William Bibbiani Reviews Red Faction: Guerrilla!
THQ and Volition Inc. aren’t exactly renowned for their originality. Together, they’re perhaps most famous for their Saint’s Row franchise, for which the term “GTA Clone” was pretty much invented, and Red Faction: Guerrilla doesn’t fare much better from a conceptual standpoint. You play Alec Mason, a white immigrant with a shaved head and drab clothes who spends most of his time “borrowing” cars, killing authority figures and blowing things up. Alec Mason is, of course, nothing like Niko Bellic because he has a Bluetooth headset. And Red Faction: Guerrilla is absolutely nothing like Grand Theft Auto because you’re on Mars, you can blow up any man-made structure on the planet, and it’s much, much more fun.
Yeah, you heard me. “Red Faction: Guerrilla is much, much more fun that Grand Theft Auto IV.” THQ can put that right on the cover of the “Greatest Hits” box, or whatever Microsoft calls its line of bestsellers, and I’ll stand by it. But that doesn’t mean I’m not about to rip them a new one either, because the closer Red Faction: Guerrilla gets to perfection, the more glaring its flaws become.
The story of Red Faction is pretty simple: Alec Mason arrives on Mars after a recent political uprising, but the new regime seems even worse than the old one and before long Alec’s brother has been murdered by fascists and his only allies are a group of revolutionaries called the Red Faction. Alec begins participating in raiding parties, prisoner rescues and oh-so-tedious transport missions in an effort to weaken the E.D.F. (an acronym I don’t remember being explained so I just assume they’re the “Enormous Douchebag Folks”) and strengthen Red Faction morale. It’s all pretty familiar sandbox fare, but with one vital difference: stuff blows up real good.
Yes, every man-made structure on the planet can be systematically annihilated just about any way you can think of: you can blow it up with explosives, knock it down with a big overcompensatory hammer, drive a car through it and eventually even use nanites to devour it molecule by molecule (non-man-made structures, like rocks, are suspiciously immune to all of these effects.) What’s more impressive is that every structure has at least a semblance of structural integrity. Most of the buildings on Mars are more than just four walls and a ceiling, and are supported by girders, rebars, concrete and other architectural-sounding things that you can use to your advantage. You can just tear down every wall in the building until it collapses or you can try to eliminate the structure’s weak points so it will collapse on itself after a few moments. Both approaches are fun, but the latter is necessary in order to destroy some of the larger structures in the game, like a six-lane suspension bridge or isolated quasi-skyscrapers.
Given that each structure has been fully designed from the inside out, you’d imagine that each of them would more-or-less look the same, but they don’t. There’s a lot of architectural variety to be found in each section of Mars, making it all the more noticeable that the actual environments are oppressively uninteresting. There are valleys, there are canyons and there are mountains, and that’s about it. Plus it’s Mars, so pretty much all of it is red, but since Mars has been terraformed some parts of it are also a little green, or have a little snow on them, which is kind of like having an gigantic bowl of mashed potatoes, only a few parts of it have blue or red food coloring: Sure, they look a little different, but it all tastes the same. In all fairness, the designers kind of wrote themselves into a hole on that one, but it doesn’t take the sting off driving through a valley, again, in order to drive through a canyon, again. Given the level of destruction that we’re capable of, would one densely populated, blow-upable urban cityscape have been too much ask? Even a small one?
Of course, the game isn’t all about blowing things up. It’s also about shooting people, and Red Faction: Guerrilla boasts one of the most balanced arsenals in recent gaming memory. Practically every weapon has a practical use. Well, not the pistol, but there’s an arc welder, which fires electricity beams capable of stunning and killing multiple enemies even inside their vehicles, there’s the “nanoforge,” which causes matter to devour itself, an upgradable rocket launcher, a “grinder” that shoots saw blades that can be upgraded to explode on impact, and many, many more. But perhaps my favorite is our trusty melee weapon, a big honking sledgehammer with which Alec Mason is capable of destroying practically any object in the game, regardless of size and density. There may be nothing more satisfying than sprinting up to an hapless EDF soldier, jumping in the air with your hammer swung high and then caving in his skull on your descent. The whole enterprise gets me very excited for a game about The Mighty Thor (at least, as long as it’s not a movie tie-in).
