Red Faction:Guerilla review
A futuristic sci-fi title set in a Martian mining colony? With real-world destructibility and a healthy dollop of GTA4? “Count us in!” we hear you cry….
Within minutes of mining engineer Alec Mason’s arrival on Mars he’s seen his brother shot dead and he’s been reluctantly recruited into the Red Faction resistance movement. Their aim is to overthrow their oppressors; the Earth Defence Force. There’s no deep and engaging narrative here, nor will you find yourself lost in an immersive and multilayered science fiction opus. However, you will blow an awful lot of stuff to kingdom come, hooray!
For an accidental terrorist, Mason is more than comfortable using a broad array of weaponry. And it’s just as well, because utilising the full arsenal in this big, dumb blockbuster of a game is where Red Faction:Guerilla plays its trump card. The variety of upgradeable weapons here is inventive and satisfying when used with the fully destructible environment. Every building in the game is constructed using a reliable physics model and can be deformed/destroyed in fantastically tactile and imaginative ways. Destroying buildings to find new ways to achieve your goals never seems to grow old, even after many hours of play.
Good news then, because there’s plenty to get through here. The EDF have turned Mars into a prison state and the Red Faction’s aim is to wrestle control of Mars’ six zones back from them. Predictably, you raise the Faction’s amount of control by completing campaign objectives and sub-missions. (Of which there are plenty.) Progression as a whole is generally well paced and the next accomplishment/reward is never far away. Additional ‘guerrilla battles’ earn large amounts of control and are generally enjoyable, but you are often summoned to take part whilst en-route to a prior destination. This forced diversion can be irritating and your new destination may be a considerable distance across the vast, bleak and repetitive Martian landscape. With no real landmarks and little environmental creativity on display, the lengthy transit sections of Red Faction:Guerrilla are humdrum, brown and laborious.
Still, most missions have real promise and offer you the chance to exploit the environment in creative ways using the aforementioned destructive physics. All too often however, you don’t get the opportunity to fully explore this as the EDF forces quickly arrive and steam-in, mobhanded. This reduces many missions to gormless barnfights and doesn’t play to the strengths of the title. Surely more tactical encounters based upon shrewd manipulation of the buildings and other structures would be far more engaging for the player? (And unique for the franchise.)
There are plenty of other irritations, such as the plentiful hostage rescue missions. (The lobotomised AI of the hostages leads to some laughably poor and premature mission conclusions.) The handling of the vehicles can’t be ignored either; despite their wonderful aesthetics they enjoy a shockingly bad physics model which moves way beyond ‘arcadey’ and ends somewhere closer to ‘cheap tat’. Realism and precision are not on the table here, which is mostly fine as 90% of the time the vehicles are merely an A to B means-to-an-end. But during other missions the unpredictable and wayward nature of the handling can be alarming and lead to further annoying and unfair moments.
This unpredictability continues during combat, where it is a double-edged sword. There are some genuinely riotous moments of wild and unpredictable combat which make for childish and giddy fun. But the rules aren’t always clear and at times it feels as though anything can happen. You will frequently die because something occurred that was not your fault or was beyond your control. It adds to the entertainment value in one sense sure, but it also undermines the authority of the game and moves it into a ‘knockabout’ territory. It’s big, dumb, simple fun – Don’t expect any more and you won’t be disappointed.
That why it’s not fair to compare Red Faction:Guerrilla to GTA4. Yet it’s difficult not to and the lack of subtlety and craft on display here merely serves to highlight Rockstar’s towering achievement. If Red Faction:Guerrilla could’ve somehow benefitted from Rockstar’s sleight of hand and polished nuance in context and storytelling it would’ve been a great game, rather than a decent one.
Despite some bombastic engaging moments it’s not possible to fully endorse Red Faction:Guerrilla. There are too many frustrations and the game’s fiction and setting isn’t convincing or cohesive enough. Ultimately, this cheapens the experience and a lack of craft and subtlety in some core game mechanics further undermines the journey. These failings would be less noticeable if the game world had more depth and wasn’t presented so crudely. (GTA’s idiosyncratic combat springs to mind; it’s easy to forgive because the setting and broader experience is so richly realised.) Without that crutch, all that remains for Red Faction:Guerrilla is an enjoyable yet cheaply disposable romp. Still, if that’s what you are seeking you’ll -quite literally- have a blast.