Red Faction: Guerrilla

Reviewed by:
Gerasimos Manolatos

Price: $39.99–$59.99

Publisher: THQ

The Skinny: After his brother's murder at the hands of the controlling Earth Defense Force, ore miner Alec Mason assumes the leadership role of the insurgents, called the Red Faction, fighting for the liberation of Mars. Lead fellow revolutionaries through treacherous terrain, take down unrelenting enemies, and harness a mysterious otherworldly power to annihilate the enemy on the fully-destructible planet.

The Good: The story, while solid enough to hold your attention through to the end, takes a backseat to the amazing possibilities for destruction provided by the fully-breakable environment: Any house, military structure, and vehicle can be turned into Martian dust. And by "any," we really mean everything. You can spend hours and hours just going around and rendering the local population homeless, without adding even a tick to your game completion percentage. Things can get a bit repetitive, though: There are a handful of territories that are locked down by enemy forces and you must loosen their grip on each before you and your insurgent friends can take over each. These missions mostly consist of taking out high importance targets or retrieving vital information from enemy computers. There are a ton of weapons to help you out on your missions, and not all of them have to be bought from the local merchant who seems to want to plunge you into bankruptcy rather than free all of the planet's slaves. Knock off some enemies, steal their weapons, and return to a safehouse to permanently add them to your repertoire. The singleplayer missions, if you forgo attempting any of the side quests, should take around 8 to 10 hours to finish off.


The Bad: We're sure the online multiplayer becomes enjoyable at some point, but the hours we spent running around attempting to find something to shoot winded up being an exercise in video game suckage. While playing through the campaign will train you how the weapons work, there are additional powerup items in multiplayer, such as specialized backpacks, that adds a bit more time to the learning curve. If you can get past that speed bump, online play is highly customizable (both your character and the starting weapons) and, for those stat fanatics, chock full of leaderboards and other measures of your supreme dominance.

Other Modes: In additional to the eight to ten hour singleplayer campaign, you'll find six multiplayer modes: Anarchy (a.k.a. Deathmatch), Team Anarchy, Capture the Flag, Siege (destroy a specific enemy building), Damage Control (defend and hold a territory), and Demolition (destroy a metric ton of Martian architecture). There is an offline multiplayer mode called Wrecking Crew, where you pass the controller around with friends in the hope of accruing the most amount of property damage.

Buy, Rent, or Disembowel: Buy. Mercenaries 2 may have pushed the envelope in terms of destruction, but Red Faction: Guerrilla eats its lunch and the proceeds to crap it out, put it in a brown bag, light it on fire, and leave it on M2's doorstep.

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