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
It all comes together to create a vision of Mars that hasn't been this fleshed out since... I dunno, Total Recall, probably, but the little touches everywhere stack atop one another to make it all feel... real. Oh, while I'm on the subject of little touches, my hat is off to Volition for actually doing military chatter right. Not only are the EDF troops incredibly cocky (which makes caving their faces in and watching them ragdoll down the side of a mountain that much more satisfying), but they actually use the phrase "I say again" when re-iterating a point. Developers: please take not. This is correct; "Say again" is proper lingo, "I repeat" is essentially command shorthand for instructing artillery to fire again on the same position. Clearly someone on staff served or had someone in their families in the armed forces, and it's awesome that they finally got that right.
More little touches: Mason can sprint for an infinite distance. It may not be realistic, but it keeps everything nice and quick, and can be used to make a hasty retreat when the heat piles on. The weapons setup is clever, too; up to three side weapons can be slotted to the Square, Triangle and Circle Buttons (X is always reserved for the hammer, which is good because I used it more than anything else). By pulling and holding the R2 button and pressing that face button, the weapons can be toggled, but just tapping it will swap between the last two used weapons. It's extremely helpful when taking down a building or toward the end of the game where long- and short-range targets have to be juggled.
On the subject of weapons, they all feel fantastic, and there's a decent variety here too. Though most fit in the usual assault rife/shotgun/pistol/sniper rifle setups, the ability throw out mines and trigger them even when another weapon is equipped, plus some less orthodox weapons like the lightning gun that can fry guys while they're still in their car (allowing you to steal EDF vehicles with minimal fuss or damage to the ride itself), means there's a lot of strategy. The destructive power of those weapons increases as the game goes on, so eventually you'll be able to level a building with just a couple shots, but it's still cool to effectively spend the whole game working out different strategies for taking down objectives.
Despite all that destruction, Red Faction: Guerrilla manages to run at an astonishingly smooth framerate. It's nearly always locked around 30 frames a second (though when you pull the menus up or during mission completion screens, it spikes to what looks like about 60 -- even in the background of the game where you can rotate the camera). Sure, there's a little draw-in off in the distance, but the framerate is so good it honestly doesn't matter too much. Some of the rock textures, however, are terrible up close -- to the point where they're little more than splotchy messes of huge, smeared pixels. The level of detail scaling in wide-open areas like the Badlands is a little striking. It kind of feels like watching a Bryce 3D rendering (for those that remember it); things are super-simple far-off, get rendered in with more detail and then eventually look really quite pretty (if a little artificial) up close.
Those up-close details extend to other things that are closer to Mason when he's driving around. Vegetation, especially, is drawn in rather close. This mostly shows up in the Oasis district, where terraforming has added plants, but it's a little annoying. One thing that struck me about the vehicles (and this definitely isn't a slight) is that Volition apparently employed the same futurist (in-house or otherwise) as the folks making the movie AI; the vehicle designs have a very... Syd Mead-ish quality to them? It definitely fits with the utilitarian, angular feel of everything else on Mars, though.
