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

It doesn’t appear – at least from the open beta – to have the deep complexity or brick-wall learning curve of Tribes 2, but this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. On the two maps that were available for play, the simplified Tribes combat worked rather well. Armored guys, in traditional red vs. blue style, ran about shooting at each other with a variety of weapons in a variety of different kits pursuing a variety of different objectives. These objectives are a bit neat, a bit like a sidequest in a typical RPG game: go kill the enemy VIP/general, or go and escort ours. Get into this big truck thing with a bunch of giant guns on it and make sure it gets to the correct destination. Find the “intel” – the flag – and get it to the capture point. Nothing particularly new here, but their inclusion into an otherwise typical point-capture FPS game mixed up the gameplay a good bit, as four control points + sidemissions ensured that combat was never centered in any one place.

Which is a good thing, as combat doesn’t seem to have been designed for large scale affairs. Most of the man-killing weapons don’t do any sort of area-effect damage, and individual players can take quite a good bit before dying, so firefights of more than four players per side can get, well, almost stagnant, what with half of them carrying repair tools and healing each other in times of need. So, big firefights are more or less out of the equation – but how do small fights add up?

Among the best I’ve seen in awhile. Finding cover is absolutely crucial, as is knowing your flank and surroundings. While an individual player can inflict great harm on the enemy if well-placed and played, team-work is, as has been the current theme in contemporary FPS games, of tantamount importance. The genuinely bizarre thing about this is that players seem more than willing to work together – it’s not uncommon to be sprinting along a path to an objective only to find a couple of other robot-suit pals running along side you, ready to kill a bunch of people and blow some stuff up with whatever their particular kit is.  Generally, these will be pretty varied from one player to the next: one player may opt for heavy armor, shielding, and a rocket launcer to piss off enemy defensive installations, and others – like myself, most often – kit themselves for speed, stealth, and weapon power, hoping to attain the addage of “One Shot, One Kill.”

Although a mid-range firefight can drag out in excess of thirty seconds, if a bogey drops in on your six with a fast-firing weapon, you’re pretty much already dead. This is due to the lock-on mechanism found within Section 8. Right mouse button to zoom, mouse over target, press E, and you’ll lock onto them, automatically moving your gun or knife or other death implement in whatever ridiculous pattern your enemy deigns to move in – and, generally speaking, you’ll kill them.

But here’s the thing with the lock-on: it doesn’t last long. At best, when kitted for it, you’ll have a lock for about eight seconds, which is usually just enough time to kill someone at relatively close range. At medium range, however, the lock-on by itself won’t kill anything, and at best you’ll chew through their shield and then be left to spray lead in the abstract bullet-patterns like so many other games of the genre. However, choose your lock-on wisely – like after knocking out a good portion of the enemies’ shield – and they’re as good as dead. As a result of this, duels often seem to come down to whomever is at their weapon’s optimal range and who uses their lock-on at the right time.

There are a variety of other means that one can employ to stack encounters in their favor, and this is where Section 8 really shines. You can pick two of the available weapons for your loadout, although here there isn’t anything special – a pistol, a shotgun, a machine gun, an assault rifle, a sniper rifle, and a missile launcher. However, you can take a series of passive modules that spice things up a bit and provide great differences in the otherwise identical sea of guys-in-robot-suits you’ll be fighting. I’ve generally found that I enjoy either the up-close and grizzly assault style of leaping into combat like a maniac with a machine gun, or cooly picking people off from afar with the sniper rifle; as a result, I generally choose to maximize my damage output with anvil rounds, ensure additional accuracy with the gyro stabilizers (which reduce recoil and grant a bit smaller of a firing arc), and spend my remaining two points on the shield booster to give me more time to react. There are other options, too, like the repair field, which increases the speed at which you repair both objects and your comrades, and another one that increases running speed and jetpack recharge. Each player is allowed ten points to customize their loadout any way that they choose.

Finally, there are the useable items. There are not many of these, and two of them – the mortar and the det pack – were not available in the open beta. You can choose the knife, for even grizzlier up-close mayhem than the shotgun or machinegun, which often kills in a single blow; the grenade, which is nice because it doesn’t actually explode unless you toss it nearby somebody; the mini-sensor which, well, it senses stuff, and ensures that little red triangles representing the enemy robot-suit-guys will appear forever on your screen. Until the charge runs out, anyway. My personal favorites were the repair wrench, which lets you heal yourself and your robot pals, and the stealth matrix, which doesn’t actually make you invisible – rather, it removes your little red triangle from the enemy HUD and prevents/removes lock-on attempts. It’s great for running the hell away if you’re not in an optimal position for a fight, or to give you a very prominent edge in a tight duel.

I’ve made mention several times of how everybody looks like they’re wearing a robot suit or something, and they really do. Each player looks identical, whether teammate or not, and although you’re rarely close enough to notice enemy graphical differentiation, some variety here would have been nice. The robot-guy-suit thing doesn’t end with player avatars, however, as almost every aspect of the HUD is modeled after this – and it’s done supremely well, and in a way Section 8 reminds me of a single-warrior version of Supreme Commander. Little red triangles show where bad guys might be, little red diamonds where enemy controlled points are, and it all works very well, but what is fantastic about the robot-suit theme Timegate is working here are the little touches. For example, spawning is relatively unique in Section 8; instead of being reborn at your team’s home base or whatever the generic term is, you are instead allowed to spawn anywhere – absolutely anywhere – that you might choose to click, and you are then flung from a spaceship that hovers over the battlefield.

And it’s completely awesome.

Friction burn flickers on the periphery and the shimmer of your shield envelops you as you fall. At a thousand meters up, you can initiate the air brake, which grants you a modicum of control over your descent. Neglect to hit the brake and you’ll fall and strike the ground far faster, ensuring you’ll avoid enemy anti-aircraft emplacements, and although you’ll take no damage, there is still a cost: you make earthfall much harder than normal, and you land crouching, delayed before you can move. The beauty in this is what happens to the perspective during the hard earthfall: when you land, your vision shifts to pink/blue/green, almost as if the connection between your character as a human and your robot-suit is being frayed. It works wonderfully.

The drop ship also serves another function: to drop stuff for the player.  In the beta, you can only requisition three of the eight or so available items: a supply depot, which bestows ammunition and health, a minigun turret, which shoots at red-colored HUD enemy units, and a heavy suit of armor.  Think a smaller mechwarrior – a minigun on each hand and big fists with which to grab, strangle, and smash your enemies upon the ground with.  That last bit is no fancy wordy trick to make them sound cooler, as the greatest strenght of the heavy comes in having the capability to kill an enemy robot suit in one squeeze.  That, and they’re a huge pain in the ass to kill with anything but the rocket launcher.

As with all running-jumping-shooting games, the player has to do a bit of running and jumping in addition to shooting – and as this is my favorite feature of the game, I’ve decided to close with it. Player movement is relatively slow and ponderous, but this lends the impression that your robot-suit is heavy. However, there’s a great mechanism to get around this; hold down the shift key as you run, and you’ll begin to run a bit faster. Fill up a little gauge on the left of the HUD, and the camera will shift into a third-person perspective as you begin to sprint at super-human speeds. The transition in speeds is really quite striking, and causes the player to feel like an immense and total badass when it is engaged. Leap while you’re sprinting in this mode and engage the rocket-pack – by continuing to hold down the jump key – and you’ll rocket into the air, propelled forward by your incredible momentum, which allows you to make ludicrously dramatic and intense entrances. I can’t imagine a better way to say hai to some pals than this – or to land within the enemy ranks with a machinegun and an air filled with blood.