A long time ago, back on the PlayStation 2, I took a punt on Red Faction, a first-person shooter set on Mars whose gimmick was that the environment around you was entirely destructible. Couldn't see a way through? Whip out your rocket launcher and make one. Enemy hiding behind cover? Reduce that cover to rubble.
It got a sequel that I also played, but by the end of both games, I couldn't tell you what they were about, beyond blowing up walls. Their selling point was fun, but not so long-lasting, and any desires for a third game felt largely hopeless - I certainly wasn't bothered about getting one. What else could they do?
How about an explosive third-person smash 'em up where you can knock out entire buildings with a sledgehammer as you fight against the EDF and take Mars back, guerrilla warfare style, in Red Faction: Guerrilla?
At the time of release, I wasn't really interested. Now? Well, let's find out if I was wrong.
Fun Times
I'm playing Red Faction: Guerrilla on the PC, which has relatively recently been updated to a Re-Mars-tered edition, free of charge, but you can continue to play the original version, and so I am.
You are Alec Mason, a mining engineer shipped to Mars to help out and make use of his demolitions expertise. You're met by your brother, Dan, who tells us that the dream we were sold about Mars being a fine and dandy place to be simply isn't true.
The Earth Defence Force - overstepping their duties, surely? - are rounding up and 'dealing with' anyone suspected of belonging to Red Faction, a group hell-bent on taking back Mars for its people, and Dan is a member.
The first thing we need to do is to familiarise ourselves with how Mars works, and by that, I mean how Guerrilla plays. Salvage is the currency to be concerned about, and you can either find it lying around or create it for yourself by smashing structures to pieces using your sledgehammer, explosive charges, or whatever other means you'll eventually have at your disposal.
A lot of us know the principles of building demolition: take out the bits at the bottom and the bits at the top will have no choice but to fall over. Slapping some explosive charges onto the base of this tower should result in a massive tower crashing down to the surface, but whoever built this must have done a good job, because I needed a second attempt.
The gunship has noticed our efforts to flatten Mars and has picked out Dan as its target, who has two choices, but barely a second to make them. In a case of shooting first and asking questions later, the EDF have gunned him down, knocked us out, and left the scene. However long later, we wake up and see our brother, dead in the Martian dust.
You know what this means.
Now a member of Red Faction, as simple as that, we join its members on their quest to rid the planet of the EDF. Guerrilla takes the form of an open world where we can get to and complete our objectives in whatever way we can think of, our first of which being to quickly destroy an old base so that the EDF can't find any evidence linking us to it.
We've been given an assault rifle, and can select it from one of four weapon slots. You'd think an assault rifle wouldn't make for a good tool when it comes to demolishing buildings, but some conveniently placed explosive barrels will say otherwise.
Frustrations
Reducing buildings to rubble is a little more time consuming than you might imagine. Guerrilla isn't quite a simulation of Mars when it comes to gravity, but these structures seem to have been built to last. You'll get to the point where you start to wonder just what on Mars is holding the damn things up as more and more holes are punched into the walls.
And then the EDF caught wind of my efforts and started shooting first, and asking questions later. It's definitely how they've been taught to do things here.
It doesn't seem like they've been taught to do much else. They'll take cover, but then won't move from it, despite seeing you barrelling towards their position with a sledgehammer. Why a sledgehammer? Because using the assault rifle just feels awful.
So far as I can tell, there's no lock-on, and the sensitivity of the aiming, even down the sights, seems to be measured in feet and inches. I'm sure some settings can be tweaked to mitigate that, and some practice would go a long way too, but for now, I'm thankful that I'm playing on Easy and swinging around Thor's hammer.
Further Fun Times
Minor quibbles aside, completing a mission earns you more salvage, the amount modified by the state of the region with regards to EDF presence and population morale, which we'll get to shortly.
You can hoof it back to the Red Faction safe house to spend this salvage on upgrades to your kit, increasing the number of explosive charges you can throw at once, or being able to hoover up salvage while driving a vehicle, that sort of thing.
Think of them as side mission as you like, or practice for when things get really hairy. I took on a few of these targets, driving through walls and mindlessly lobbing in explosive charges from the safety of some cover. It's basically more of what we've been doing, and as you can imagine, the EDF would prefer you didn't do it.
From time to time, missions will pop up out of nowhere to remind you that you're not the centre of attention. Whether you go out of your way to help is your choice, but again, consider it learning, and the benefits for succeeding will surely help you work towards something you've got your eye on in the upgrade shop.
I was using these missions to learn how best to deal with the EDF, and with ammo crates in quite a few places, the strategy I fell back on was to litter the area with explosives, detonate them for maximum effect, then use the assault rifle as a last line of defence. I really don't like using that thing if I don't have to.
The enemy is stupid enough to roll up to the fight, park in a spot ideal for an ambush, then get out of their armoured transports to attack on foot, where they run around like idiots and barely get anything done. Most of the damage I end up taking is because I'm charging into the fight with a sledgehammer.
