Red Faction: Guerrilla Demo Impressions

It’s the future, Mars is being colonised (and has a breathable atmosphere, apparently) and there is the smell of revolution in the air. Who could possibly be around to lead such a revolution with the colonists against the probably-evil-but-nobody-cares Earth Defence Force (EDF)? Why, you of course! You are Alec Mason, a minor (as in digging, not under-age) and you’ve had enough of the EDF pushing people around.

Red Faction: Guerrilla is a third person game where the main draw seems to be that everything is destructible. Everything. And it’s all sexy physics based. Buildings have structural supports, walls, windows, people. Each separate aspect can be destroyed in a multitude of ways, usually resulting in utter devastation. All for your sick, child like satisfaction the good of the people.

There are three main method to achieve your goal of destroying everything in sight. By foot, in a vehicle or in a big-ass Mech. The demo starts with you on foot with a couple of guns, mines and a hammer at your disposal. You’re tasked with recovering a Mech for the Red Faction. Inconveniently, between you and the Mech are a lot of dudes and buildings.

Weapon selection is a bit finicky to get used to begin with. Hold the right shoulder button to bring up the weapons hud then press the corresponding colour pad to select. Tapping the shoulder button switches between your last two weapons, which is both useful (when you run out of ammo) and annoying (when you can’t remember what your last weapon was).

Your hammer is your main beast of a weapon, allowing you to smash down every part of a building until it’s nothing more than rubble, and some weird collectable bits that probably have some use in the final game. As your main tool of destruction, the developers saw fit to add the ability to swipe either horizontally or vertically. Fine for destroying buildings, but did result in me missing my human targets annoyingly regularly, especially when not vertically aligned with them, when on a slope or jumping for example.

Using guns seems competent enough and there is a fairly nice, if generic, toggleable cover system. Though compared to all your other weapons the guns in the demo are just weak sauce. I had the most fun simply using the mines. Sticking them to the bottom floor of a building and detonating them, whilst stood on the top floor is just fun. As is sticking the mines to people and watching them flail around desperately trying to knock them off. Though killing non-soldiers does loose you some points of some kind.

Once everything in sight has been levelled, onwards to the Mech building where the Mech inside seems to have had its keys conveniently left in the ignition. En route, time to try out some vehicles. It took me a while to get used to the way vehicles move; left turns left and right turns right. None of that Halo-esk “look where you want to go” I’ve become so accusomed too. Some of the vehicles have weapons which auto target, but your best just ramming the trucks into buildings, then blowing them up.

So, Mechs. Giant walking trucks which can swipe and smash through anything. Nothing stands in your way when you’re in a Mech, and it feels awesome. Walking and smashing, like a child and a train set. Not too much more I can add about that.

The end of the demo puts you on the back of a truck with a big gun, blowing up enemies a they chase you. Again, nothing but pure, enjoyable destruction here. Once you and your new Mech toy are safely away the demo ends, with a rather impressive view of the vast open world map. There are more than a hundred missions for you to choose and I couldn’t help getting eerily similar vibes to those I got playing Far Cry 2.

Those feelings, when playing the demo again, emanated stronger. A combination of the open world and potentially incredibly repetitious missions. The game looks good, plays fun and seems like it’ll be a very enjoyable full game. Though I just can’t see how they can add enough variations for the 90th mission to actually still be interesting.

Also, to get the demo you need to sign up to THQ’s official site. Oh, and the demo (but not the game) is only available for the 360, as seems to be the growing trend with these things.

Image source: Giant Bomb