Red Faction: Guerrilla (PlayStation 3)

Of all the weapons you'll find in Red Faction: Guerrilla, the simple sledgehammer is one of the best. This powerful object has the ability to bring down entire buildings, giving you an almost tactile feeling of gleeful abandon as you watch your character leave nothing but rubble and havoc in his trail. The brutish, direct sledgehammer exemplifies what the excellent Red Faction: Guerrilla is all about. Destruction is this game's currency, and it puts its considerable wealth to good use. Mars is yours to annihilate, and while the main story is uninvolving and the action can get repetitive, you'll find plenty to like in the game's mayhem-filled single-player campaign and impressive multiplayer offerings.

Mayhem is built into Guerrilla's DNA, and its impressive physics engine realistically showcases destruction on a massive scale. The game ditches the deformable landscapes that were a staple of its predecessors, instead offering the ability to blow apart anything in the game. Any man-made object can be reduced to rubble, and every structure or vehicle--and every one of its composite parts--features its own unique physical properties. Everything from smokestacks to bridges appears to have been built with real-world engineering principles in mind, and you can see the various supports and reinforcements in their design. So to demolish a small building, you needn't take out all its walls--simply identify its support columns, take those out with charges, and watch the whole thing implode. All of this destruction is performed in real time, which means no structure collapses in the same way.

The realistic nature of this rampant destructibility is the standout feature of Guerrilla, and it will affect many of your gameplay decisions. Cover, for example, is at best a temporary haven for you and your enemies, since all walls can be demolished. Height is also of little concern--if an enemy sniper is perched on a building, you can easily destroy the floor underneath him. You can stop pursuers by blowing up a bridge as you pass it, or even level an entire building to kill all of the troops inside. It's hard not to get swept up in all the damage you can cause, and you'll find yourself wanting to lay waste to an object just to see how it crumbles simply because it's so much fun.

If it sounds like the game is frenetic and chaotic, that's because it can. Despite the fact that your character, Alec Mason, is a guerrilla--a member of the underground group Red Faction, which is trying to take out the all-powerful Earth Defense Force (EDF)--there's little scope for anything other than full volume action, even if you are trying to approach a mission with subtlety. Mason is initially an unwilling recruit to Red Faction, joining only after his brother is killed by EDF soldiers. What follows is a lengthy main storyline which is fairly cliched for the most part. Mason's motivation for revenge doesn't ring that strongly throughout the campaign, and there are very few twists and turns to keep the plot engaging.

Story, for the most part, takes a backseat to Mason's continuing mission to free Mars. The EDF have total control of the six sectors of the planet, oppressing its population of miners with a heavy security presence and upfront brutality. To free the planet, you'll have to do it sector by sector. Each will have its own level of EDF control that you'll have to lower while at the same time raising the population's morale. The game's eight different mission types will do one or the other, and in many cases they'll do both. Lowering EDF control opens up new story missions which will move forward Guerrilla's main narrative, while improving morale means more of the population will randomly jump in and support you when you get into a fight with the EDF. On the surface, the mission types are varied--for example, protect a settlement, join a group of rebels in storming an EDF stronghold, intercept an enemy shipment, destroy EDF property--but the game's aggressive AI means most missions will end up in large explosions and a hail of gunfire. You may want to take a more circumspect approach, such as finding an unguarded path into a group of structures that need to be taken down, but as soon as the first explosion hits, EDF troopers will swarm to your position to try to take you down with force. While this doesn't make the action one-dimensional, it does make it one note. Sure, you can blow stuff up in a variety of interesting and creative ways, but in the end, it's still the same thing--blowing stuff up.

It's to the game's credit (and to the credit of its remarkably robust physics engine) that despite repetitiveness, Guerrilla's destruction manages to be engaging and entertaining for the 15 or so hours it will take you to get through the single-player campaign. Even after you finish the game, you can go back into the world to complete any missions you may have skipped, as well as try your hand at the "insane" difficulty level you'll unlock after your first run through. The game is quite challenging even at lower difficulty levels, and you'll find yourself pushed to survive most large-scale fights at medium difficulty. Guerrilla has a cover function which will let you stick to walls, but it's not something you can rely on--you'll sometimes fail to stick to objects properly (particularly low bits of cover), and trying to pop out to shoot can cause you to leave cover completely.

Blowing a bridge up as you escape in a truck--just another mission in Red Faction: Guerrilla.

Thankfully, the rest of Red Faction: Guerrilla's controls are solid, particularly its shooting mechanic, which feels just right. You'll be able to equip only four weapons at a time, but you can quickly switch between them by holding down the right shoulder button. Most are typical weapon archetypes--there are pistols, machine guns, shotguns, rocket launchers, and sniper variants--but Guerrilla does feature some unique weapons, such as the killer disc-spewing grinder and the electricity pulsing arc welder. By far the most interesting is the nano rifle, a weapon which sends out a bolt of microscopic nanites that corrode anything they hit--and this includes people as well as buildings.

See pricing