Red Faction: Guerrilla Review, Smash Smash Smash
June 25, 2009 - 
In his blog, MIT Media Studies Director Henry Jenkins makes an astute observation about videogame design: “I think of words in which, if you need to kill the dragon in the cave and you happen to have a drill, there’s no reason you can’t just drill straight down, bypassing all his little traps, and kill the bastard.”
The man has, in just over fifty words, summarised the biggest problem in open-world videogames. If I’m on Mars, and I’m picking my way through some stony ruins with a hammer in my hand, why can’t I swing it into the nearest wall and skip the long, drawn out entry into the final room of the maze? Well, in Red Faction: Guerrilla, that’s exactly what you can do, along with using every other weapon in the game to dissemble the various buildings, bridges and other miscellaneous structures in the game.
It’s not just genius, it’s fun genius.
The first problem this poses is the fact it’s very easy to lean back in your gamer chair and scoff. “Ah, but Christos,” you sneer, “I’ve played games like that, and I could only destroy certain walls. They’d never let you destroy anything crucial.” Well, this is the point where I smirk to myself and tell you you’re wrong. You can destroy the only bridge that leads to an objective, and you can destroy your own base too, if you’d so wish. Yes, things are rebuilt in time, but isn’t everything?
So why all the destruction, the violence, the dominant allegorical images of buildings crumbling beneath the might of someone who never built them to begin with? It all lies in the narrative, and it’s a fairly routine narrative at that. You are Alec Mason, a man fresh on the Mars landscape from Earth, come to work with his brother in the mining community. Sadly, the Earth Defence Force have decided miners are ideal meat to be beaten, wrongfully imprisoned and, in the case of your brother, shot for being part of Red Faction, the guerrilla group who’ve decided that all sounds a little harsh.
A slight twinge of revenge later and you’re part of the faction yourself, and the game begins in earnest after a brief tutorial prior to the demise of your brother. The Faction leader wants you to lower the amount of influence the EDF has in each of six regions on Mars, and simultaneously raise the morale of those being crushed under their military heel. You can do this in a pleasingly wide variety of ways, from raiding EDF outposts to jumping into a mechanised exoskeleton and smashing seven hells out of the army. But this isn’t why you’ll enjoy playing this game. The fastest way to get the EDF off Mars is to grab some explosives and bring every building the EDF owns crashing down onto its foundations.
This can be achieved any way you like, and this freedom is rather liberating. GTA IV did indeed entitle you to complete some missions any way you liked, but most of the time you had the tools for success forced on you, with any other approach resulting in death and a “retry” text message on your in-game phone. Red Faction allows you to drive a lorry through five rooms of the ground floor, jump out, turn around, sling five sticky demo charges onto the supporting pillars of the remaining walls, and hit a button, standing back to watch your destructive handiwork bring the building down. Or you could jump into a mech-suit and smash your arms through the walls. It’s all viable.
It also looks fantastic, with alien world graphical representation that puts even the prodigal son of next-gen science fiction titles, Mass Effect, to shame. Dust whirls slowly across the Martian wastes, small rocks are visible from hundreds of metres away, and there’s no tearing textures or graphical faux-pas present whenever a wall is torn through with your sledgehammer. The protagonist and his cohorts, along with all humans on Mars, are brilliantly animated, taking cover, shouting orders, and never once feeling as static as a lot of supporting AI characters. The ability to play any of them in multiplayer adds to the argument that they’re all just as well animated as the main character, and it’s enjoyable to hurl fifty ragdolls across a chasm at once, with no graphical slowdown no matter the level of chaos on-screen.
As you’re smashing through the walls, ceilings and everything else, the sound does its best to keep up, though a few extra sounds for breaking different materials wouldn’t have gone amiss. Don’t get me wrong, it does a great job of letting you know audibly whether you’re breaking metal or marble, but in a game so destruction-focused, these sound effects are your soundtrack. The score is enjoyable enough regardless, though it’s pleasingly kept to a minimum, making the action thankfully less melodramatic.
In terms of drama, the storyline is very well put together. There’s no melodrama or intricate storytelling, but it suits the game brilliantly because quite frankly there doesn’t need to be. The gameplay mechanics are already a brilliant game, and with a light backdrop of rebellion, betrayal and the struggle for independence gives you enough motivation for guiding Mason through the Mars landscape without asking too many frustrated questions.
Red Faction: Guerrilla is a brilliant game, and it really has achieved a colossal amount for what can be done with current technology. Every quibble I’ve ever had with a game that boasted destructible environments has been settled, and Epic would do well to take a close look for their final Gears of War title, as this stretches far beyond the simplicity of “metal girders behind everything ever” design to be found in their work. Definitely a title worth playing, whether you’re a fan of simply shooting up the town, or walking away from where it used to be.
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