.
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Red Faction: Guerrilla isn't the first game to feature realistic physics-based destruction, it isn't the first game where destruction matters to the gameplay, and it isn't even the first next-gen open-world game where you have to blow things up all of the time. Geomod 2.0 is the biggest selling point, but the destruction engine alone does not make the game exceptional. Guerrilla is a consistently fun experience simply because it does lots of things right. Plus, it throws in a rich and dynamic multiplayer mode for good measure. With two successful Saint's Row games under their belts, Voltion has crafted Guerrilla to embody that developer's tried-and-true "fun video game comes first, interesting story comes second" philosophy. It doesn't matter whether you're a sucker for open-world games or just love basking in the glory of explosions and collapsing buildings; Guerrilla will satisfy just about anybody.
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Other notes:
- The game looks great most of the time, but some of the textures on the rusty metal warehouses look downright embarrassing on closer inspection. Like a mosaic of giant rectangular red-and-orange pixels.
- Guerrilla accommodates OCD gamers and achievement junkies by sprinkling the world with hundreds EDF crates (which contain tiny bits of money) and ore deposits (which contain significantly bigger chunks of cash).
- You can take cover (as in fully place your character's back against walls) and whip out quick melee attacks with each weapon, but I never got much use out of either of these functions. Switching to the sledgehammer was always more efficient and satisfying… in the single-player game. There are several instances in multiplayer where I could have survived engagements by just hitting the left trigger to whack guys with the butt of my rifle instead of wasting precious seconds by switching to the sledge. Don't make the same mistake I did.
- Beyond the expected shooter firearms of the shotgun, rifle and rocket launcher ilk, one particular gadget stood out to me. The Arc Welder is a static-electricity generator that stuns enemies at close range, has a wide area of effect, and can target multiple enemies at once. This thing saved my ass countless times in the campaign. They stay stunned just long enough for you to quickly switch to the sledgehammer for a one-hit kill.
- The Red Faction equivalent of Grand Theft Auto's hidden packages are well-hidden tape recordings left behind by former Guerrillas. Just like the rest of the story, the soundbytes contained within these things are pretty boring. Every three collected, though, reveals the location of a M.O.A.B. on the map. I never used these things either… I expected nuke-like levels of destruction and only got a bomb that does roughly five times the damage of one of my thirty remote charges. Plus you have to pick the bomb up in a vehicle to arm it, then blow up the vehicle to set it off. The payoff for all of that hassle is really weak. The Thermobaric Rocket Launcher is basically like a portable M.O.A.B. launcher anyway, and it holds up to six of them.
- Driving to mission starting points takes pretty damn long, sometimes up to three minutes from the nearest safehouse. Plus safehouses are a commodity in the game world. What really sucks is having to purchase the ability to fast-travel between safehouses. What sucks even more is that you don't even get the opportunity to unlock this ability until after liberating the third region (of which there are six). Guerrilla's open-world design has many positive aspects to it, but it definitely needed a way to navigate through its terrain more quickly.
- The game has an offline 2-4 player mode called Wrecking Crew that you play by taking turns and passing the controller around. It might be fun? I don't know; I didn't get to test this out with anyone else.
