49. Red
Faction: Guerrilla
Developer:
Volition
Publisher:
THQ
Year: 2009
Format: Xbox
360, PC, PlayStation 3
Most of the
games on this list are things of elegance.
They demonstrate superior design, rabid originality, refinement and
class. Red Faction: Guerrilla is not one of these games. Red
Faction: Guerrilla wants shit to blow the fuck up.
Guerrilla
is the third in the Red Faction
series. The first two were first-person
shooters on the PlayStation 2, PC and Xbox.
I haven’t played them. I’m not
convinced that anyone’s played them. The
cornerstone (pun kind of intended) to the Red
Faction series is destruction. The
first two games were on systems that couldn’t handle what the developers
wanted. But come the Xbox 360 and
PlayStation 3, the tech was there for stuff to go boom.
Guerrilla
breaks from its predecessors by swapping into a third-person, open-world
format. (One of the admirable things
about the series is Volition’s willingness to completely change the game style
– the fourth game, Armageddon,
switched things up again to a linear shooter a la Gears of War and company.
And there was also a spinoff between games 3 and 4 that was entirely
vehicle-based, although apparently that was a bit pants.) The plot, such as it is, sees you as builder
Alec Mason (DO YOU SEE WHAT THEY DID THERE DO YOU) drawn into an attempt to
free Mars from the military chokehold of Earth forces and give the planet a
fresh start. You do this by breaking
things.
Guerrilla
is entirely a showcase for GeoMod 2.0 – an engine that allows unrivalled levels
of physics-based destruction. Every
building in the game can be destroyed, and it’s all carried out the way you
would in real life. Walls shatter before
steel beams buckle. You can take out a
building in one go with a well-aimed sledgehammer swipe at a load-bearing
area. Use an explosive and bits of
wreckage fly through the air and smash through other buildings. No piece of cover is entirely safe, as it too
could be destroyed.
It’s astonishing. Allegedly, Volition had to hire some real
proper architects as the engine was so true-to-life that some of the more
outlandish sci-fi structures they’d come up with wouldn’t take their own weight
and would collapse as soon as they were coded into the game. And it makes the primary act of the game –
its core, its USP, its very raison d’être
– exactly as enjoyable the five hundredth time as it is the first. Smashing stuff up simply never gets old. And the toolset you get for smashing up said
stuff is highly pleasing. Mason’s never
without his trusty sledgehammer, and the limpet mines you get right from the
start – chuck ‘em on to something, detonate ‘em when you feel like it – are so
pleasing they’re unlikely to ever get left out of your inventory. (Extra sadist points – stick a mine to an
enemy soldier and cackle as they run around in a panic.) Going up through typical weapons through to
oddities like the electricity-shooting arc welder, sawblade-spitting grinder or
the enforcer, with its homing bullets, is great fun.
And great fun is basically what this game is
about. It’s not deep and meaningful, and
it’s not trying to be deep and meaningful.
It just wants to entertain you.
When it gets it right, it’s like playing a cheerfully dumb action movie
from the ‘80s or ‘90s – probably starring Stallone or Schwarzenegger – and is
exactly as enjoyable as you’d hope. (You
even get a jetpack near the end. And
occasionally you get to run around in a big mech suit smashing things just by
waving its arms about.) Admittedly, it
doesn’t always get it right: some missions are annoying, the last one in
particular, and quite a lot of the sidequests are a bit rubbish. But the good bits are so good that it doesn’t
really matter. Plus, it’s an
American-made game from 2009 where you play as a heroic terrorist with distinct
Communist undertones. How likely is
that?
MAGIC
MOMENT: The mission that ends the second chapter, where you have to evacuate a
town before the troops arrive, is breathlessly exciting.
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