Gameplay Impressions
What do we like?Many developers have boasted about the destruction you can cause in their games, but none have done it with as much flair as Volition and its superb physics-based system. You can toss sticky mines onto buildings, structures and vehicles and they’ll literally crumble, shatter, disintegrate as they're torn apart by the blast – it's as realistic to watch as you can possibly imagine. The explosions also impact on the environment, so a communication tower may topple over and land on a road causing a vehicle collision, or a fragment of brick may propel from a explosion and strike an enemy who is standing a little too close to the explosion. It’s really clever stuff and it looks fantastic.
It isn’t just a case of blowing up stuff either. You’ll often need to think quickly about the best way to destroy an EDF buildings because enemies will swarm on your from all directions. This means that you need to carefully choose where to place mines, or where to shoot your rocket launcher. Buildings and structures are affected by where you hit them. Blow up one of the three support girders of a tower and the structure will begin to lose balance. Place mines on all four girders and it will come crashing down. The same goes for buildings. You need to assess its weak spots and then place your mines wisely to ensure a quick demolition.
The effects are just as good if you’re using your rocket-launcher, dis-integrator, or sledgehammer to smash down supporting walls or pummeling rocks for their precious ore. Everything crumbles and fragments as realistically as we’ve seen in any game before. The destruction-based gameplay is a real driving force throughout the game and the fact that you can use it tactically to blow up bridges to take out enemy convoys, or send a building crashing down on EDF soldiers, keeps the gameplay feeling fresh. You're always rewarded for your destruction during the game by being given scrap to spend on upgrades, or points that improve the Red Faction’s morale. This motivates you even more (not that you'll need motivating) to keep on blowing up and demolishing any EDF structures.
Aside of the story mode, Red Faction Guerrilla’s multiplayer component offers an entertaining and diverse selection of game modes, though you can definitely tell it was designed for console rather than PC due to the restrictions placed on player numbers. There are the standard modes, such as Death Match, Capture The Flag and Siege, but there are also other modes that allow you to get the most of the destructive gameplay, including 'Damage Control,' where you have to destroy enemy emplacements and then rebuild them as your own; and Demolition, which is similar to Warhawk’s Hero mode.
What don't we like?
Though the control and targeting systems works very smoothly, changing weapons feels a little clumsy. Red Faction Guerrilla relies on you having to hold the trigger and press a face button to navigate between the four weapon slots. It's not a big issue, but we often found ourselves fumbling around trying to select the actual weapon that we wanted to use. Luckily though, the A.I. isn't always that bright. EDF soldiers don't hide behind cover or intelligently respond to your gun-fire by moving out the way and taking up a new position. They tend to spot you and keep on attacking and chasing you head on, even if you're standing there with a rocket launcher in your hand. You're often overwhelmed by enemies so there's still a lot of skill needed to get yourself out of situation. Still, A.I. could respond better to situations.
There's not much of a story to speak off either. The opportunity was missed to develop characters and give the gameplay some real purpose. We'd say that this is more a preference though than a negative.
Final Thoughts
Red Faction Guerrilla was one of our favourite games of 2009 on console and aside from a few stuttering frame-rate issues on our 9800GT, the transition to PC has been successful. The destruction-based gameplay is not only fun to play, but sending buildings crashing to the ground, or vehicles high into the air, is great fun to watch. While not quite the complete package, Red Faction Guerrilla offers hours upon hours, both in its single player mode and multiplayer component, of riveting and explosive action. We do prefer the console version, but the transition to PC is certainly warranted and well worth a play through if you're not a console gamer.
Final Score : 8.5/10