Still, all is not well in Red Faction: Guerrillaville. Unlike Saint’s Row 2, the game is relatively stable and only froze on me once, but there are a lot of intentional design choices that made me want to chuck my controller through my TV, plasma screen or no plasma screen. I’m about to go on a rant here for the rest of the review, so let me recap that I really, really like Red Faction: Guerrilla, but the following things just drove me farkakte nuts:
The mini-map suffers from Shadow of the Colossus syndrome, often guiding you to the general area of your objective but providing no help whatsoever when it comes to finding the exact spot you need to stand on in order to start your mission. This is particularly frustrating in canyons and mountain areas, where the map will lead you right next to where you need to go, but you actually have to travel all the God damned way around a series of enormous obstacles in order to actually get there.
The lush graphics and impressive physics engine ironically makes every flaw in those departments more prominent. For example, you can steer your automobile in mid-air to prevent overturning your car when you land, which has practical functional value but never failed once to distract me from the gameplay. I always pictured Niko Bellic – I mean, Alec Mason – rolling around inside his car in order to shift its balance in the desired direction, which would mean that he doesn’t wear his seatbelt and thus would probably be killed in any one of the hundreds of horrific crashes I’ve put him through. And although you’re on Mars, perhaps the dustiest of all planets (one area is even called “Dust,” for crying out loud), your car never seems to kick up any of said dust no matter how much desert you drive through… and trust me, that’s going to be a lot.
Blowing stuff up is cool, but getting killed by falling debris because the camera is too close to get a decent sense of your environment is less cool. Bad, even. Also, buildings you’ve spent a lot of time and energy completely demolishing have a nasty tendency to suddenly exist again if they’re suddenly necessary for a sub-mission. I realize that’s a problem inherent to the game design, but it’s still distracting and made a lot of my missions feel like weird flashbacks to earlier in the game when I apparently blew up all the same buildings in a completely different way.
Not every aspect of your weaponry is perfect. The only melee option besides your hammer is a “gutter,” which serves the exact same function as your sledgehammer but cannot be placed in the same inventory slot, meaning that if you actually WANT to use the gutter you have to needlessly equip two melee weapons, which is never worth your while. Also, one of the more interesting weapons – a “singularity bomb” capable of creating tiny black holes – is very rare, but no hint is ever given as to how to find the damned thing. It turns out they’re inside “High Profile” destruction targets, which you’ll probably never want to enter because you’ll be too busy blowing them up. Then when you do pick them up (and good luck finding them because they’re hidden in a tiny, barely noticeable briefcase… unlike every other item in the God damned game), you find out that you can’t store them for later use. If you replace them in your inventory you lose them forever, forcing you to find something to blow up right away. Granted, if you’re in a “High Profile” target you probably have something handy, but it’s unfair to punish the player for finding something very rare by not letting them do what they want with it in a God damned sandbox game. Kind of like getting a puppy as a birthday present, it’s nothing more than an unwanted load of responsibility in an appealing package, and not really worth anyone’s trouble.
