If you haven’t noticed yet, I’m enamored with open-world games on the console. Even without the online option, I’ve always been hooked since the day I laid my hands on GTA III. As such, most any game of that bent gets my first-hand treatment (e.g. inFamous, Godfather) - Red Faction Guerilla is no different.
Mars is the location of choice for the game, where you play as Alec Mason, a man on the path of revenge, trying to find closure for his brother’s death. You join the local resistance movement, Red Faction, as you follow in your brother’s footsteps in the fight against the corrupt and oppressive Earth Defense Force (EDF).
As you probably already expect from that premise, much of the game will revolve around destruction – anything that has do with the EDF gets treated to your explosive wrath. Boosting the Red Faction’s morale and diminishing the EDF’s control is your main gauges for progress, with smashing the latter’s properties and infrastructures proving a huge way of achieving it.
In the game, you play in a variety of missions (often on a vehicle) across six zones, as you work to put each one under Red Faction control by winning the support of the local population. Apparently, in Mars, the more stuff you destroy, the more the general public will cheer.
Gunplay in the game is pretty bad, which is why the focus is on annihilation of entire structures. Not that it isn’t fun – on the contrary, the game brings a jaw-dropping experience to the act of smashing everything to bits that will make you smile ever so slyly. If you can look past the lack of precision and tactical variety, you’ll get to enjoy the thrill of massive demolitions like never before.
Overall, Red Faction Guerilla is a good game, replete with a robust mission structure and entertaining gameplay. If anything, it’s the lack of charm of the open world that will get to you. The best do-what-you-please titles always had that engaging environment going for them that is sadly absent in this game. Of course, you can always ignore the Martian landscape and just focus on being a one-man-wrecking-machine. Set in a game, that’s always fun.
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