In an era where artillery-packing supersoldiers could routinely be foiled by a large piece of plywood and a doorknob (hunt down those keys, please), the original Red Faction proposed a more plausible approach as to how ordinance should interact with building materials... on paper, at least. While Red Faction and its sequel let you alter the face of your environment with your deadly tools, the results were more Dig Dug than John Woo. Inevitably, you felt more like a groundhog than a one-man wrecking crew, and except during the sequences included expressly to showcase these deformation mechanics, you got the feeling that you'd "break" the game if you utilized them too much. In the end, all that was left was a by-the-numbers shooter with an enticing-but-overly-ambitious operative mechanic.
Have technology and ingenuity of design advanced enough in the intervening years to make a game built around these elements worthwhile? Hopefully for Red Faction: Guerrilla, the answer is yes. THQ and Volition are flipping the script on the dormant series, wisely avoiding the deep crowds of the FPS genre (not to mention its current high benchmarks), and attempting to do right by the notions of devastation associated with its title by means of a more thoughtful approach.
They're sort of rebuilding it from the ground up, actually. Red Faction: Guerrilla has moved to a Gears of War-style over-the-shoulder perspective. Moreover, the game is built around an open-world, mission-based structure. It's hard to cite two safer bets in the games industry right now, but given the ways that a wide-open landscape can help to enable the wholesale destruction of the structures that dot it, the open-world scheme seems to make quite a bit of sense in this case.
The environment on display at THQ's recent demo event was pretty vast and sparsely populated overall. Scattered throughout it were command posts, hangars, barracks -- all the sorts of utilitarian structures that one would associate with a mining colony on a terraformed Mars. Upon entering one, the protagonist -- controlled alternately by all comers -- hatcheted, shelled, satchel-charged and RPG'd every aspect of his surroundings. In some cases the damage looked pretty prefab -- uniform chunks of concrete would fly off the walls with less-than-convincing results. In others, though, it looked as good as almost anything else on the market today, with light posts and building foundations toppling quite believably, affecting neighboring objects in ways that felt right.
As a supposed testament to the tech's fidelity, associate brand manager at THQ Matthew Weissinger shared an anecdote: when a level designer erected a structurally unsound building within the game's toolset, it unceremoniously collapsed on itself when loaded into the gameworld. This is precisely the sort of story you want to believe. It is advised, however, to wait until you witness these elements play out in, say, a thriving Martian metropolis before you subscribe wholesale.
From the looks of it, Volition is planning to include some open-world bells and whistles in Guerrilla. Convoys will travel the roads, reportedly enabling "emergent" mini-missions. All manner of vehicles are available for you to commandeer, including buggies, worker mechs, and Martian dump trucks. "Resistance Points" will serve as your progress tracker, increasing as you strike blows against your oppressors -- be it through demolishing their buildings and units, or completing missions against them -- and decreasing as your side suffers casualties. After reaching certain milestones, more missions will open up, leading you, apparently, from the trenches of your mining colony and into the moneyed heart of the red planet.
As for the story, well, it seems like the EDF -- the old games' downtrodden freedom fighters -- have turned bad. You play the role of a disenfranchised miner with heart, hoping to shed Mars of the corrupt government, and build something more equitable in its place. A true revolution, though, would entail THQ successfully resuscitating a long-dormant franchise. On the strength of Red Faction: Guerrilla actually looking pretty cool, let's hope that happens.