Then there’s the “nanoforge,” a device so powerful that one character actually refers to it as “the future of Mars” before instructing you that you should never allow the device to fall into E.D.F. hands. So naturally, they strap the most important thing in the universe onto a rifle and give it to Alec Mason, who is always placed on the frontlines of any armed conflict, in an effort to keep it out of harm’s way. In theory, every time you die that means the weapon falls into E.D.F. hands and Mars is doomed, but of course that never actually happens because in videogames the protagonist’s death is almost universally meaningless. In fact, you can drop the nanoforge in the middle of a battlefield and just leave it there if you so choose, because the stupid (but incredibly useful) thing somehow always returns safe and sound to every safe house and ammo crate you find throughout the game, completely neutralizing its effectiveness as a plotpoint. But hey, don’t get me started on the story…
(Too late.) Finally, there’s the story, which practically single-handedly keeps Red Faction: Guerrilla off of my short list for “Game of the Year.” Red Faction’s story is derivative, and I’m fine with that. It’s a sad state of affairs, but derivative plot and design elements are simply a fact of life in most videogames. It doesn’t just borrow from Grand Theft Auto, it borrows from Saint’s Row, Total Recall, Aliens, Firefly, and plus it’s a sequel, so there may not be an original bone in Red Faction: Guerrilla’s body (although I could be wrong, having never played the earlier games in the franchise). But the structure is so damned awkward that it borders on mind bogglingly unbelievable.
The first few hours of Red Faction: Guerrilla feature several fully-rendered cinematics introducing elements of the storyline, both characters and plot points. But after a few hours this storyline stops moving forward altogether, leaving the player to craft their own experience for around 10-20 hours, depending on how leisurely you play. Literally, the story just stops. Sure, you’re blowing stuff up and saving lives, but you’re always doing that so it loses all meaning after a while. Actually, this is the part where Red Faction really shines, but then, quite fittingly, everything comes crashing down when suddenly after about 14 hours or more of letting you do your own thing, the game suddenly tries to get your attention again with astoundingly bad plotting and surprisingly poor game design.
Yes, just when it looks like the game is reaching a fitting crescendo to a satisfying conclusion, the designers pull a switcheroo and force us to play a series of increasingly poorly planned story missions until the game’s conclusion. Characters die that we never cared about because we barely spoke to them for 80% of the game, another character reveals a plot twist that everyone – EVERYONE!!! – will see coming from the first couple of hours of gameplay, and suddenly practically all of your missions are MacGuffins. “We have to find this thing in order to get this thing to work so we can do this thing,” only with science fiction-sounding words. I went from being emotionally invested in saving lives (or at least taking them) to falling victim to a series of “Would You Kindly’s” where I only completed objectives because someone told me to, and having few other gameplay options left I just trusted that they knew what they were talking about… which is bad storytelling. A lot of people complained that Niko’s friends calling him up constantly throughout Grand Theft Auto IV was annoying, and it was, but at the very least it kept those characters prominently in the player’s mind even when they spent hours ignoring the storyline, so when we did return to it we actually remembered who everyone was.
From a gameplay perspective, the last part of the game falters as well, introducing new and distinctly broken gameplay mechanics like (mild SPOILER ALERT) satellite laser targeting, which despite being told from the perspective of a God damned satellite can’t seem to zoom out enough for me to see what I’m God damned doing. (END SPOILER.) Then towards the end, Red Faction: Guerrilla takes a page from the Assassin’s Creed handbook and just hurls wave after wave of enemies after you because they apparently ran out of decent extensions of the functionality the designers had been developing for about 20 hours and couldn’t be bothered to schedule a God damned lunch meeting in order to come up with something interesting instead. After trying, and failing, over and over (and over) again to climb a damned mountain covered in rocket launchers I finally almost reached the top, only to die and respawn all the way back at the bottom again. Now, frankly, I couldn’t care less, and the game that I was ready to call “The Best Sandbox Game Ever Made” rests in its box unfinished because the designers couldn’t be bothered to put a decent checkpoint in one of the most difficult and annoying parts of the game.
So the ending sucks, but frankly, the endings of most videogames suck because that’s the point where the developers cut corners in a rush to make their release date (look at the end of Gears of War 2 – a boss fight where the boss doesn’t fight back and dies after only three hits?) Red Faction: Guerrilla is well worth its price tag and at the very least is probably the best game to be released so far this year. I just really hope it’s not the best the industry can do in 2009.
