As the walls that once housed the fuel containers of a small, EDF-controlled fuel depot fall and trigger a chain reaction of viscerally beautiful explosions before me, a solitary thought dominates my mind: I did this, and I did it alone. No scripting help from the game engine, no computer-controlled character holding my hand and telling me where to place charges and when to run, and no loss of control in the form of a cut-scene – and it is in this independence that Red Faction: Guerilla finds its apex.
But those details end up as irrelevancies as, even though some of them forward the engaging plot, they’re really just encouragements for you to go blow the hell out of something – and Guerilla makes this activity incredibly entertaining. Simple destructions, like swinging away at the foundation of a solar power array that stands a hundred feet tall, often yield unexpected results. Not the sort of unexpected where the rapidly-falling tower crushes you, no, although that occasionally happens – but the sort of unexpected that means that collapsed array falls into something explodey, which explodes, which then makes further things explode, killing a bunch of once-living things and showering the screen in glorious, beautifully-rendered carnage. It’s all really very gratuitous, but somehow it never quite gets silly – the graphical feedback and design ensure that, while things exploding are bright and vibrant, they always look just like you might imagine them to.
That I mention the killing of men secondary to structures is no accident; not only does the game generally only rarely require you to actually kill soldiers, it doesn’t really facilitate their slaying terribly well. That’s not to say that Guerilla is bad as a shootey-game, but rather to say that it’s average. The cover mechanics are straightforward and simple, ‘F’ is depressed to zoom in a bit and center your view, and the left mouse button does the shooting. Enemies find cover, lob grenades, and appear to possess an intelligence that’s almost human – but none of it is quite convincing. Once I pieced together how the enemy AI acquires and assigns targets, I found it pretty easy to avoid too much incoming damage by simply running the hell away.
Only, it doesn’t because you don’t have to do that ‘running away’ part. At least, you don’t need to keep running once your health bar fills up sufficiently. Sometimes, when completely and hopelessly overwhelmed, unlimited flight is the only viable option. But usually, you can kill all of the enemy soldiers. This is because, inexplicably, Alec is bigger, stronger, faster and more accurate than the EDF is. Having a badass protagonist is all well and good (who wants to play a weakling, anyway?), but it runs contrary to every bit of narrative the game throws at you.
Incidentally, you never need to run further than the nearest safe house – Red Faction camps – to ditch any pursuers. Even though these camps have about a dozen freedom fighters/terrorists at them, the EDF simply will not pursue you into them, which makes for a rather jarring experience when three times that many were in hot pursuit. These weird blips happen often, and have the nasty habit of utterly annihilating any sense of immersion that had been previously established. For example, one mission sends Alec to a desolate valley, devoid of all life and containing only a few construction supplies. After beginning the mission, a small Mechwarrior-like suit spawns. Upon entering it, hordes of EDF soliders attack, both on foot and in vehicle, and you are informed that you must kill 60 of them. Alright, no problem – a solid amount of good-fun bloodshed. Once the 60 are slain, however, the remaining EDF – which for me was easily two dozen – all disappear. Although I was relieved that I was going to survive, I was disappointed – didn’t I earn a glorious, rusted-iron-Mechwarrior victory or a painful, humiliating loss? Isn’t that the commitment that I signed up for? Quests like this – that terminate all evidence of their being upon completion – take the responsibility of survival away from both the player and the narrative, and I found that I greatly resented it Guerilla for it.
That’s the rub of Red Faction: Guerilla: really genuinely awesome physics modeling and world-breaking that gives the player total control over his environment, juxtaposed over a narrative engine that repeatedly removes this control and independence away from the player. An interesting, Marxist-fueled paranoid sci-fi thriller with hints of the film Total Recall that repeatedly tells the player how weak he is compared to the EDF and how heroic he is for overcoming them, juxtaposed over an engine that creates a player avatar vastly more powerful than any of the foes he encounters – even though, by trade, he is a mere miner. A beautiful, fully-realized world into which great care has clearly gone into the engineering of, placed overtop of painfully generic looking enemy soldiers that behave in sadly generic ways. This, I suppose, is the nature of life on Mars.
Head over to the Scores section for a more numeric look at Red Faction: Guerilla
Comments
Leave a Reply