Red Faction: Guerrilla Updated Hands-On

Don't be surprised if you do little more than just blow stuff up during your first half-hour or so of playing Red Faction: Guerrilla. You aren't alone. After all, this is a video game. If you weren't supposed to turn every building that you see into huge piles of rubbled ruin, then why would they give you the ability to do so? No, Red Faction: Guerrilla encourages--it insists--that you give in to your destructive urges and make the most of your role as guerilla rebel Alec Mason. We recently had a chance to spend a good chunk of time with the game during a THQ press event in Las Vegas, where we got an extended look at the game's single-player campaign, as well as some of the treats that the developers at Volition have cooked up in multiplayer.

Red Faction: Guerrilla's plot is your basic revenge tale. After Alec Mason arrives on Mars, his brother is murdered by the Earth Defense Force, the military group that liberated Mars in Red Faction II and eventually became fascist rulers in their own right. Seeking revenge, Alec takes up with the rebel force Red Faction, which is looking to free Mars and its citizens from EDF control, one sector at a time.

Early on in the game, you're taken through a very basic tutorial of the action. The early story missions introduce you to the typical kinds of jobs that you'll be pulling throughout the game, which often have you invading key outposts and laying waste to key EDF assets. You'll also get an intro to the typical weaponry. As a guerilla force, the Red Faction can't match the firepower or the sheer numbers of the EDF. That said, Alec can still act as a one-man destruction derby, thanks to a collection of explosives, machine guns, and his always-trusty sledgehammer. There's no small amount of childish joy in taking that hammer to walls, buildings, and other objects in the early goings, just to see how much mayhem you can cause with a few swings.

Once you've completed a handful of tutorial missions in the starting area, known as Parker, Red Faction: Guerrilla's story opens up, giving you the freedom to pursue the liberation of Mars by following your own particular path. There are story missions that you can complete that will move the plot toward its inevitable conclusion, but you can also simply explore or, perhaps more importantly, collect valuable salvage. Salvage components, which come from destroyed buildings and vehicles, serve as the game's currency and let you purchase new weapons and upgrade your existing ones, and you'll have plenty of ways of going about it.

For example, side missions abound. As you're driving along in one of your commandeered vehicles, you'll occasionally hear radio chatter about a side mission near you. Pressing right on the D pad will give you an illuminated path to that mission, or you can choose to ignore it and do it later. When you bring up your overhead map, you'll see a number of green icons onscreen, each indicating a different mission that you can take part in. These missions are varied, and include everything from rescuing civilian hostages, to destroying select targets, and setting traps for convoys to interrupt EDF supply lines.

Each mission that you complete in Guerrilla will result in a small drop in EDF control over a region; reducing control in that region to zero will liberate it completely. In addition to the story and side missions, each sector in Red Faction: Guerrilla will have prime targets that you'll need to take down. Noted as light-blue icons on your minimap, these highly valued EDF buildings are worth a big drop in EDF control if you can take them down. At the same time, given that they're so highly valued, they're also heavily guarded.

Taking down these targets will require a good deal more strategy than your typical building. Luckily there's a number of ways you can take down a target, depending on the weapons you have. In the early goings, you'll have little more than sticky mines, your hammer, and a machine gun. And though a direct run-and-gun approach can work for some targets early on, for larger objectives, you'll need to be sneakier. One effective strategy is to sneak around the perimeter of a target, toss a number of sticky mines with the right trigger, and then blow them by pressing the B button. An even better one is to load up a vehicle with sticky mines, drive it toward a target, and dive out of the vehicle at the last minute by pressing the Y button. Once the vehicle runs into the target, you can blast the mines with the B button and watch things go boom.

Attacking any high-value target in Guerrilla will inevitably attract the attention of EDF soldiers and, sooner or later, you'll need to fight your way out of a tight spot. Although the shooting and cover mechanics in the game work well enough, you rarely have enough ammo to last long; therefore your best bet is usually to make a hasty retreat from your target and high-tail it back to your rebel HQ where you can rest and reload. Death has no real penalty in the game, other than the fact that you'll have to restart your efforts to take down target objectives.

With all of the wanton destruction in the game, surprises are bound to happen. In our time with the game, we enjoyed the different ways that we discovered of completing objectives. For instance, in one mission in which our goal was to take down a series of radio towers that were broadcasting propaganda, we went on a freewheeling death ride in a huge truck, taking down a number of the towers simply by driving through them. Once the truck was spent, however, we pulled the rest of the job on foot, sneaking underneath buildings and taking them down by planting charges on the supporting beams, causing the buildings (and the towers they supported) to come crashing down. Another nice surprise: getting a hand from NPC characters. By completing anti-EDF objectives, you'll raise the local morale in the area. Higher morale means that civilians will sometimes join the fight by your side, which can turn out to be handy if you're in a tight spot.

However, the surprises aren't always good ones. During one long mission that involved Alec rescuing a series of civilians and obtaining secret EDF documents--all while being chased by increasingly maniacal EDF soldiers--we managed to get to the very last civilian only to have her die when the building that we were fighting in came down around us, killing her in the process. After such a long mission, with so many different objectives, it was tough to have to start the mission over again, but we suppose that's how the cookie (and the building) crumbles.

The single-player aspect of Red Faction: Guerrilla is jam-packed with missions and a huge Martian landscape to explore, but the multiplayer modes are no slouch. The game will have standard modes such as Deathmatch and Capture the Flag but, after playing it for ourselves, it's the weapons and accessories that make the difference. You'll be armed with everything from your standard sledgehammer to machine guns, shotguns, and more, but it's the backpack accessories that really put things over. These backpacks give you special powers that you can activate by pressing the left bumper. These powers might include a burst of running speed, the ability to float in the air via jetpack, a quick healing burst, or a concussive blast that will knock down any player in your vicinity.

Finding interesting backpack/weapons combinations is part of the fun in multiplayer. For example, you can use the jetpack to fly in the air and pick off players on the ground; you can use the fleetfoot pack to zip through enemy defenses on your way to capturing their flag; or, our personal favorite, you can use the concussive pack in combination with the sledgehammer to make a very fun and nearly unstoppable combination. The idea is to get close to your foe, set off the concussive blast to knock them to their feet, then run over and blast them in the noggin with your sledgehammer. It's a deadly and effective combo that never got old in our time with the game.

In addition to blasting one another to bits, there's a multiplayer minigame for up to four players that tests your ability to destroy buildings in as short a time as possible. Each player will get the same weapon/backpack loadout and the same amount of time to do as much damage as possible. In our case, we played the minigame with a jetpack and a singularity bomb, which creates miniature black holes that suck in fragments of buildings. The more destruction you cause, the more points you'll score, and the player with the highest score wins the match.

Although we've spent a good deal of time with Red Faction already, there's at least one more big multiplayer mode to check out before the game is released in early June. We look forward to seeing more on that mode and hopefully spending some additional time on Guerrilla's version of Mars. There are plenty of buildings out there to destroy, after all. Red Faction: Guerrilla is set for release in early June.