Still, it's quite fun. Who doesn't love wiping out cannon fodder?
My explosive efforts have earned me another mission, and while it too is going to feature lots of destruction, this time out we get to plough through everything in an armoured truck of our own.
The vehicles in Guerrilla do handle a little closer to what vehicles on Mars would handle like, floating and bouncing more than you expect, so lining up some of these targets was a little tricky, especially when the EDF is hounding you to stop and utterly failing to do so.
Destroying all of these satellite dishes is one part distraction, one part purposeful, as they're being used to track a convoy that we're smuggling out of the area, and us smashing them to bits is certainly pulling attention away from that convoy.
After 12 towers have been wiped off the surface of the planet, our mission is complete and this section of Mars, called Parker, has been liberated. The EDF are out of here. Our next target is a region called Dust if I recall, where the EDF generate much of their money. Won't that be fun to destroy...
A few new upgrades and a load of salvage as our reward and Guerrilla carries on where it left off. Do we immediately drive to Dust and carry on? Do we mop up some side missions? Do we go back to base and upgrade our stuff?
What we definitely do is save, ready to come back another day.
Final Word
I enjoyed Red Faction: Guerrilla, even through the awkward shooting controls and daft enemy AI sometimes. It's not a game that has revolutionised how other games are going to be in the future, but what it does is solid enough to keep you entertained for a while, and that's about where Red Faction has always stood.
The stories haven't made a dent on players, and I don't expect Guerrilla to be any different, but you're probably playing this game more for the destructible nature of it all, rather than the story. So few other games have given you the ability to do so, and you can absolutely go to town on whatever stands in your way - so long as it's manmade.
That's a big point, or a point, at least. In the first-person games, the environment was there to be blown apart. Often, manmade structures were too strong for you to crack into, so you had to dig tunnels in the rocks beside them. Here, it's the opposite. The landscape isn't going budge for anything, but an unnatural structure build atop it is fair game for you to knock down.
You can't cause a landslide to bury a structure, not unless that's an interesting set-piece later on, I guess. You can't render a road impassible to cut off a section of the EDF from their buddies. Would asking for these things be too much for the engine to handle? Probably, but it'd still be nice to see.
As it stands, though, destroying everything in sight is pretty cool, no matter how you do it. If you've the time to do so without the EDF getting in your way, it's all the more enjoyable, as you slowly pick a building apart to see just which part of it was the one part the entire building needed to remain standing.
I must be easily amused. Red Faction: Guerrilla is a solid game. Stand out in some ways, but perhaps not a game that has 'it'. I'll enjoy it for a while longer, I know that much, but I can also see that it might get a bit repetitive, a bit tedious, and a bit worn out over time. Definitely worth trying out, though.
FILLING YOU IN
Gosh, how right I was. I'll enjoy it for a while longer (10 hours or so before the credits rolled) and then question whether I want to carry on knocking off the reptitive bits for a few meaningless achievements (uhhhhmmm, probably not, no. But it's not uninstalled yet).
Red Faction: Guerrilla is not a game you replay for the story. It's not one you replay for the characters or the voice artists behind them. It's a game you replay to smash some things to bits, but, sadly, you are really limited in how you do that.
Usually, you lob a load of demolition charges around the outside of a building, while under fire, detonate them, question what physics are holding the building up, then chuck a load more charges onto whatever is left for round 2. When you run out of charges, you might as well get swinging, which will make for sloooooooow progress, but you'll get it done eventually.
Once you unlock the rocket launcher you'll have a better time, and if you save your salvage for the 1000 cost Thermobaric Launcher (if I recall), buildings turn to rubble in an instant, which is a remarkable change of pace from charges and sledgehammer swings.
Or you can hop into a big stompy mech, some of which come out swinging, others armed with rockets, all capable of just walking right through the walls and, at some point, wading out the remains of the building that has satisfyingly landed on your head as a result.
Moments like that make Red Faction: Guerrilla worth a look, but there's little else that is appealing otherwise. In another Universe, the Red Faction series went somewhere, but in the world I'm writing this, the best we've got is a Re-Mars-tered version that does... something... I don't know what. Oh, I tell you what, it defaults to keyboard and mouse controls upon launch, and the switch to controller button doesn't work, requiring you to quit out, relaunch, and jab a controller button as soon as you can, to tell it "Hey, I really want to use this lump of plastic, you know. Just let me."
So yeah. Play it. It won't take you long if you like playing it, and it won't offer anything else if you don't. Brilliant.
Fun Facts
Back and forths between teaser images and fan forum comments lead to the actual inclusion of an 'Ostrich Hammer', all because of enough players convincing themselves that's what they saw.
Red Faction Guerrilla, developed by Volition, first released in 2009.
Versions played: PC, 2009. Red Faction: Guerrilla Re-Mars-tered, PC, 2018.