Review | Red Faction: Guerrilla

Format: PC (previously on Xbox360/PS3) | Genre: Action | Publisher: THQ | Developer: Volition | Release date: 18/09/09 | RRP: £39.99

By Andy Johnson

No doubt you read Lewis’ informative review of the new Red Faction, back on its console launch date in June of this year.

So now the task falls to me to add Resolution’s verdict on this newly released PC version. Rather than rehashing much of what Lewis had to say – that this is a brilliantly fun, wonderfully kinetic third-person action game – I’ll instead talk a little about one or two specific issues. I expect I’ll also carry on waxing lyrical about what fun Guerrilla is.

Yet in a way, I’ve found Guerrilla to be an agonising experience. It’s one of those games that excels so brilliantly in so many departments that its failings stick out like sore thumbs, and make you wish, long for them to go away.

The strengths this game displays are often astronomical. The combat is brilliantly realised. Built almost solely around the demolition of buildings and structures, it’s aided by a very finely struck balance of risk and reward. At every step of the way, the game challenges you to cause more destruction, complete more diverse attacks, rescues, assassinations, and at every turn the game rewards you with a gleeful trickle of unlocked weapons, upgrades, items, and the salvage required to buy them. Travelling between these tasks involves taking advantage of the great driving, allowing you to tear around the Martian colony in trucks, buggies, taxis and more. Every journey is a thrill – after one mission involves the destruction of a bridge in the colony’s Dust sector, you notice a convenient dirt ramp which you can use to soar over the rift below, whenever you need to cross that area.

The game’s focus, the demolition, is its crowning monument to fun. Ramming a truck into a barracks, jumping out through the new hole in the wall, then detonating the charges attached to it so that the building is torn out from under the feet of the guards on the floor above is glorious.

//Revolting
Guerrilla’s trouble, though, is that ostensibly all these things are meant to happen as part of a revolution. This theme of throwing off the shackles of oppression is what the Red Faction series is all about, and the shift to third-person from first- doesn’t change the focus. But as fun as the chaos and destruction of the game’s action are, there just isn’t enough of an attempt to make any of the player’s actions meaningful in anything more than a purely mechanical, reward-based sense. Missions reward you with morale (increasing the number of rebels that help you out) and salvage, and reduce the villainous Earth Defence Force’s control over a specific region. When the enemy’s resolve is shattered, they just naff off – victory sucks the life out of a given zone, meaning that there’s almost nothing at all to do there any more. After a few cycles of this process, you realise that the revolution you’re engineering is rather a hollow one. Repitition sets in, and no adequate story is told.

Which is what, ultimately, holds Guerrilla back from true greatness. And I mean true greatness earnestly – this game could have been one of the very best of the last several years had it woven some emotion and soul between its cathartic explosions. The potential for a well-told story is laced through the game.  Whether via propaganda broadcasts, idle rebel and civilian chat or the character exuded by the silent red dust of Mars itself, it all hints at an altogether deeper and more involving world than the one we actually find ourselves in.  The game even has the odd colonist speak Spanish or German, in a lovely but underdeveloped attempt to inject diversity and life into the fiction. But instead of getting caught up in the plight of these oppressed peoples in their vicious conflict with the jackbooted EDF, we are simply swept up in a treadmill of combat and ensuing reward – which, while enormously fun, offers little lasting resonance. Guerrilla masterfully stole my attention as well as anything I’ve played in ages, but it largely failed to capture my imagination. Surely, to do both is what games are meant to be aspiring to…

But aside from narrative shortcomings, Volition have done a wonderful job here. This PC version of the game is a damn solid port in my experience – it demands a fairly muscular machine, but has a decent level of scalability. Sure, on all but the most Herculean PCs, you can expect at least a little slowdown when larger buildings get shredded rapidly, but that’s understandable given the impressiveness of the technology. Guerrilla is to destruction physics what Crysis was to graphics – before long, every PC gamer will have a machine that can cope much better with the tech, and it’ll look absolutely glorious. Additionally, this PC version comes with additional single-player prequel content to add even more longevity to the game, and retains the turn-based “pass-the-controller” demolition mode from the consoles. The latter creates a bit of an oddity – a PC game with hotseat play – but though small, it’s a very welcome annex to Gueilla’s huge appeal.

8/10

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