Get In, Get Out... And Leave Only Rubble Behind
Red Faction: Guerrilla is amazing. We will now proceed to ramble about why.
Published: June 28, 2009
For the most part, open-world games haven't really attempted much beyond the admittedly bankable formula that Grand Theft Auto established less than a decade ago. I'm not exactly faulting other devs for sticking to what works; creating a sandbox game is a ridiculously ambitious undertaking, and some of the risk is minimized by just going with what's been proven. Games that tug at the boundaries of a go-anywhere setup like Crackdown or Hulk: Ultimate Destruction have at least pushed things in a more extreme direction.
Red Faction: Guerrilla, however, is attempting something that none of them have done thus far: do open-world but factor in the previous games' GeoMod technology to up the ante on destruction. In this respect, the game is an unequivocal, triumphant success. It's not quite tunneling-through-rock levels of destruction, but a few ingenious weapons, a fantastic physics model that takes into account structural integrity and material properties and vehicles that can literally rip through a building like it was made of toilet paper mean a ton of different ways to approach an objective -- at least in the first two thirds of the game.
It's not so much that RFG completely abandons the truisms of most open-world games; you can still "jack" (the residents of Mars just sorta give it to you while saying something about not getting caught or a little inspirational pep talk, so you're not exactly stealing), you'll travel between distinct districts, you'll buy and upgrade all manner of destructive tools, run from the authorities and so on. But there are neat little takes on familiar missions you've played before a billion times in these games. Following missions, for example, do something very cool: they paint an area in red for both the "too close" and "too far" radii; all you have to do is stay in the band in the middle. It sounds minor, but it makes chasing infinitely easier than the usual tailing BS seen in other games.
But I'm getting a little ahead of myself here. Let's start at the beginning. One miner on Mars had the balls (and some inside help) to stand up against the oppressive, intrusive Ultor Corporation 50 years before the events of RFG. This man, Parker, helped liberate Mars with the help of the incoming Earth Defense Force. Over the years, though, dwindling resources on Earth have caused the EDF to turn slowly from liberators to new oppressors, raiding homes, executing miners they feel are defying the rule of law and generally just running around acting like dicks. The time has come for the Red Faction resistance to once again take back Mars.
Alec Mason is a mining engineer looking to get something of a fresh start. He hooks up with his brother, Dan, and quickly tries to get acclimated to a much harsher, seedier version of Mars than the one painted by the broadcasts back on Earth. When Dan is killed by the EDF for supposedly being a terrorist, Alec returns to his new home only to face the threat of execution for collaborating with a Red Faction member. Just as he's about to be shoot, the actual Red Faction storms in, informs Alec that Dan was a major player in the resistance and explains that the EDF already sees him as a member of that resistance, so he's now a part of things, willingly or no.
The Red Faction's activities are fairly organized, but they lack a figurehead. As Alec helps to free the individual zones of Mars' terraformed surface, eventually culminating in taking the fight to the EDF itself to push them off the planet. Along the way, he re-discovers Ultor's experiments into nanotechnology and rather early on is granted access to a weapon that literally breaks anything it hits down at the molecular level. This tech, using the Nano Forge he discovers in easily the coolest mission in the game (a major throwback to the first Red Faction complete with literal echoes from the past in the form of dialogue from the characters in that game) out in the Badlands, an older part of Mars populated by the feral Marauders, becomes central to the rest of the story.
Red Faction: Guerrilla, however, is attempting something that none of them have done thus far: do open-world but factor in the previous games' GeoMod technology to up the ante on destruction. In this respect, the game is an unequivocal, triumphant success. It's not quite tunneling-through-rock levels of destruction, but a few ingenious weapons, a fantastic physics model that takes into account structural integrity and material properties and vehicles that can literally rip through a building like it was made of toilet paper mean a ton of different ways to approach an objective -- at least in the first two thirds of the game.
It's not so much that RFG completely abandons the truisms of most open-world games; you can still "jack" (the residents of Mars just sorta give it to you while saying something about not getting caught or a little inspirational pep talk, so you're not exactly stealing), you'll travel between distinct districts, you'll buy and upgrade all manner of destructive tools, run from the authorities and so on. But there are neat little takes on familiar missions you've played before a billion times in these games. Following missions, for example, do something very cool: they paint an area in red for both the "too close" and "too far" radii; all you have to do is stay in the band in the middle. It sounds minor, but it makes chasing infinitely easier than the usual tailing BS seen in other games.
But I'm getting a little ahead of myself here. Let's start at the beginning. One miner on Mars had the balls (and some inside help) to stand up against the oppressive, intrusive Ultor Corporation 50 years before the events of RFG. This man, Parker, helped liberate Mars with the help of the incoming Earth Defense Force. Over the years, though, dwindling resources on Earth have caused the EDF to turn slowly from liberators to new oppressors, raiding homes, executing miners they feel are defying the rule of law and generally just running around acting like dicks. The time has come for the Red Faction resistance to once again take back Mars.
Alec Mason is a mining engineer looking to get something of a fresh start. He hooks up with his brother, Dan, and quickly tries to get acclimated to a much harsher, seedier version of Mars than the one painted by the broadcasts back on Earth. When Dan is killed by the EDF for supposedly being a terrorist, Alec returns to his new home only to face the threat of execution for collaborating with a Red Faction member. Just as he's about to be shoot, the actual Red Faction storms in, informs Alec that Dan was a major player in the resistance and explains that the EDF already sees him as a member of that resistance, so he's now a part of things, willingly or no.
The Red Faction's activities are fairly organized, but they lack a figurehead. As Alec helps to free the individual zones of Mars' terraformed surface, eventually culminating in taking the fight to the EDF itself to push them off the planet. Along the way, he re-discovers Ultor's experiments into nanotechnology and rather early on is granted access to a weapon that literally breaks anything it hits down at the molecular level. This tech, using the Nano Forge he discovers in easily the coolest mission in the game (a major throwback to the first Red Faction complete with literal echoes from the past in the form of dialogue from the characters in that game) out in the Badlands, an older part of Mars populated by the feral Marauders, becomes central to the rest of the story.
