Red Faction Guerrilla is a reboot of the series from its fps ps2 days. Volition have made this reboot a third person game, and instead of the linear story structure of the prequels, this game is an open world sandbox. This decision takes the game in a far different direction from its prequels, as the game plays more like saints row now than red faction. This is not a bad thing, as the game is open and rather fun, offering freedom to the player in what they can be doing at any time. You play as Alec Mason, a new member of the red faction resistance movement on mars against the stereotypically evil Earth Defense Force. You must free mars by taking out edf infrastructure and military assets across the sizeable game map. The story is cliched and weak. You are good guys, you must stop the evil bad guys because they are evil. The characters are uninteresing and monotonous. The story lacks any dramatic impact or involvement. It also fails to capture the feeling that you are in an insurgent guerrilla movement, instead feeling like its a war between 2 armies.
The graphics are decent, though not overly detailed. The character models do not move gracefully, and I seen enemy soldiers clipping through terrain on more that 1 occasion. Despite this, the environments do the job of giving you a sand box to play in, even if it is all largely the same open plain. The mountains and backdrops are impressive, but generally the graphics are nothing special. The sound is largely forgettable, with little music of note and average voice work. Its all passable but completely forgettable. The textures of everything look like plastic, and slowdown can ruin the best of explosions.
The destructability of the environment is the selling point of this game, namely buildings. You can bring down large structures buy strategically taking out their supports, resulting in highly entertaining crashes and blasts. This can also be used while doing missions in the campaign, as you can drive vehicles through walls, blow up obstructions and generally cause mayhem. The physics engine is fun, allowing all this destruction to happen. It really is impressive to watch entire bridges to fall from great heights and clouds of dust to be left in the aftermath. This allows some strategy for the single player and greatly adds to the otherwise lacklustre features of the game.
Over the course of the game you acquire numerous weapon upgrades and even a jetpack. While this can be fun, its all a novelty that fails to make up for a generic and uninteresting campaign. Mars is broken up into sectors which you must liberate 1 at a time. To liberate them you cause destruction to EDF buildings in that sector. This is what the game boils down to and it all becomes very repetitive. The multiplayer is similarly uninteresting, with death matches and capture the flag the staple of it. There is a ranking system for those interested in playing, but I found in boring very fast.
The game has a campaign of roughly 10 hours, but its very repetitive bar a handful of chapter advancing missions. The game is disappointing, with its poor graphics, lack of quality music, repetitive nature and dull multiplayer. There are some good points like piloting a mech walker on a rampage, but these are few and far between. The ending was disappointing and the sandbox style I feel let the game down as it was poorly implemented. I hope volition raise their game in future and there was a lot of potential here and a great physics engine.
Pros: Destruction is great
mechanical walkers are fun to pilot
Cons: Bad graphics
dull multiplayer
poor story and no narrative direction
repetitive missions
side missions fail to add anything to the game
Wtf: Mars has been terraformed, just like that?
Score:
- 5/10