Developers have long lured us with talk of fully destructible environments for quite some time now, and Battlefield: Bad Company was one of the first titles to actually have a destructible feel to it. Unfortunately, the game wasn’t fully destructive. Sure, you could blow a chunk through the wall of a building, and the wall would break to some extent. But no matter how hard that building was battered, whether it was by missile fire or a vehicle driving through it, the structure would still stand perfectly straight. Thankfully, Red Faction: Guerrilla does away with that nonsense.
Red Faction: Guerrilla is set in the year 2120, with the Earth Defense Force as the main enemy. You play as Alec Mason, a mining engineer who has come to Mars to reunite with his brother, Dan. Your character comes equipped with a variety of weapons, some of which you stumble upon later on in the campaign. Mason begins the game with a sledge hammer weapon. In Red Faction: Guerrilla, you’ll be able to equip three weapons at once. These weapons can range from explosives, to guns capable of tearing down buildings. The game has a wide variety of weapons to choose from, and the ability to have three at once helps out a lot.
Volition promised their fans fully destructible environments and, incredibly, they achieved it. The title has vast numbers of buildings to destroy, cars to blow up, and bridges to collapse. The best part is that it’s a different experience every time. The first moment I watched as a building collapsed before my eyes, I was stunned. Never before have I seen that pulled off in a game so perfectly. Taking down buildings is a blast, and you can destroy them any way you want. The possibilities are endless.
The controls in Red Faction: Guerrilla are easy to pick up, with R1 used to fire your weapon, and X as your jump button. Switching your weapons out is as simple as holding R2 and making your selection with the D-pad. Driving is also a cinch, with R2 to accelerate, and L2 to brake or back up. The enemies in the game are repetitive at first, as you’ll run into the same enemy in all the territories on Mars. During the course of the game, however, the enemy variety gets kicked up a notch. Fortunately, the enemy characters are fun to take down, and despite the bad A.I. you probably won’t get bored with them during your playthrough.
