Good thing, too. The ridiculous amount of imaginative damage you’ll cause in the name of the Martian rebellion is infinitely more memorable than the weak story that assigns it: Alec Mason’s dreams of making an honest living as a Martian miner are ripped to shreds when his brother is, well, ripped to shreds by murderous EDF soldiers. Brief points of exposition detail that, yes, Mason is still pissed and killing to avenge his dead sibling. The second act takes a startling turn for the eerie, but Volition never really follows through with the haunting radio chatter that accompanies an “I really shouldn’t be here” mission. It’s a missed opportunity to do something unexpected, but the predictable story is irrelevant in the face of how much fun you’ll be having. When you’re told to blow up an airfield, you’ll do it because it’s awesome -- not because it will hit the EDF where it hurts.

The continuous reward for completing missions comes in the form of salvage, scrap metal used as currency. What’s more, you can collect the blue bits and pieces as you blow up fuel silos, specially marked EDF targets and vehicles. Smashing the 250 supply crates or 300 mineral patches also yields spendable scrap. As if you needed another reason to destroy stuff. Salvage buys new weapons, damage or ammo increases and armor upgrades. It would have been nice to drop some salvage on the backpacks that appear in Guerrilla’s online multiplayer, but being able to slip in and out of invisibility, dash through obstructions or knock nearby enemies over with a shockwave snugly fits to the online mould.

Typical “kill everything” and capture-the-flag variants offer the expected, but RFG offers a couple clever additions to its multiplayer: having to repair a control point after destroying it is a smart change of pace that leaves you temporarily defenseless, for instance. Another mode has your team hunting a specific player that earns proportionate points for destroying the map. If you don’t want to commit to earning new characters and weapons via online multiplayer, competing for points in quick bursts of same-console chaos makes Wrecking Crew a great in-and-out mode.

Red Faction Guerrilla’s unabashed destruction is so much fun that the lengthy load screens gave me an unfamiliar feeling of anxiety. I desperately wanted to move on to the next area and come up with a cool, entertaining way to execute a mission. But not because I cared about my dead brother or what he was fighting for. Forget vengeance. Forget liberty. The cheesy action movie story is background noise to the sound of 12 bombs crippling a skyscraper, tires tearing across a craggy Mars, and a sledgehammer smashing the skull of EDF infantry. Good times.

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