Red Faction: Guerrilla

One of my favorite games of the 2000s, or probably ever. No game comes anywhere close to the fun of destroying things in this game, even 14 years later. The campaign has so many fun missions that it is addicting at many times. This game has what I think are some of the best cutscenes and I am glad it has so many. My biggest complaint of the plot is I wish it involved the marauders much more but otherwise it is very nice. The sledgehammer has got to be one of the most fun weapons to use in any game to me, it is a key element of the game. I really love how even most of the side missions are really fun and thrilling too. I desperately would love for another entry in the series to come some day.

In 2120, Mars is a mining colony and the Earth Defense Force (EDF) rule with an iron fist. You play as a miner Alec Mason, who travels to Mars to reunite with his brother Daniel. Daniel tells Alec things aren’t good here, and he is a member of Red Faction who are a resistance group that plans to fight back. Alec has no interest in joining him, but soon the EDF gun down Daniel and Alec is forced to flee. He has no choice but to join Red Faction. You are then a key member and must help liberate all six districts on Mars: Parker, Dust, Oasis, Badlands, Free Fire Zone, and Eos.

The main selling point of the game is the destruction. You start off with a hammer and several remote explosives and can destroy any man-made construct. You can choose any 3 weapons plus your mandatory hammer. Your choices are between: remote charges, machine gun, pistol, a rocket launcher, arc welder (shoots electricity), grinder (throws deadly buzz saw blades), and a few EDF weapons.

Excluding the hammer, your weapons have a pretty limited amount of ammo, so you need to restock them using supply crates, or returning to your safehouse. Midway through the game, you unlock the ability to fast travel, so this involves some tedious back-tracking. Or you can just save and reload, since reloading places you at a safehouse.

When you're back at a safe house, Samanya will upgrade or unlock weapons and upgrades in exchange for salvage. You gain salvage from completing missions, destroying buildings, and mining ore.

It’s a third person shooter, but it’s quite hard to play the standard way of hiding behind cover, given how easily it is destroyed. I usually preferred to keep moving, running and gunning, or simply trying to keep my distance and throwing explosives from afar.

The great thing about the destruction is that if there is someone shooting from a building, you can blow the base of it to collapse it and send him tumbling down. In some places, you can strategically blow-up bridges to prevent enemies from reaching you.

Each sector has two gauges, one showing the level of EDF control, and another for the population's morale. By raising morale, you are joined more frequently by fellow guerilla fighters. You take control of the region when the EDF control reaches zero, and you have completed the 3 key missions.

The several different mission types will affect one or both of these gauges. You can also destroy any EDF building to lower control as depicted by red areas on your map. Key buildings have a blue mission marker which has a much larger effect.

The mission types are varied: protect a settlement, attack a base, rescue hostages, intercept an enemy convoy, chase a messenger vehicle, destroy EDF property, steal a vehicle.

There’s a mission type where you have to destroy a building using limited weapons as fast as possible, but you are unopposed by enemies. You can replay this to beat your fastest time.

The game incorporates a “wanted” system like games like Grand Theft Auto, where when you trigger an alert, enemies will spawn in and chase you. If you manage to escape line of sight for several seconds then the warning level will decrease back to ‘green.

The game can be very chaotic with the number of enemies it can throw at you. The more heavily guarded areas sometimes need a more stealthy approach, like sneaking through the mountains and launching explosives from afar. Sometimes, I took down a base using some hit and run tactics. So if there were 4 key targets, I would just take one down, then flee, then come back later for another round.

There are many parked vehicles that you can take, or even steal occupied vehicles that are driving around. I think people willingly give them up to help the resistance. There are some missions that feature Walkers which are like mech-suits which allow you to either fire rockets, or crush objects with your mechanical arms.

Mars is pretty barren really. It’s different shades of red, lots of elevation and mountains, then human constructs in the populated areas. I thought the final area, Eos was more interesting, since it uses a different colour scheme and is more densely populated. There are lots of high-rise buildings with lots of glass windows, and glass walkways. The large battles in these areas were great fun.

I think the game originally came out in the era where open world games were cool. I guess it comes with the advantages and disadvantages of those games. A lot of time is spent driving to objective markers, there’s plenty of small distractions like blowing up the EDF supply crates, and mining ore deposits etc. The core concept of driving around, causing some destruction, then fleeing the scene is fun. The length is about right at 15 hours, so it ended before it got too boring.