It had some fun hooks with the explosives in creatively leveling buildings, but there wasn't much of a game behind it. Guerilla promised to make it better by making it open world. It was hyped for it's destruction and instead it was bland, low budget, corridor shooter where you could smash through some walls.
#Red faction guerrilla series#
The entire Red Faction series always felt overhyped and underbaked even back in 2001. I'm surprised by the amount of people recently saying how much they loved this game. There’s a little too much barren space where there could have been a greater spread of activities.
![red faction guerrilla red faction guerrilla](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/redfaction/images/b/b6/Images_(6).jpg)
As you open up more areas, there’s a little more variance introduced in terms of new vehicles and building designs, but a few more structures and a slight change to the overall hue isn’t enough to make it seem any less repetitive. Yes, this is Mars, but a little more creativity wouldn’t have gone amiss. It's reminiscent of the original Borderlands, with a wash of browns and rusty reds making every hill and canyon look painfully similar wherever you roam. In terms of environment design, Red Faction Guerrilla is a little disappointing, though.
![red faction guerrilla red faction guerrilla](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/uOIplSgXMT4/maxresdefault.jpg)
The fun is finding where a building’s weakness lies and how best to disintegrate it. Watching masonry crumble away as internal steel structures warp and break never stops being a riot, even when you’re hours and hours into the campaign. You might need to use remote charges to topple a tower, or blow apart a facility from a distance with a rocket launcher. The Destruction Master side-missions are still the best, which task you with destroying one or more structures in a time limit with a certain weapon. The mission structure might change, but Red Faction Guerrilla never forgets what its good at: glorious demolition. You’ll ride shotgun in a trike and destroy barracks and checkpoints you’ll help overrun an enemy base by either killing its enemy occupants or bringing the whole place crashing own you’ll rescue hostages while shattering walls to make an impromptu exit.
#Red faction guerrilla how to#
Original developer Volition was already learning how to create open-worlds with fun activities – it would release Saints Row: The Third two years later and perfect its own formula for this – and while parts of Mars too often fill barren and underutilised, almost every activity you do find involves blowing things to smithereens. You’re constantly told you’re doing all this for martian rights, but really you just want to see that tower come crashing down in real-time while ragdolling some poor goon across the map with your sledgehammer. You know he’s a PS3/X360 era protagonist because a) he has an instantly forgettable name ( “Give it up for, Alec Mason!”) and b) he’s voiced by Troy Baker.
![red faction guerrilla red faction guerrilla](https://cdn.gamer-network.net/2019/articles/2019-07-04-13-42/digitalfoundry-2019-red-faction-guerrilla-switch-re-mars-tered-analysis-1562244174768.jpg)
Yes, there’s a story in here somewhere, one involving a nefarious military authority, a rebellion of Martian freedom fighters (the titular ‘Red Faction’) and a tale of bland vengeance to get our cookie cutter hero motivated to participate. So it’s with that same sense of lavish agency that Red Faction: Guerrilla Re-Mars-tered finally lands on Switch. All you’d really need is a sledgehammer, some throwable explosives and penchant for all-out chaos. Does anyone remember Fracture? Inversion? The Saboteur? Well, Red Faction Guerrilla quickly descended into this miasma at the time, which is a shame, because its unscripted destruction elevates every single mission and side-activity since every building or structure could be blown or smashed to bits. Without its creative wrecking powers, Red Faction Guerrilla is just another one of those generic third-person, open-world shooters that seemed to clog up the previous generation. Who needed doors when you could just demolish things instead? We’ve seen a few series attempt to copy the power of Volition’s GeoMod tech – Just Cause and Battlefield both offer impressive destruction in their own right – but very few games have ever really reached the unscripted level alteration of 2009’s Red Faction Guerrilla. Corridor shooters could often be stifling and claustrophobic affairs, but Red Faction just pointed a grenade launcher at the walls and blew them apart. Sure, it wasn’t the best first-person shooter we’d ever played, but its destruction physics really were something else. When the original Red Faction dropped in 2001, it was kind of a big deal.