Red Faction: Guerrilla
Years ago, the Red Faction freed mars from the Tyranny of mega company Ultor. The Earth Defense Force was brought in to keep the peace. Now the EDF is the oppressor and the Red Faction must rise to free Mars once more. Although it carries forward the Red Faction brand and some of the plot points, there are many attributes of Guerrilla that has been changed when compared to it's ancestors.
The story missions for RF:G are linear. You can navigate a map to get to each mission by walking, driving, and eventually with a little bit of jet-packing. As you complete the story missions you'll liberate areas, thereby unlocking a new region. In each new region there is at least one safe-house. Safe-houses serve as jump points so you can quickly move from one area to another. It's at safe-houses where you can also purchase upgrades, reload your weapons (if you can't find a weapon cache out on the field), and there will also be a vehicle handy for you (if you don't want to hi-jack someone).
In between story missions there are a large number of side-missions you can take part in, as well as the occasional spontaneous mission you'll get a notification of over the radio. In fact there's so many side missions available that despite there being a large variety of missions types, some of them manage to still get repetitive.
Mission types include:
- Vehicle Transports: This is a race against the clock as you try and drive a variety of vehicles back to a safe house.
- Demolition training: Try and take down a building or structure in a set time under specific conditions with limited resources.
- Demolition: Destroy points of interest to the enemy, ranging from wind turbines, to bridges, to barracks.
- Offensive raids: Join a group of Red Faction members to take out squads of EDF soldiers, and destroy key buildings.
- Defensive stances: Protect a location from an EDF attack until their forces are depleted.
- Rescue operations: Free a group of hostages from an EDF facility, and get as many as you can back to a safe-house.
- Convoy Interference: Stop groups of trucks from getting to their destination.
- Hunt & Retrieve: Follow couriers and traitors carrying vital intelligence to their drop-off point. Then kill them, steal the intel, and communicate it back to base.
- Ride Shotgun: Man the gun-turret on the back of vehicle, and try to rack up enough damage by destroying buildings and vehicles.
- Bonus tasks: Such as finding ore deposits for mining, and finding radio tags which will unlock new missions.
To help you complete all of these mission types, you'll have a variety of weapons to choose from. These include your standard guns and rifles as well as rocket launchers, lighting guns, nano-disintegrators, explosive buzz-saw-blade throwers, mines, remote bombs, and of course sledgehammers. You can only carry 4 weapons at a time and the sledgehammer is one you always have on you. You won't mind not being able to swap it out though, since it can make quick work of smaller buildings and EDF troops. When out on a mission, if you think you've brought the wrong tools, there's usually a weapons chest where you can reload and swap out which weapons you're carrying.
Weapons can be upgraded as well. Upgrades will allow you to make some weapons more lethal, let you carry more ammo, allow you to use different types of ammo, and more. Other types of upgrades are also available such as armor, a jet-pack, mining upgrades. You purchase upgrades with "salvage" which is collected from the remains of destroyed buildings, destroyed vehicles, and mined ore deposits. You can also earn salvage by completing various missions.
Adding to all these components are the EDF presence meter and Moral meter. Completing certain missions will reduce EDF presence. The lower the EDF presence, the easier it is to complete other objectives. In turn, when you complete certain missions the Moral meter will be raised. The higher the moral, the more people will pick up arms and join in the fight while you're completing a task. High moral also translates to better equipped weapon caches that can be found throughout the maps. Moral can also be lowered if you accidentally shoot, hit, or run over other Red Faction members. And considering how they like to crowd around any vehicle you jump in, and run into the line of fire, it's quite likely that you'll find yourself doing this every now and then.
Since destroying large structures suggests that physics played a big part some may be disappointed. The walls of buildings seem thin, and it is possible to bust up 4 walls and 3 corners of a building before it falls down. This however really didn't bother me, because unrealistically sturdy buildings simply meant I had more to destroy!
The action is pretty steady, and the only thing that seemed to slow it down was all the driving, which can get a little tiresome; especially with some of the target destinations that were far from safe-houses. But generally speaking the large chunk of land to explore populated with plenty of missions and lots of destruction add up to a very fun game. There were no real mind-blowing moments for me, but the entertainment it did provide was consistent and enjoyable.