Red Faction: Guerilla

As the walls that once housed the fuel containers of a small, EDF-controlled fuel depot fall and trigger a chain reaction of viscerally beautiful explosions before me, a solitary thought dominates my mind: I did this, and I did it alone. No scripting help from the game engine, no computer-controlled character holding my hand and telling me where to place charges and when to run, and no loss of control in the form of a cut-scene - and it is in this independence that Red Faction: Guerilla finds its apex.

Although certain missions are required to advance the plot of the game - and therefore the weapons, items and areas that are available to you - Red Faction: Guerilla usually leaves the player alone to make their own decisions. Each district, which must eventually be liberated from the EDF, the militant arm of the apparent police state of Mars, has a series of voluntary missions that may be completed in any order. Or not, really - it’s up to you, although some combination of them must be completed. Thankfully, there is such variety both in the mission types and in their delivery that they remain fresh and new with each undertaking.

But those details end up as irrelevancies as, even though some of them forward the engaging plot, they’re really just encouragements for you to go blow the hell out of something - and Guerilla makes this activity incredibly entertaining. Simple destructions, like swinging away at the foundation of a solar power array that stands a hundred feet tall, often yield unexpected results. Not the sort of unexpected where the rapidly-falling tower crushes you, no, although that occasionally happens - but the sort of unexpected that means that collapsed array falls into something explodey, which explodes, which then makes further things explode, killing a bunch of once-living things and showering the screen in glorious, beautifully-rendered carnage. It’s all really very gratuitous, but somehow it never quite gets silly - the graphical feedback and design ensure that, while things exploding are bright and vibrant, they always look just like you might imagine them to.

And really, much of the game seems to have been designed around getting you to do this sort of thing. Missions often tally the total amount of monetary damage you’ve caused, and the entirety of the second district in the game revolves around dismantling the money-making apparatus of the EDF on Mars. Of course, to accomplish this, you are required - well, asked by the game, really - to go out and kill buildings with hammers and explosives while inflicting similar things to the soldiers of the EDF.

That I mention the killing of men secondary to structures is no accident; not only does the game generally only rarely require you to actually kill soldiers, it doesn’t really facilitate their slaying terribly well. That’s not to say that Guerilla is bad as a shootey-game, but rather to say that it’s average. The cover mechanics are straightforward and simple, ‘F’ is depressed to zoom in a bit and center your view, and the left mouse button does the shooting. Enemies find cover, lob grenades, and appear to possess an intelligence that’s almost human - but none of it is quite convincing. Once I pieced together how the enemy AI acquires and assigns targets, I found it pretty easy to avoid too much incoming damage by simply running the hell away.

Fleeing works well because of the way health regeneration works: don’t get hit for ten seconds, and your life meter rapidly refills. When combined with the sprint key and a mad dash for relative cover, Alec becomes almost unkillable - which is quite possible the strangest thing about the game. This is because Alec Mason, the protagonist, and the Red Faction that he works for, are essentially an outlaw labor union fighting with sticks and hammers and guns for the freedom to live their own lives. During the first five minutes of exposition, we learn that the EDF is better-armed, better-trained, and more well-prepared for military dominance on a planetary scale. We learn that the only way to defeat them is to strike quick, bloody them, and then fade into the outlying deserts. It makes logical sense, and it works.

Only, it doesn’t because you don’t have to do that ‘running away’ part. At least, you don’t need to keep running once your health bar fills up sufficiently. Sometimes, when completely and hopelessly overwhelmed, unlimited flight is the only viable option. But usually, you can kill all of the enemy soldiers. This is because, inexplicably, Alec is bigger, stronger, faster and more accurate than the EDF is. Having a badass protagonist is all well and good (who wants to play a weakling, anyway?), but it runs contrary to every bit of narrative the game throws at you.

Incidentally, you never need to run further than the nearest safe house - Red Faction camps - to ditch any pursuers. Even though these camps have about a dozen freedom fighters/terrorists at them, the EDF simply will not pursue you into them, which makes for a rather jarring experience when three times that many were in hot pursuit. These weird blips happen often, and have the nasty habit of utterly annihilating any sense of immersion that had been previously established. For example, one mission sends Alec to a desolate valley, devoid of all life and containing only a few construction supplies. After beginning the mission, a small Mechwarrior-like suit spawns. Upon entering it, hordes of EDF soliders attack, both on foot and in vehicle, and you are informed that you must kill 60 of them. Alright, no problem - a solid amount of good-fun bloodshed. Once the 60 are slain, however, the remaining EDF - which for me was easily two dozen - all disappear. Although I was relieved that I was going to survive, I was disappointed - didn’t I earn a glorious, rusted-iron-Mechwarrior victory or a painful, humiliating loss? Isn’t that the commitment that I signed up for? Quests like this - that terminate all evidence of their being upon completion - take the responsibility of survival away from both the player and the narrative, and I found that I greatly resented it Guerilla for it.

That’s the rub of Red Faction: Guerilla: really genuinely awesome physics modeling and world-breaking that gives the player total control over his environment, juxtaposed over a narrative engine that repeatedly removes this control and independence away from the player. An interesting, Marxist-fueled paranoid sci-fi thriller with hints of the film Total Recall that repeatedly tells the player how weak he is compared to the EDF and how heroic he is for overcoming them, juxtaposed over an engine that creates a player avatar vastly more powerful than any of the foes he encounters - even though, by trade, he is a mere miner. A beautiful, fully-realized world into which great care has clearly gone into the engineering of, placed overtop of painfully generic looking enemy soldiers that behave in sadly generic ways. This, I suppose, is simply the nature of life on Mars.

Scoring:
Visual Representation: 1.6/2.0
Explosions are vibrant and intense and complement the overall, red-grey aesthetic of the game in a highly complementary fashion. The overall design sense of the game is solid all-around, whether it come in the form of the design of the protagonist, his animations, or the interface game information is presented through. However, the health bar is small and located at the top of the screen, independent from the rest of the interface, making quick reading access difficult. Further, enemy design tends on the generic side; the EDF troopers look like every other fascist solider you’ve ever seen.

Gameplay and Level of Immersion:
1.5/2.0
The integration of independence and player choice provides for an intuitive and engaging experience; the sledgehammer feels heavy and brutal when killing either buildings or people, and avatar movement feels natural and flows well. However, narrative difficulties - like the EDF ceasing in pursuit and the badass-level of Alec Mason - shatter the illusion on occasion.

Mechanics and Technical Considerations:
1.7/2.0
This is where the game shines with the intensity of a thousand exploding nitrogen tanks; buildings collapse onto each other realistically, player-placed traps detonate how it seems like they should, and the sound effects are powerful and persuasive. The paper doll death-effect is a little overdone, and gravity seems to be slightly off. The vehicle sections were often difficult to control and aim and, since they were required, were more bothersome than anything else.

Quality of Narrative:
1.4/2.0
The Marxist/Maoist backdrop provides a compelling reason to dismantle the corporate structure of Mars, giving Alec Mason good reason to be an angry badass with a sledgehammer. However, his motivations for joining up with Red Faction and his relative strength compared to his enemies alienate this from typical Marxist/Maoist dialogues and, given the importance of these dialogues that the game places on itself, it tends to fail in this. Close, but not quite.

Connectivity:x/2.0
As I played a, well, non-online version, I am unable to effectively speak on this. However, multiple leaderboards and deathmatch/team fighting scenarios seem available through Windows Live.

Total: 6.2+x / 10