Red Faction: Guerilla

A few months back I made a post celebrating cracking 10000 achievement points on the X-box 360. In that document I reviewed the top eleven games that contributed to my point score. I had a such fun with it, that I thought I might put in reviews of any games in which I achieved at least half of the achievement points for. At least you'll know they held my interest.

In the time since the cracking 10000 post, I've played three games in which I earned at least half the achievement points: Red Faction: Guerilla, Battlefield 1943, and Grand Theft Auto 4. I got some catching up to do, so here is the first one.

Red Faction: Guerilla

Red Faction is a third person, sandbox, shooter where you play Alec Mason, a miner in the future who joins his brother on Mars. Things go bad pretty quick as Mars is run by corrupt conglomerates (are there any other kind) and the military who descend upon the brothers suspecting them of being in the Free Mars rebel group. Well, needless to say the brother gets killed and Alec is left with the motivation necessary to take it to the Mars overlords.

The hook of Red Faction is that it lets you run amoke with the ability to completely flatten almost every structure in the game and, quite frankly, that turns out to be a hell of a lot of fun. The down side is that the price of having fully destructable environments is that those same environments are pretty drab and uninspired. There's nothing of that feeling of being sucked in and wowed by the world that you get from a game like Farcry 2 or Grand Theft Auto IV (review pending). Similarly, the story and characters also lack any spark of life that might actually make you care about them.

That all said, the gameplay is a hoot. Besides blowing stuff up but good (you are provided with a heady arsenal of goodies for this), the combat is fast paced, varied, and satisfying. As is typical of a sandbox game, you are provided with numerous missions that you get to choose from and there is enough variety and challenge in those missions to keep the game fun right through to the end. Because of my lack of investment in the story, getting to that end is less satisfying than it otherwise would be, but the ride is a fun one.

The surprise for me in this game was its multiplayer, something I normally am not that attracted to, but here ended up eating a significant amount of my time. There is a great collection of different game types, taking full advantage of the destructable environments, and there is a wonderfull variety in the maps, ranging from close and personal to large and sprawling. Besides the sheer variety of weapons, things are spiced up even further with backpacks that bestow abilities upon the wearer: jetpacks, cloaking, damage boost, speed, etc. The end result is a face paced, multiplayer, package in which I find a heck of a lot more play value than games like Gears of War or Halo.