Red Faction: Guerrilla is a game from developer Volition (of Saints Row and Freespace fame) and publisher THQ, released in June of 2009 for PS3, Xbox 360 and September of 2009 for Windows. It is the third installment in the Red Faction series (albeit only the second set on Mars) and is a continuation of the themes of the original Red Faction, exploring the vulnerability of a revolutionary group fighting a guerrilla war against a better-armed state military in a bid to gain freedom and self-actualization.

...Either that or it's a third-person shooter whose unique flavor to an otherwise samey formula, repetitive side missions and bland plot is a detailed physics engine devoted to the realistic damage and collapse of buildings - the occasional whole building perched on single freestanding columns notwithstanding.

The game centers on aforementioned mortal avatar of destruction Alec Mason as he guns, explodes, chops, shocks, disintegrates and just plain hammers through waves of faceless EDF soldiers in an attempt to liberate Mars.

The game world is split up into six sectors: Parker, Dust, Badlands, Oasis, the Free Fire Zone and Eos. Each sector is completed by performing a series of preliminary missions to require the resources or information needed to proceed, challenging the EDF's Control on a sector by destroying their facilities or performing Guerrilla Actions (the game's side missions), and finally performing the liberation mission in a climactic battle for the sector's control.

The missions themselves are usually very diverse and seldom do you find yourself doing the same sort of task twice (beyond "go here, blow stuff up," which doesn't count), but the game's accusations of repetition are not without merit. The problem lies in the Guerrilla Actions, several of which leave you with a sense of "Haven't I already done this before?" despite a fair bit of variety in the side missions' tangible parameters. As the game progresses, the difficulty also ramps up a fair bit, and it's not odd to die several times in the course of performing the later missions, which adds to the annoyance and repetition.

But overall, RF:G is a most enjoyable game to me at least, since the shooting combat and destruction mechanics are so fundamentally satisfying that it's easy to start a new campaign and try new permutations on the mission objectives.

Original Archived Let's Play available at the Let's Play Archive

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