Knights of the Cardboard Castle

Most shooters start the player off with some kind of assault rifle, maybe a sub-machine gun if the designers are feeling stingy, plus a dinky little side-arm that never actually sees any use. Not so Red Faction: Guerrilla. In this game, right after the introductory cutscene, you’re given a humongous sledgehammer and a satchel of remote-detonated explosives. Then you’re set loose on the Martian landscape to do as you will. That is a fair representation of this game is all about.

You’ll find that most of your time on Mars will be spent wrecking stuff. Of the two starter weapons, the sledgehammer is the more reliable but it’s always satisfying to bring down a building with lots of enemies inside with explosives, especially when you become skilled at identifying structurally weak spots to slap them on. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg that is your arsenal. You also get the grinder, a bulky machine that fires razor-edged metal disks, the thermobaric rocket launcher that is really good at filling an enclosed space with a big explosion, a nano-rifle which infects the target with nanites that dissolve it, and, if you’re lucky, the awe-inspiring singularity bomb, which creates a miniature black hole.

Alternatively, you could just commandeer a garbage truck from a Martian colonist and drive it into whatever building you’re currently trying to bring down. Tanks work well too, but the ne plus ultra of demolition technology in the game are the walkers, which resemble the powered exoskeleton from the film Aliens. When you’re encased in one of these babies you become a veritable walking whirlwind of death and destruction. While you can’t just walk up to any manned vehicle and just chuck out the uncooperative occupants inside as in the Grand Theft Auto games, you can use the arc welder weapon to first fry anyone inside an enemy vehicle and then take it over once they’re dead.

To be fair, Red Faction: Guerrilla does have a storyline but it’s mostly generic and forgettable tripe. Set in the year 2150, it purports to depict the struggles of the underground group bearing the name of the game against the oppressive government overseen by the Earth Defense Force. The EDF were initially allies who protected the Martian colonists but as Earth’s collapsing economy and deteriorating environment demanded more and more of the Red Planet’s natural resources, it turned Mars into a police state at the beck and call of Earth’s megacorporations. Since the revolutionary Red Faction is composed of disgruntled workers fighting against evil capitalists, this gives the resistance movement a distinctly communistic flavour.

Not much effort is put into the story and in fact there are only a handful of named characters and a dozen or so storyline missions in the game. What the setting does offer is the terraformed surface of Mars as an open world to romp about in. While there have been quite a few open world games released over the past several years, Red Faction: Guerrilla is the first science-fiction themed game to move the action off-planet. The core gameplay elements remain the same but the change of setting is welcome as you’re now driving around in futuristic vehicles instead of cars ripped off from real world equivalents in what looks and feels like a rough and ready Martian colony.

The really clever bit is that this effectively allows the designers to get away with less. Creating an open world that is mostly a lot red sand deserts, rugged cliffs and with habitats only sparsely scattered across the terrain takes a lot less effort than recreating huge metropolises with interconnected highway systems, but because it’s Mars, the illusion works. What works even better is that not only is every single building and vehicle in the game utterly destructible, but that the in-game physics ensures that they can be destroyed in all sorts of realistic and dynamic ways.

This is possible because while structures in other games are really single objects with canned animations that kick in when they get blown up, buildings in Red Faction: Guerilla really are composed of tons of small parts that hang logically together. This means that if you knock out the columns supporting a roof with your sledgehammer, the whole thing will come crashing down. Indeed, some of the destruction challenges in the game, a side-activity in which the player must destroy one or more targets using a specific loadout within a limited time, rely on this physics system. For example, you might need to knock down a tower at just the right angle so it topples into another tower to demolish it as well. As you might appreciate, this makes simply wrecking things an extremely satisfying experience.

The side-activities are the heart of the game. Each of the six distinct sectors on Mars must be liberated one at a time and each sector has a Control rating and a Morale rating. The Control rating represents the EDF’s domination of the sector and reducing it unlocks storyline missions. It must be reduced completely to zero in order to unlock the final mission to set the sector free. The Morale rating represents the strength of the Red Faction’s support amongst the local populace of the sector. If you manage to raise it high enough, civilians in the streets are more likely to take up arms to help you out when fighting breaks out.

Each side-activity rewards you by lowering Control or raising Morale in a sector, sometimes both at once. For example, the rescue hostages mission needs you to break into an EDF occupied building to rescue prisoners and safely deliver them to a Red Faction safehouse. This helps boost Morale in a sector by a significant amount. Some of the craziest moments in the game come when you’re riding shotgun to the psychotic Jenkins and must destroy EDF assets worth a fixed amount of money within a limited time. This lowers the EDF’s Control in that sector. Even without a mission, you’re always free to destroy various EDF targets that are marked on your map to reduce Control or blow up propaganda billboards to increase Morale.

Completing missions earns you Salvage as well but you can also collect them from the ruined debris of the buildings and vehicles you destroy and by mining fixed spots on the map. This is spent to purchase upgrades to your gear. Unlike the Grand Theft Auto games, you always have access to all of the weapons you’ve purchased at every Red Faction safehouse so there’s no need to buy a given gun multiple times. Sadly, there’s no garage feature in the game so it’s strictly a case of use it or lose it for every cool tank or walker you find in the game.

Graphics-wise, the game is about par for the course for a 2009 release but is nothing to shout about. The destruction is suitably impressive but everything else feels somewhat bland. Even the level design is lacklustre and the world feels empty. Luckily the game does a good job at masking these faults by keeping the player occupied. For example, you’ll occasionally get reports from your commander that a Red Faction hideout is under attack from the EDF and needs to be defended, or that a traitor is trying to get away with the movement’s secrets and must be intercepted.

Overall the game lacks polish. The controls can feel a little clumsy and trying to navigate around debris obstructing your path can be frustrating. This is counterbalanced by the sheer fun factor of its activities and the features that actively help rather hinder the player to complete the game. If you fail a mission, you simply reappear next to the mission’s starting point, rather than being forced to drive a long way from a safehouse to the mission location. The longer missions even have mid-mission checkpoints that save your progress. Even going after the various collectibles is made easier by having them appear on your mini-map as you get close.

This means that the game doesn’t overstay its welcome long enough for its faults to become too apparent. If you really feel like more of the same after finishing the game, do note that not only does all of the previously uncompleted side-activities become unlocked after the main storyline missions are done, but the game world actually changes to reflect that you’ve basically won against the EDF and are just cleaning up the remnants. The PC version of the game also comes bundled with the Demon of the Badlands mini-campaign that is available as a separate DLC for the console versions for those who just can’t get enough.

Red Faction: Guerrilla isn’t a game that’s going to win many awards and it certainly has no pretensions about offering anything more than straightforward action. But it is a very good game for what it does and arguably no other game does mindless destruction better. This is something that you’ll want to play with your brain turned down and your bravado turned way up but it does satisfy the senseless craving for violence that all of us have from time to time.