Anyone trying to figure out today’s modern terrorist will probably use words like “religious extremism,” “sociopath,” and the like. Were such a person to play “Red Faction: Guerrilla,” a new third person shooter in the previously unremarkable “Red Faction” series, they might see that a plausible terrorist motivation might just be that blowing up buildings is really fun.
“Guerrilla’s” big hook is that every building in the game is destructible, and not just destructible in the “Mercenaries” sense of the term, where you shoot at a building with a big rocket launcher, a few craters appear, and eventually the thing collapses in a cloud of dust (just like in real life… right?). In “Guerrilla,” when you’re throwing bombs at a structure or taking it down piece by piece with a hilariously overpowered sledgehammer, you can’t help but marvel at the exquisite detail. Everything seems to be architecturally accurate, as buildings won’t collapse unless you’ve thoroughly destroyed every inch of support holding it up or just blown the whole thing up from top to bottom.
Quick disclaimer: neither this writer nor “Guerrilla” support real life terrorism in any form. Despite the fact that you play a guerrilla insurgent, the game keeps as much distance as possible between the world’s current terrorist insurgents by putting the game on Mars in the future (although it wouldn’t take much to imagine the boring, brown, dusty badlands of Mars are really the shadier regions of the Middle East) and making the oppressive government as evil as the Third Reich.
In any case, the Red Faction rebels are far cooler and manlier than any of today’s real terrorists; rather than sneaking past military security and killing themselves to blow up hundreds of innocent civilians, the game’s protagonists practically run headfirst into enemy fire, tossing bombs to bring down menacing military structures (throwing the “Guerrilla” subtitle out the window in the process).
About half of “Guerrilla” embraces the destruction; the game is open world, meaning you drive space vehicles around massive levels doing various short missions, evoking the same gleeful feelings of freewheeling destruction as “Grand Theft Auto,” except instead of shooting NYC cops you get to shoot space-Nazis. As you progress through the game, the buildings get larger and more complex, making gameplay almost puzzle-like as you try to figure out how to bring down a structure without getting killed by a battalion of soldiers.
But the shooter part of “Guerrilla” unfortunately doesn’t fully embrace the open world gameplay. The gunplay gets pretty repetitive early on, when the only weapon worth using is the three-clip-max assault rifle, but gets more interesting as the sandbox opens up with more interesting weapons and heavy vehicles. There are lots of cookie cutter missions that involve rescuing hostages, chasing after enemy vehicles, or just destroying large buildings (the most cathartic by far), and they’re all good enough to be worth searching out, but the story missions that feature much more interesting design provide for some of “Guerrilla’s” best moments.
The story itself isn’t very interesting (you could probably guess what happens through most of it), but still helps to immerse the player in the world of Mars as all the NPC’s (of which there are many) will protest against the oppressive EDF, wish you luck on your missions, and generally keep you interested in their plight and motivated to free them. Universally good voice acting helps quite a bit to that end.
“Guerrilla” is a very good game, but can’t quite make the jump to a must-have because it doesn’t completely nail the core 30-seconds-of-fun required of any shooter. While the gunplay is solid, the enemies are too repetitive and uninteresting to make every minute of the very long campaign to free Mars as fun as it could’ve been.
