Important warning: the following wall of text will definitely contain hyperbole and strong subjective opinions. If you are of a suggestible nature, please continue reading.

Before we get started, I want to ask all the 360 and PS3 owners to go to their respective Marketplaces and PSNs and set the Red Faction: Guerrilla demo downloading. This may be a lengthy essay about why I feel people should play this and be excited for the full game, but I feel the demo really does enough to sell itself; the real problem being encouraging people to try it first. Admittedly, I felt a lack of interest at yet another third-person shooter heading to the shelves, even after playing (and quickly dying in) the demo once; I nearly dismissed the game there and then. Guerrilla isn’t immediately the most friendly game to enter, but this is down to it hiding new ideas beneath a familiar exterior. Where I was expecting something typical and generic, and attempting to play it like so, I actually discovered a game that is taking an approach that better highlights its strengths, and the originality these bring. Really, all I ask is that you give it a fair try.

Press Button, Receive Explosion

For years now, in various forms, people have been blowing things up in games. Barrels, enemies, vehicles and buildings have all taken their turn in front of a grenade or rocket launcher, and all detonated with varying degrees of spectacle. Back in the days of Duke Nukem 3D you could hunt down destructible walls that revealed secret rooms, or demolish entire buildings and trigger earthquakes to progress through a level. It helped make the game feel more interesting and dynamic, as well as presenting some large-scale set-pieces to thrill the player. Moving forward, games such as Mercenaries, Hulk: Ultimate Destruction and Earth Defence Force all allowed the player to destroy entire buildings in a more free-form environment.
While exciting, DN3D’s demolitions were entirely scripted (appearing at the same point on each pass through a level, falling the same way every time). These newer games allowed the player more freedom with the carnage caused, to a point where any building can be reduced to rubble if hit with enough explosive force (varying by game. EDF’s buildings, for instance, take little more than a wayward frown to send an entire skyscraper crashing down behind a veil of smoke. Insert tasteless 9/11 joke here). Unfortunately, this still didn’t feel right.

It’s fun watching a building collapse, fun enough to spark a DVD craze of building demolitions a few years back, but when it still just equates to “press the button, watch the animation”, it lacks some of the satisfaction that comes with the whole kinetic event. I don’t just want a model-swap while a scripted animation is played so that That Building is removed and replaced with This Rubble behind a smoke curtain. It’s kind of fun at first but, as is the nature of things, you just want more. Games like F.E.A.R. or Black illustrate the kinetic sensation that comes from seeing chunks of plaster torn from the walls during a firefight. Seeing something like that on a larger scale, where explosives can actually damage or remove chunks of a wall? That’s more like it.

Where we’re going, we don’t need doors
Last year EA gave us Battlefield: Bad Company which promised to let you blow up ‘anything’, and despite my love for the game, its characters, and the way it presented combat, this was only half-delivered. You could indeed blow out walls, and it was rather fun to do so, allowing you to improvise in the midst of a battle (need an impromptu exit? Pull pin, throw!). But this perk was let down by the fact that buildings themselves were still indestructible; they acted as if constructed from removable panels over an adamantium frame, meaning you could only blow up so much before it refused to give any further. This isn’t to say it was a let-down; it worked perfectly fine as far as the engine and gameplay went, but still didn’t quite measure up to what I had hoped for.

Jumping back a few years, the original Red Faction was built around Volition’s GeoMod technology, which allowed players to re-shape the very ground they walked on. Not being a game I’ve played myself, this information comes from the fondly-recalled stories of those who did, but it effectively let you carve tunnels around the map at your leisure. At the time it was completely original and remains relatively unchallenged by more recent games. Letting players hew their own routes into enemy bases and the like was unique and earned RF a place in the hearts of a great many players. Since then, a few games have attempted variants on deformable terrain, including one which closely parallels Guerrilla. Fracture was released last year by LucasArts and ended up with a mediocre reception. It was a third-person shooter centred around the ability to re-shape the landscape using various weapons and equipment. A lot of time and effort was spent on this technology, and some of the implementation was indeed quite novel; a gun that can raise or lower the ground, or a tunnelling rocket launcher for instance (Jaws theme sold separately). The problem here was that it felt gimmicky. Suddenly having the ability to raise the ground meant that the landscape was littered with puzzles requiring just such a solution, for little other reason than ‘we could’. You could pull up a chunk of land to use as cover, only to watch it deflate like a cooling souflé when hit with bullets. You could also make a hasty trench to avoid being shot, or raise the land to conveniently solve a ‘broken bridge’ puzzle.

This resulted in the game feeling like little more than an average third-person shooter where you could fiddle with the ground a bit if you felt bored, or you were being called to solve a puzzle. The feature that should’ve been a core reason for playing felt like a tacked-on bullet-point to go on the back of the box. What Guerrilla delivers is something far more integral to the experience, where the act of demolishing a building moves away from being just a gimmick and becomes another part of your thought process.

