The Bad
- Vast playing field
- You can destroy anything
- The multiplayer
- Above average single-player length
- The voice acting
- Predictable story, with uninteresting characters
- Becomes repetitive the end
- Huge, but empty world
Review
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When it was released in 2001, Red Faction stood out from the FPS crowd thanks to its impressive terrain deforming possibilities. Basically, you could blow anything up following the motto “If there’s no door, we’ll just make one”. And although in 2003 a sequel was released (I’m talking about the PC versions here), it took more than six years for the franchise to jump on next-gen console, time during which Volition studios developed a new engine, originally named Geo-Mod 2. Also, the perspective shifted from first to third person, “to better admire the destruction”, as the producers themselves stated.
Welcome to Hell
The action once again takes place on Mars, which has been somewhat terraformed in order to sustain life. The year is 2125 and your old Earth Defense Force (EDF) allies have turned into the bad guys. In short, due to the continually lacking economy of Earth, Mars has turned into a colony where people are forced to work under the strict supervision of EDF soldiers, once hailed as saviors.
The player will take the role of Alec Mason, an engineer specialized in everything mining related, who arrives on Mars to find his brother and start a new life. Instead, he discovers that the brother is part of the Red Faction and gets a personal view of the EDF methods, as his sibling is killed right in front of him. In turn, Alec is then barely saved by Red Faction members, who ask him to join the good fight. Of course, more out of revenge than anything else, he goes along with it and starts the revolution to liberate Mars from EDF control.
Unfortunately, during the single-player Mason will meet few characters who are very poorly outlined. Once you meet them, the radio will be the only way to communicate with said characters and until the end of the game you’ll only see them twice. Which doesn’t do much for the emotional attachment and gives you a very strong reason to ignore the story altogether, especially since it’s not very interesting to begin with.
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Guerrilla warfare
The Red Planet is divided into six sector which must be liberated one by one in order to drive out the EDF forces. This means that you have to completely lower the EDF control over each sector, an objective that can be attained through several means.
Each sector has a couple of secondary missions for the Red Faction, which if completed will lower the EDF control over the planet. There are approximately ten mission types available, which will get more challenging as you progress through the game. These vary from rescuing hostages to destroying EDF property to raids against strategic objectives or defending against EDF attacks. And although they’re quite varied and challenging, after a while the side-missions will become tedious and boring.
To go around this, another way to lower the EDF control is the destruction of important buildings. There are two types: medium importance (they’re pretty common) and high importance (only two or three per sector). As you would expect, the high importance structured are well defended by soldiers armed to the teeth, but once you bring them down, the EDF will lose much of its control in that area.
The sector have between two and five missions which must be completed in order to advance. These are offered one at a time, depending on the EDF control level, and when the latter reaches zero, there’s a final mission at hand in order to liberate the sector and move on to the next one. Rinse and repeat five times and the game’s done.
Besides lowering the EDF level of control, completing secondary missions for the Red Faction also boosts the morale of the civilians in your sector. A high morale means that occasionally you will have allies that will fight alongside you, but they have a habit of dying quickly and they have to be pretty numerous to actually make a difference. The sad part is that this only happens right before you liberate a sector, and once you move to the next one, the morale will be reset.
Fortunately, the single-player length is above average and it will be almost impossible to finish the campaign in under 10 hours. However, the game difficulty also kicks in, which sometimes has the tendency to go overboard. The final mission of the game for instance will raise plenty of problems even on the lowest difficulty setting.
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Red Planet
Nevertheless, the main selling point is that you can blow up any structure that you come across, which in turn will give you Salvage, the local currency. During the campaign you’ll also discover mini-games which will require you to level a building in a certain amount of time using a specific weapon. Barring the fact that they can be quite the challenge, these missions will also help you better understand how to optimally destroy a building, as there are architectural elements to take into account. So it’s better to destroy the support structure of an outpost rather than tearing it apart brick by brick. There are some weird moments however, in which a tower will remain standing on what can only be described as an apparently insignificant metal rod.
Red Faction: Guerrilla also has a cover system, which funnily enough is rendered almost useless by the Geo-Mod engine, as all the obstacles in the game can easily be blown to bits. Also, the enemies are smart enough to destroy your cover, so you won’t be able to stay in one place for too long. Speaking of enemies , I found their behavior to be quite realistic, as once I disappeared from their field of view, they would start looking for me in the last know location, without having a sixth sense to magically tell them where I was.
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