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
If the visuals are solid, however, the audio is even better. Red Faction Guerrilla sports fantastic music. It's in turns ambient, driving, industrial, somber, ethereal, swelling, moving and with just enough techno-flair to make it sound futuristic without becoming too synthy. It's depressing while still somehow managing to sound like there are notes of hope. I know that probably comes off as sounding a little pretentious, but so much of the game's mood comes from the weird dichotomy of feeling oppressed while still getting these tinges that it could all be made better. I cared about saving Mars, and much of that investment came from the feelings that were stirred up by the music.
The sound effects are great too, of course. I made plenty of fuss about the sound of a building slowly giving up its fight with gravity, but everything from the sound of Mason's hammer connecting with buildings and flesh alike. Vehicles aren't exempted from things either; tires on the road crushing the earth underneath or skidding to a stop actually sound like they're piling up a mound of dirt. Even the hiss of hydraulics is nice.
Ah, but that's just the single-player portion. When you take things online, any weak spots the single-player might have quickly slip away. Everything provided by the multiplayer portions of the game piggyback off the best parts of the offline game -- most notably in the destruction. Though there's a sort of hot seat sandbox mode dubbed Wrecking Crew where you can set up a smallish environment, some weapons and then go to town on the whole mess, they're merely the tip of the multiplayer iceberg.
There are the usual bits of progressive unlocks and leveling up to be found, but the real treat in multiplayer comes in the form of backpacks that can be actively swapped out while in a level. These enable everything from punching up or down through a building (resulting in a one-hit kill if you can actually take someone out with the move) to charging through walls to being able to cloak (countered by a backpack that lets you see all enemies through walls) to being able to shake a building to the ground or send out a concussive blast to jetpacking or on-foot dashing. Not one of the backpacks is too powerful, and all of them are incredibly useful.
They add variety and experimentation to a game that's already filled with it, but better still they modify what would otherwise be a fairly horizontal shooter into something that takes into account elevation and destruction. Weapons like the singularity bomb, which creates a portal that sucks everything into it before exploding suddenly become traps for those stupid enough not to listen to the chime of it being planted as they run around a corner. That the game support both normal deathmatch play and collaborative attempts to destroy (and repair) structures only makes things more addictive. I'll almost certainly spend as much time online as I did in the single player, which means something in the order of a good four dozen hours of gameplay packed into the $60 sticker price.
There's no other way to say it, so I'll just lay it out here: Red Faction: Guerrilla is a must-have. That means you should stop reading this, head down to the store and pick it up now. Don't get it online, don't rent it, just rush out to the nearest place that sells games and get a copy. After about 10 minutes of online play or a half-hour off, you'll know exactly why waiting for the game to arrive will have been time wasted. And you do not want to waste time in experiencing what Volition has created here, trust me.