Sledgehammers, Bombs, Walkers and Chases
The demo itself has a ten-minute time limit, runs through three stages of one mission, and most importantly, can be quite difficult the first couple of times you play it. It’s not “the hardest game ever” by any stretch, but my own experience seemed to mimic that of other players and was one that resulted in a number of deaths. Starting out on foot equipped with an assault rifle, explosive charges and a sledgehammer, instincts led me to use the rifle as my primary weapon, and seeing that I had rechargeable health meant that I felt quite safe in exchanging bullets with the unfriendly guards. This can very quickly lead to you being outnumbered, outgunned, and left face-down in the dust. It feels like a punishment for attempting to play this traditional way, but that’s only because it is encouraging you to have more fun with its unique design; the game seems to become considerably more manageable when you make use of your charges and hammer. The latter is capable of both demolishing walls and killing guards in a single hit, while the former is handy for setting traps and destroying both vehicles and buildings. Suddenly you find yourself having fun as you blow out a wall that an EDF trooper (the moustache-twirling bad guys, and of no relation to the aforementioned EDF) was hiding behind, sending him flying amidst a cloud of rubble. Place a charge on one of the many giant-and-obviously-explosive chemical tanks around the compound, stand back and wait for some unsuspecting victim to wander too close..
Not long after, you find yourself planning demolitions, looking for weak-spots to stick your charges, placing explosive barrels to further the blast, attempting to do as much as you can in a single hit. This is where the game begins to shine as each detonation gives an explosive shower of debris, and a building will stay standing until its structure can no longer support the weight. Compared to EDF or Mercenaries where each collapse is effectively canned and triggered by using X amount of force, this feels so much more involved and authentic.

After driving cars through buildings and realising that there’s a clock running with objectives to complete, you can smash your way into a hangar and steal a ‘walker’, moving to the second, brief stage of the demo. The temptation for a number of developers here might be to try to ‘balance’ this section by making the walker a flimsy piece of equipment, forcing the player to move quickly and worry about how much damage they are taking. Instead, this acts as the ultimate power-trip as bullets ping off the surface doing little or no harm. You can also smash, sweep or flip your arms up, causing all manner of trauma to whatever happens to be in your path, be it man, car or building. Yes if you dawdle too long you probably will eventually be destroyed, but it’s impossible to not look around for one more building to march through, or one more EDF-packed car to hurl across the landscape. I want to dwell on this more, but it really is as simple and as fun as that: you can march through buildings without a care in the world.

Once you’ve loaded the walker onto a nearby truck, the final section is a bit of on-rails shooting that has you riding on the back, firing rockets at pursuing EDF vehicles. I’ve played through a fair number of rail-shooting sections in games and they usually hover between ‘passable’ and ‘want to avoid next time through’. Call of Duty can present some more thrilling sections, but there always seems to be that scripted feeling, that you’re not really outwitting those in pursuit so much as staving off death and triggering certain scenes: specific vehicles may appear at the same point every time, and crash the same way when you manage to destroy them. What you find here is that, while you may follow the same route every time and vehicles tend to appear at the same points, the chase itself is every bit as free-form and explosive as the rest of the game has proven to be up to this point. A well-placed rocket can launch a car into the air and through nearby buildings, signposts, into other vehicles or hurtling at your own. Chemical tanks explode, cars swerve and collide, EDF troops are flung across the landscape, and all the while I have a fixed grin on my face at the chaos left in my wake. It doesn’t hurt that the EDF’s driver pool is apparently staffed entirely with clones of Bo and Luke Duke.

Stop..
So what happens next? Well there’s a multiplayer demo coming out soon, followed by the full game in early June. This will obviously feature a whole bunch of new weapons (some of which look to be spectacular, as videos on gametrailers.com demonstrate) and missions, all set in an open world that you are free to explore. One other aspect that has me interested are the soon-to-be-announced cheats for the game. Not normally held up as a selling point, Volition seem to have a universally-applied emphasis on fun that has resulted in such cheats as the ‘super sledgehammer’, which is capable of knocking a hapless victim through a building… capable of knocking a hapless victim through a building. Another point of note, on April 1st a video went up explaining how some early shots from the game had leaked onto the internet, and had become the subject of some ridicule due to the sledgehammer looking a bit like an ostrich, and how the game should in fact feature just such an ‘ostrich hammer’. Everyone laughed, nice joke Volition, let’s see what zany stories everyone else is talking about.

A couple of days later, this was actually confirmed to be a true story. Pictures were leaked, the ostrich hammer was picked up as an idea, and will be an unlockable for the game’s multiplayer.

What I feel this shows is that the developers aren’t under any illusions about what people enjoy with Guerrilla. The story may be about oppressed workers and inciting a revolution on Mars, but everything about this game is geared towards putting the biggest grin on your face from the sheer mayhem you can cause. I’ve not played the full thing so I can’t comment as to its overall quality, but I do see a team of developers who know where the strengths of their game lie, and how to emphasize these to the player. Destroying things in games has always been fun, if often lacking in the physics modeling to make it truly feel as credible as it should. What I have found, just from playing this demo, is a game that compels me to go back every time and find new ways to pick apart the same buildings, new ways to play and interact with its environment. With that much ‘game’ contained within a 10-minute mission, I’m left counting down until June for the whole thing.

Now you might want to go check on your download’s progress. Don’t forget to give it a few tries to get the hang of things, and then maybe come back and post up some comments. Thanks for reading, and I hope you find something you enjoy.

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