Following the death of his brother at the hands of the tyrannical EDF, protagonist Alec Mason joins the titular underground resistance who have started to emerge from beneath Mars’ surface to set up camps in a bid to fight back. Starting at one of such camp situated in Parker, the game’s first settlement, Mason has access to a rugged all-terrain vehicle which you can use to travel to any of the mission markers dotted around your map.
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| Alec Mason joins the Red Faction resistance as a reluctant hero when his brother is killed by the EDF. | The EDF are a malevolent organisation who lord over Mars with an iron fist. |
Objectives range from story-driven to non-essential distractions such as rigging an abandoned tower with explosive barrels and levelling the structure before the timer runs out. Parker itself is a large mining community inhabited by honest working folks and oppressive EDF soldiers and during our first hands-on, it’s not long before we have our first encounter with a small group of EDF troops who are armed to the teeth and riding along in armoured vehicles with manned machine gun turrets on the roof. Mason has quite an arsenal himself early on in the game though and we find ourselves equipped with sticky mining charges, an assault rifle and of course, our trusty sledgehammer.
Throwing our mines, which latch onto the armoured cars puts them out of commission, while rushing the soldiers unawares and smacking them aside with a swing of our hammer does what an assault rifle would normally do. However, the real joy in Red Faction: Guerrilla comes not from clubbing troops around the head with a giant hammer (although that is fun) or spraying them with a beefy automatic weapon, but revelling in the sheer wealth of destruction on offer. Shifting the series’ usual first-person view into third-person makes perfect sense once you realise the kind of wilful destructive activities you’ll be engaging in. The third in the Red Faction series, Guerrilla is no longer concerned with changing the landscape so if you’re worried that this is another Fracture in waiting, you can rest assured that it’s not.
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| The explosions are lovely, which makes blowing up buildings all the more gratifying. | Every edifice has been painstakingly built from the ground up. |
Volition have painstakingly assembled an entire open-world made up of individual structures that conform to real world architectural rules, so reducing them to lumps of concrete and debris is every bit as satisfying as you’d expect it to be. Proper physics ensure that each building crashes around you realistically and if you’re not careful, it’s easy to get yourself caught beneath a shower of ballast, masonry and steel girders. And that’s exactly when the new perspective makes sense, allowing you to fully appreciate your handiwork while enabling you to avoid getting trapped under an avalanche of rubble. You’re positively encouraged to run riot through Guerrilla’s expansive world and although Parker is the typical vision of Mars with its dusty red valleys and sloping, orange-hued mountains, Associate Producer Sean Kennedy promises each of the game’s six sectors will be markedly different from one another. From the barren dustbowl plains of Parker, Badlands and Dust the landscape will evolve seamlessly as you progress through the world, with the red skies steadily turning yellow, giving way to the verdant blue atmosphere and lush green grass of Oasis and Eos where terra-forming has reached a more advanced stage. It’s heartening to see plenty of variety in the landscape, but it’s also encouraging to see that Volition has incorporated a variety of different game modes to discover beyond the core single-player campaign.
During our recent hands-on time with the game, we played several of the multiplayer modes from the standard deathmatch modes of Anarchy, to the attacking and defending of Siege which has one team striving to destroy the opposition’s towers while the other side uses the Reconstructor tool to reassemble the trashed targets and attempt to hold the line. Damage Control is a similar mode, except both teams compete for control of the same three nodes on the map. There are more modes besides, including Wrecking Crew, a party game where players take turns to cause the most destruction for points with the highest score winning, which sadly wasn’t playable during our hands-on preview.
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| It’s not all red dust on Mars. Terra-forming has started to make Mars more hospitable to human inhabitants. | Let’s be honest – destroying stuff will never, ever get old. |
Each multiplayer mode boasts the same degree of destructibility in the game world, so if like us you want to destroy the central bridge on a certain stage and disable the main means of moving across the map, you can, providing you’re not bothered being labelled the most annoying person in the game.
Multiplayer is made all the more interesting by the inclusion of backpacks, which grant different abilities such as temporary flight, enhanced speed or powerful offensive support like concussion, tremor, firepower and best of all the rhino backpack, which enables you to recklessly charge through walls or enemies. What ensues is the most entertaining kind of chaos imaginable and a clear indication of the longevity that Red Faction: Guerrilla is promising. It may have been five years in the making, but it looks as though it will have most definitely been worth the wait when it’s finally released this June. Don’t believe us? Check out the demo now on XBLA and PSN.
