When I was growing up, consoles were outlawed in my household, and as such, I was relegated to PC gaming in secret when the parentals were out doing whatever it is Catholic teetotalers do for fun. This led to two developments: 1. I continue to be exclusively a PC gamer 2. Considering how limited my playtime was, I SUCK at video games. I am flat out terrible at pretty much every game not called Street Fighter or Guitar Hero. Since I am legitimately the worst, I generally look for games that present an immersive world, because the actual playing mechanics are more often than not just a hindrance to me doing anything. This whole “open world” trend of late has been a huge boon for me, because those are the games I want to play. Hell, I was one of the 10 people that thought the original S.T.A.L.K.E.R. was an amazing title, solely because of the immersive setting. I had heard Red Faction: Guerrilla was pretty much Far Cry 2 on Mars with more ‘splosions. When it was on sale for 5 goddamn dollars on Steam, it was go time.
HAMMER TIME!
You control Mason, perhaps the blandest protagonist of all time, who has mad beef with the Earth Defense Forces because THEY KILLED HIS BRO. To avenge said bro, Mason joins the Red Faction, an ill-defined group of rebels, and proceeds to BLOW THE FUCK OUT OF EVERYTHING ON MARS. This is literally all there is to the plot. No lie, when I realized I was going to review this game, I had to go back and rewatch all the game’s cutscenes because I had NO IDEA what the game was about. There’s some bullshit about nanobots and space barbarians and a character twist that is telegraphed about an hour into a 30 hour game, but it really doesn’t amount to much. However, the Red Faction series has always been sold on their proprietary GeoMod engine, rather than story, enabling the player to destroy pretty much whatever they feel like. Back in the first game, this included terrain, leading to some awesome sequences of driving through your enemy’s base with a GIANT TOTAL RECALL-STYLE DRILLMOBILE. My only brush with Red Faction II was ogling that awesome Russian constructivist box art, so I don’t know if you were similarly empowered in that title, but Guerrilla scales back the destruction solely to buildings. While structures do gloriously fall to pieces, it really isn’t that impressive in 2010, considering the glut of titles around now that allow for some full-scale destruction.
HAMMER TIME!
To go about the glorious mission of BLOWING THE FUCK OUT OF EVERYTHING ON MARS, you are offered a positively enormous open world and a sizable selection of cars to pick up random jobs in. Being big on completion, I attempted to complete every side mission, yet somehow managed to miss 9 of them by the game’s end. “Guerrilla Actions” as they are called, come in 4 varieties: blow up a building under a certain time limit, drive a car somewhere under a certain time limit, rescue and escort a hostage, or go have a gun battle at some location until ALL FOES ARE SLAUGHTERED BEFORE YOU. As you can imagine, this gets painfully dull as you approach the final tally of 103 optional missions. If you aren’t keen on repeating the same junk over and over, you are also given the option to stage freeform raids on “important targets” and take on the occasional plot mission to liberate a segment of the map.
Taking out “important targets” or completing guerrilla actions will lower the EDF red bar of control and raise the Red Faction’s yellow bar of morale (WHY DID THEY CHOOSE THESE COLORS?) If you have a high yellow bar, random colonists will join up with you during fights, but I really have no clue what the red bar does. Even after destroying every EDF structure in a zone, enemies will continue to populate it until you complete the plot missions, hanging around the wreckage of their old buildings like a bunch of filthy bums. I was reminded of Prototype quite a bit by this oddity; you do an AWFUL lot of things, but almost none of them seem to have any consequences. To me, the point of an open world is to give the player a sandbox to shape to his or her vision, not add 10 minutes of driving time between every mission. Even worse, every section of the map is largely identical, save the color of the dirt. After liberating Red Dirt Province, you move on to Gray Dirt Province, Brown Dirt Province, Brown Dirt With Some Grass Province, have a brief jaunt through Extended Red Dirt Province, roll up on Moonscape Province, and finally stage your final assault on Snowy Dirt Province. The open world concept feels absolutely tacked on to pad game time, and Volition did a terrible job of hiding it.
HAMMER TIME!
While I haven’t said really anything positive about the game, I did find myself strangely compelled to play it. Every single gun in the game is intensely boring, save the sledgehammer and that signature railgun that lets you look through walls, the combat is decent at best, and the plot missions generally amount to shooting galleries, but I stuck around to kill a whopping 5168 people before the game was done. I didn’t know I was going to review it until I was 27 hours into the game, so there must be some X-factor that was doing it for me, but I sure can’t put my finger on what that was. As long as you don’t stop to think too much about it, Red Faction: Guerrilla isn’t a BAD GAME per se, just a lazily designed one. And hell, how often are you offered the opportunity to BLOW THE FUCK OUT OF EVERYTHING ON MARS?
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