Appetite for Destruction

I like it when games that aren't big-name blockbusters sneak onto the market with really innovative ideas and thoroughly enjoyable gameplay.  It turns out Red Faction: Guerrilla is just such a game.  As a fan of both Volition's other titles (Saint's Row comes to mind) and the first Red Faction title on the PS2, I was both excited and dubious of what the game promised.  A third person open world shooter rather than a FPS?  Claiming that every building in the game can be destroyed from the foundations up?  While the former left me on the fence, I was understandably suspicious of the latter claim, given the less than stellar track record of games that try to play the "destructable environment" card.  I'm looking at you, Fracture and Bad Company.

Despite my hesitance, I bought the game as part of an agreement with my brother in Colorado in which we would both play on Xbox Live more often.  To date, only Volition's previous game managed to hold our collective attention for more than a week, and I imagine we'll revisit it now that we're back to playing more than once a month.  I managed to get my copy before he did, and fired up the single player campaign to see what all the fuss was about.  As much as I hate to use an already overplayed joke, the experience is certainly a blast.

Bringing Down the House

Volition's claims aren't made lightly, they really aren't kidding when they say that any building can be leveled in a number of ways.  You can throw remote mines all over the place, hit it with a rocket launcher, crash through it with a vehicle, or just take your trusty sledgehammer and whack away at it like crazy.  Structures are entirely physics powered, so they'll crumple depending on how you dismantle them, and even collapse under strain if you knock out the supports and the weight brings it down for you.  In the single player game your demolition work gets you scrap metal to trade for weapon and armor upgrades, as well as contributing to your guerrilla war if you take out enemy owned structures.  In multiplayer, it's just fucking enjoyable.

Flying Solo

The single campaign is very much a product of Saint's Row experience, offering a massive open world composed of five distinct districts or zones, each with its own ambient flair.  Much like any game of the GTA-esque style, you're given the freedom to roam and cause havoc, play pickup side-missions of various types, or get right down to business with core story missions.  The mission variety ranges from simply levelling a structure or rescuing a couple of repressed miners to destroying whole convoys of enemy supply trucks.  Your minimap is marked with red targets of opportunity, which if destroyed will net you some scrap currency and increase your faction morale.  Marked on your main map are numerous key targets that are either medium or high importance, often involving considerable danger to attack.  These structures have an additional reward to them: they decrease the enemy's control over the territory.  Your ultimate goal is to drop the enemy's control and raise your faction morale, driving "the man" out of each zone slowly but surely.

The Main Attraction

While I did really enjoy the couple of hours I put into the single game, the real fun begins by jumping into multiplayer.  The game includes your standard modes: deathmatch, team deathmatch and CTF.  On top of those ho-hum modes you also get Demolition, Damage Control and Siege mode, each of which fully utilizes the excellent destruction engine to its fullest.  Damage Control (or DC for short) is most analogous to a control point map in Battlefield or TF2, except the control points are physics-enabled towers; you must destroy the enemy's tower and use the Reconstructor weapon to put up a tower of your own.  Siege mode is an objective-based game where you must destroy key structures in the enemy base, while defending and repairing your own.  The most novel of the three is Demolition, which pits one player as the Destroyer and consequently the only player capable of scoring for the team.  The Destroyer must use any weapon at his disposal to cause as much damage as possible, while teammates reconstruct buildings to fuel his frenzy of destruction.

The modes aren't the only unique twists to the multiplayer in RF:G however.  Players can utilize a number of backpack devices that are activated to unleash special abilities.  Packs span everything from passive abilities like x-ray vision and damage boost to jetpacks, cloaking fields, concussion blasts and the dreaded Rhino pack.  The two particularly fascinating packs are Rhino and Tremor, which let you plow through walls and shake buildings apart, respectively.  The Tremor pack is the bane of Demolition mode, and properly utilized can level a building and easily double your team's score in seconds.  Packs are spawned all over the maps and are hot-swappable at any time, letting you switch packs to counter different tactics on the fly.  For example if someone's stampeding around with the Rhino pack, you can grab a Concussion pack and knock him on his ass.  Then STOP.  HAMMER TIME.

Speaking of hammers, your ever-present melee fallback is the dreadfully powerful Sledgehammer.  This sucker is a one-hit kill beast of a hammer, and combined with Cloak, Fleetfoot or Rhino packs it makes one hell of a vicious close quarters weapon.  It might even be a little too powerful to be honest, but there's something to be said about the satisfaction of cracking heads with it.

The rest of the weapons run the gamut.  You've got your token pistol, assault rifle and both pump and auto shotguns.  You've got remote charges and proximity mines, plus the Singularity Bomb which is more or less a black hole mine.  On the quirky side, the improvised weapons of the Red Faction include an industrial Arc Welder that chains lightning between enemies, a weapon which fires high speed buzzsaw blades called the Grinder, and everyone's favorite Thermobaric Rocket Launcher.  It's like the BFG of RF:G.  Some of the guns find very limited usage and feel kind of tacked on, for a number of reasons; the Enforcer feels like a slower and less useful Assault Rifle, and the Nano Rifle doesn't hold enough ammo and is rarely spawned unless you're on the biggest maps.  Overall though, despite some of the weapons feeling underpowered and needing better sounds, they're extremely enjoyable to use.  Particularly the ones that go boom.

The multi isn't without its faults though.  For all the enjoyment found blowing shit up, the game's client interpolation and hit detection makes fast games downright frustrating.  You may unload 40 rounds with your assault rifle into someone from 10 feet away and never miss a shot, but they'll turn around and shoot you a dozen times and your health drops like a lead brick.  Though players using cheap tricks usually isn't the game's fault, I think in a couple of cases the game really facilitates certain tactics that irritate me.  For example the cloak pack doesn't de-cloak you until a second after you shoot, which is great for things like sniper rifles or other regular guns, but people have taken to point-blank rocketing people while cloaked because you die before they even decloak.  I still consider the Tremor pack in Demolition mode to be extremely cheap, especially if the map doesn't have a Tremor spawn and the Destroyer is lucky enough to get one at spawn.

Aside from occasional faults, the game is fantastic in both single and multi play.  The destruction engine really shines, and delivers on all the promises Volition put forth, turning a solid shooter into an excellent one.  Existing multiplayer modes provide lots of avenues to use buildings to your advantage, whether it's bringing one down on an enemy or topping all the towers to nip snipers at the bud.  Oh, and placing remote mines inside your base to protect the flag isn't such a great idea when the explosion brings down your entire base.

VERDICT:  Highly Recommended