Red Faction: Guerrilla Destructability Impressions

Mention the words "Red Faction," and chances are people will think of rocket launchers and highly destructible environments. Released on the PlayStation 2, the original Red Faction was notable for the explosive way it let you progress through its levels. After the inevitable sequel in 2002, the developers decided to reinvent the series for next-generation consoles and PCs. Work began on this new project in 2004 and is still going on now--four years later.

There was only one problem: In the time it took to develop the new engine for the game, Volition decided to become an exclusively open-world-game company on the back of the success of Saints Row. For Red Faction 3, this meant changing from a first-person shooter to a third-person action game. According to Volition vice president Dan Cermak, the move was perfectly suited to Red Faction, because it let you better appreciate the destruction going on around you. The game now has an official title--Red Faction: Guerrilla--and we saw it in action for the first time at a recent UK press event.

To show off the destruction in Guerrilla, Cermak compared the physics engine to those used in current games, such as Crysis, Battlefield: Bad Company, and Mercenaries 2. He said that while the aforementioned games did offer some detailed effects in this area, they would often cheat slightly by replacing buildings and structures with "dead" models once they'd been destroyed. To elaborate, he showed examples of structures that would effectively disappear once they'd collapsed, with the "alive" models being replaced with "dead" equivalents. While this process allows for lower overhead in terms of processing power, Cermak argues that it's not as impressive as a truly destructible physics system, which he claims is the key to the next generation of gaming. "Once people play our game," Cermak said, "something feels missing when they go back."

Luckily, the technology behind Red Faction: Guerrilla delivers the goods to back up such claims. While it doesn't boast comparable visuals to current benchmark titles, the level of destruction in Guerrilla has a profound effect on both the look and feel of the game. If you blow up a bridge, not only will it collapse at the impact point, but the resulting shift in weight will cause the rest of the structure to topple in a realistic manner. The physics system works out the effects of pressure and gravity in real time, and in one wireframe demo we could see how the engine was calculating stresses and strains and adapting the models dynamically.

With such a destructible environment, the game's weapon selection is incredibly important, and as you might expect, explosives form a heavy part of the arsenal. We saw rocket launchers, sticky bombs, and grenades during the demo--all of which can be used to blow holes in buildings to make custom doors. But there are nonvolatile weapons in Red Faction too, such as the sledgehammer, which can, if lined up correctly, smash through a thick concrete wall and take out someone on the other side. Finally, there's also a weapon that will rebuild broken structures around you, although we didn't get to see that in action during the demo.

While destructibility will play just as big a part in Guerrilla as it has in previous Red Faction games, Volition is working hard to create a world where you'll want to do more than just destroy things. The story still takes place on Mars, but in the 50 years that have passed since the last game, Mars has been completely colonised. The Earth Defense Force has grown in prominence and now controls the majority of the planet, resulting in an uprising among the people who live there. As the title suggests, you'll be part of this guerrilla movement, and as a rogue element you can move around the world as a militant, taking on missions and moving in and out of the crowd.

The play area itself will be huge, supposedly three to four times as big as Stillwater is in the upcoming Saints Row 2. You'll move around using a variety of vehicles, such as tanks, buggies, and jetpacks, all of which we got to see in our hands-off demonstration. You'll be tasked with various missions, including robberies, assassinations, and ambushes, and as in Saints Row, you're free to move around the world and carry out these missions as you please. There will also be side missions for you to take part in that will ultimately aid your success in the main missions; for example, if you take down the comms towers, the EDF won't be able to call in reinforcements. The aim is to drive out the EDF and liberate the people of Mars one mission at a time.

The multiplayer mode is a side of Guerrilla that we didn't get to see, although Volition talked about some of the things we can expect. Both PlayStation Network and Xbox Live will be supported, and the team is expecting to be able to support up to 12 players online and up to 16 players if it's technically possible. Although the exact modes haven't been announced, deathmatch and team deathmatch are pretty much a shoo-in. The bad news? There will be no online co-op mode, which may make the game look quite dated by the time it's released.

Guerrilla isn't the prettiest game of all time, but it's easy to see that most of the computing power has been dedicated to the revolutionary new physics system. The game uses a heavily modified version of the Havok engine underneath, and development of the physics has supposedly taken up a bulk of the development process. Thankfully, though, it looks fairly polished at this stage, and we have no reason to doubt the developer's claims of a solid 30 frames per second in the final product. However, the game only supports 720p output--sorry 1080p TV owners.

The first two Red Faction games were solid, with one key hook: destructibility. While Guerrilla also hangs on this feature, its transformation to open-world action game has resulted in a dramatic move forward for the series. It's set to arrive on the PC, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3, but the makers refuse to be drawn on when this will be, which means it's probably a long way off yet. With that in mind, expect to see more on Red Faction: Guerrilla in the coming months.