Red Faction: Guerrilla Updated Hands-On

At some point in the four-and-a-half-year development process behind the engine that drives the gameplay in Red Faction: Guerrilla, all of the buildings fell down. Each time the developers would load up the latest build of Volition's long-awaited follow-up to the PlayStation 2 first-person shooter, all of the buildings would topple to the ground. After some careful investigation, the team found out that this wasn't some strange show-stopping bug that was bringing all of the game's structures down; in fact, it was the physics system acting exactly as it was supposed to.

In a game in which realistic building destruction is one of the primary foci, building physics play a huge role in Guerrilla. Once the physics had been implemented in the game, all of the buildings began toppling because they weren't built to the kind of architectural standards that would keep an actual building vertical in the real world. As a result, the developers had to go back and make sure that all of the constructs in the game were built on sound architectural concepts--that they stood up for themselves, in a manner of speaking. Once that problem was solved, it was back to the game's main mission: finding new and fun ways to bring those buildings to the ground by sheer destructive force.

There are many flavors of destruction in Guerrilla, and practically every one of them is pretty tasty indeed. You can throw self-attaching remote charges to buildings and blow them remotely. You can crash into propaganda signs at high speeds in a military jeep. You can pilot a huge, mechlike walker and quite literally walk through walls, with the building crumbling beside you. There's a nano rifle that fires ammo that disintegrates anything it hits, alive or otherwise. These are just a few examples of the kind of wanton, rampant destruction you can bring to the virtual Mars that you'll roam around in Guerilla.

The game takes place roughly 50 years after the original episode, and you'll play as Alec Mason, a miner who's come to the Red Planet to escape a sketchy past and be with his brother, Dan. It isn't long before you find out that your brother is more than just a simple miner; he's also a member of the rebel group the Red Faction. The guerrilla group is one of three factions in the game, and they're going up against the Earth Defense Force (the saviors of the original Red Faction game, who have since taken power in Guerrilla, and have proven themselves to be even worse overlords than the bad guys in the original game).

Although the original Red Faction game was a first-person shooter, Guerrilla moves the action to the third person and the gameplay to a more open-world approach. Tharsis, as the setting is known, is divided into six distinct sectors, and is roughly twice the size of city of Stilwater from the original Saints Row (also developed by Volition). After you finish the initial tutorial and a trio of starter missions designed to teach you the various tactics that you can use against the EDF bad guys, the world basically opens up to you. You can attack missions in practically any order, and the overall goal is to liberate each of the game's six sectors from EDF control. Completing missions and destroying certain EDF targets will lower the EDF's control over a region; finish enough of them and you'll completely liberate a sector from its control.

Liberating a sector from EDF control is the primary goal and, if you play your cards correctly, you'll be able to enlist the help of the Martian citizens as you go. By destroying EDF installments, you'll gradually improve the morale of the citizens in that region. The more confident the people become, the more apt they will be to help you out as you fight their totalitarian oppressors. As the developers told us, if the citizenry's morale is high enough, they'll take up arms to help you out in a firefight, which is handy because you'll be outmanned and outgunned throughout the entire game.

Well, maybe not outgunned. The weaponry in Red Faction: Guerrilla--and all of its delicious destructive potential--appears to be one of the game's big selling points. Sure, there are standardized weapons such as pistols, sniper rifles, and machine guns, but it's the superspecialized guns that are the most fun. Rocket launchers, an arc welder that sprays zig-zagging shards of electric death, and the aforementioned nano rifle are just a few examples of the different types of weapons that you can use to bring down enemies and their surroundings. Although the game does have a cover system, cover is a fleeting thing in Guerilla thanks to the ubiquitous destruction. If you've got an opponent stuck behind a wall, you can fire a rocket into the wall itself, or trap a roomful of bad guys in a collapsing building by bringing it down around their heads. In fact, setting traps and ambushes appears to be a huge part of the gameplay in Guerilla. The more creative uses you have for the game's destructible environments, the more success you'll have in your guerilla campaign against the EDF.

Graphically, Guerrilla is coming along. We suspect that the game is sacrificing some texture fidelity to support its generally solid frame rate, which seems to be steady even when a building is blowing apart into hundreds of pieces all around you. The six districts of Tharsis each have a distinct look, from the dusty red "traditional" Mars look of the opening stage, to more richly terraformed areas with blue skies and more vegetation.

Although most of your battles in Guerrilla will be fought against the EDF, a third faction will also make its presence known in the game. Known as Marauders, these barbaric anarchists are known as friends to no one; they're just as hostile to EDF troops as they are to the Red Faction freedom fighters. Wielding big, tridentlike melee weapons, these guys don't opt for using cover and tactics; they're all about offense, aggressively rushing you and attacking until you manage to bring them down. It's unclear how this third faction fits into the overall plot of Guerrilla at this point, though we do know that at some point, Alec Mason will find himself temporarily allied with the group to achieve an objective.

A recent multiplayer beta for Red Faction: Guerrilla came to a close in late August, and we're still awaiting more details on all of the different modes that the game will include. One thing's for sure: If the multiplayer game features the same kind of rampant destruction as in the single-player, you can kiss camping goodbye because no cover spot will be safe anymore. We look forward to learning more about all of the aspects of Red Faction: Guerrilla in the coming months and will be bringing you much more on the game ahead of its release in mid-2009.