Once upon a time my mates and myself had a little game called ‘Operation: Blow shit up.’ We would start in any FPS game and deliberately set out to destroy as much property as possible by the use of explosives. Grenades, C4, pipe bombs, IED’s, stickies, mollies, tanks, gas cans, you name it; if it exploded we explodeded it (yes, I did say explodeded).

So imagine my delight when I first saw Red Faction: Guerrilla! Complete and total destruction of buildings and vehicles. Nom nom nom. I had to have it.

For a start, RFG is a third person shooter of sorts, with more attention paid to general destruction than to actual shooting. Some might try and compare it to the GTA series but the similarities are few and fair between. RFG does a good job of making you feel like the good guy despite your destructive habits. The story isn’t rich but it has enough in it to give meaning to blowing up EDF installations and randomly ‘borrowing’ other peoples vehicles for the common good. It doesn’t have an anti-social overtone which is nice.

The story is set about fifty years after the events of the first two RF games. The Ultor corp has been defeated with the Earth Defense Force coming to save the day. But now, the EDF has seen that the occupation of Mars is actually beneficial for their bottom line, so have instituted a sort of military run police system which has become repressive on the people. Enter the Red Faction once again.

You play the role of Alec Mason who witnesses his Brother brutally gunned down by an EDF gunship at the very start. Alec decides to take up arms against the EDF and joins the Red Faction. From there, he is tasked with raising morale of the common public and lowering the grip of the EDF on any sectors. This is done mostly through the use of missions which are based all around the maps. They can vary from going with Jenkins on a destroy X million dollars of EDF property run, to rescuing captured RFG buddies. You can also go on raids to assault against EDF installations, as well as defending from counter EDF raids. There’s also the usual car runs where you have to get a selected car from point A to point B in a set amount of time. And, of course, there are the main missions which will help liberate an entire sector once completed. Overall the missions are varied and plentiful and don’t give you the feeling like you’ve done them before somewhere.

There are also lots of random opportunities to lower the power of EDF. At any stage in the game, if a building or entity is shown as being red on your map, you can attack it and if destroyed, it will take some points off the EDF meter. It’ll also call in more EDF soldiers and vehicles so get ready for some intense fire fights. You know you’ve hit the jackpot when tanks start rolling in. What I really liked about this reform way of working was that when you are in the middle of a fight, random public members will sometimes try and help you out and take up arms against the EDF, if local morale is high enough. You’ll also receive other Guerrilla reinforcements who will show up in groups of four and usually come in cars. You don’t have to call them in, or direct them, you just have to start attacking the EDF and they’ll be there to help.

Now, I’ve tried my best to avoid the destruction system until now. RFG can be played like a sandbox if you really desire. You can destroy nearly anything other than the actual terrain itself. I must say the physics system has been implemented very well. Buildings come down like they should. For example, attach a few explosives to key structural supports of a building, stand back and detonate. Then watch as the building stands for a moment, then eventually begins to bend and buckle under the weight of no longer being able to support it’s own mass. Then watch as the rest of the building completely collapses. This is no more prevalent than when destroying bridges.

Lets see, I’ve tried putting explosives onto a truck and driving it onto the bridge; I’ve used the nano rifle to shoot the supports; I’ve used general explosives on just anything to do with the bridge; I’ve even tried smashing a large hole in the surface of the bridge with my sledgehammer and then driven various cars and trucks at high speed into the hole, where they then crash through the sub structure. Oh, and I had a bridge come down on my head too.

Before

After

The weapons also have some very nifty things going on here. There’s the infamous sledgehammer, as well as a basic rocket launcher and assault rifle, but they get a lot better from there. The nanorifle is quite simply awesome. Whatever it hits, it disintegrates. Shoot it at the wall of a building, and the entire wall vapourises. This works a charm when trying to take down buildings that have very obvious super structures. There’s also the singularity bomb, which is an EDF only weapon and must be picked up off a dead EDF soldier. Only the guys in the white armour carry them. It basically creates a whirlpool where ever you drop the bomb, where upon it sucks in anything in the general vicinity. Once it has drawn in enough matter, it pauses for a moment before exploding in a giant white blast of energy. Put this baby in the middle of a house and watch the house get tore apart.

This is where the game hits a sweet spot for me. It’s fun, plain and simple. You can play it for five minutes or five hours and enjoy it just as much. Because the game is partly mission based and partly sandbox, you can mix things up if you are becoming bored with something. Go on a raid and then go and ram a truck through the guts of an EDF administration building. Then go on a Jenkins raid and blow stuff up with a missile launcher on the back of a car. Perhaps try and get enough EDF on your tail so they bring out a tank or two, then try stealing one. It’s open enough to not get repetitive while still holding true to it’s fun characteristics. This is what I like, do what you want, when you want, for however long you want.

There are a few bad points to this game though, and most start with Games for Windows Live. The first three days of the game I could not play because of this. Firstly, you have to be signed in to GFWL in order to make and load saved games. Although GFWL would let me sign in out of game, the in-game version wouldn’t. So for the first three days I was unable to save any progression. Then it started crashing when I tried to sign in. I had to manually download the latest patch and then tried it again. Now, GFWL will sign in and let me save, but will also report than my account has been suspended for incorrect payment details. I’m not sure how that works on a free account but anyway.

Actual in-game problems are few. I had the patch and didn’t encounter any real bugs or crashes what so ever. I think the only thing that could be improved would be the handling of the cars. They have a bad habit of under steering at the first sign of a corner, effectively wanting to drive straight ahead when you want to turn. It can get a tad frustrating if you’re trying to get up a hill too as the front wheels just don’t grip at all seemingly. But other than that, no other complaints.

So, to wrap it up, Red Faction Guerrilla is a mix of free form destruction with missions intermingled into it. The story is enough to keep you going and you can play it anywhere from casual to hardcore and enjoy it. Oh, and that destruction engine is to die for.

There’s around 20 hours of gameplay here for the mission inclined and more for the destructive people amongst us. I’m happy to give it a 9 out of 10.