Giant Bomb Review
45 CommentsRed Faction: Guerrilla Review
4- PS3
- X360
by Jeff Gerstmann on
Who knew that blowing apart buildings, bridges, and other Martian structures could be so satisfying?
Guerrilla is the third game in the Red Faction line, and it's the first one to be released in quite some time. It opens with you, as miner Alec Mason, arriving on Mars to see your brother and put in some good, honest work. Before too long, your brother is dead and you've been sucked into a brewing rebellion with the rest of the Red Faction. The reds are fighting against the EDF--that's the Earth Defense Force--who seems to be pretty good at oppressing the labor class on Mars. Seeing as how they just gunned down your brother and you've narrowly avoided being their next victim, you quickly join up and start taking on tasks to slowly disrupt the EDF's control.
That control is region-based, with each region of Mars offering a number of tasks that can lower the level of control that the EDF has over a sector while also raising the morale of the people, inspiring them to fight at your side should you find yourself in a public battle. The control level is what gets you to accomplish side tasks, as you won't be able to liberate a region without first lowering the level of control below a certain threshold. Doing so unlocks the final mission for a region, which liberates it and moves the story forward to a new area. Most of the story missions are straightforward, though some of the longer ones start slow and end frantically. While the longer missions provide checkpoints, there were a couple of cases where I wished they had one a little closer to the tricky part.
Even though a lot of the single-player stuff in Red Faction: Guerrilla sounds a little boilerplate on its own, the end result is still a fairly exciting campaign. You'll purchase enough weapons and upgrades along the way to keep the new stuff coming, and there are enough side mission types around that you're almost guaranteed to enjoy at least one of them--and you don't need to do too many of them before unlocking an area's final mission. So it rarely feels like you're grinding it out just to move on. The weapons are satisfying and, well, you blow up tons of buildings along the way. It's the inclusion of a robust physics model that makes destroying structures so much fun. Everything behaves roughly as you'd expect, so taking out key points of a bridge's foundation, for example, is much more effective than just grabbing your hammer and punching random holes in the bridge itself. Seeing buildings collapse and watching smokestacks crumble, often falling onto other structures on their way down, is the game's most exciting feature.
Blowing things up is a key component of the game's offline multiplayer, a pass-and-play mode called wrecking crew. There are multiple minigames to play here, and all of them are centered on you taking one weapon into a small cluster of buildings and blowing them apart. Some give you limited time to blow up as much as possible, others give you limited ammo to force you to make every shot do as much damage as possible, and so on. It's a great showpiece for the game's destructible structures.
While there are clunky bits at the fringes of Red Faction: Guerrilla that give it a handful of frustrating or disappointing moments, the core moments of the game are exciting and well-conceived. Factor in a thrilling multiplayer component and the sheer satisfaction provided by the wholesale destruction of huge structures and you've got more than enough reasons to get your ass to Mars.
