Review by: Mitch Dyer

A few brief descriptions will be enough to convince most folks to play Red Faction Guerrilla. Free-roaming; third-person shooter; Total Recall; explosions. If you weren’t interested before, you definitely want to free Mars now, don’t you? Renegade violence, driving around a well-designed planet and crushing enemies with a sledgehammer is a brazen blast, and even if a lackluster narrative fails to make you care about why you’re doing it, there’s a ton to get out of simply watching the world realistically react to your inflicted mayhem.

Mars is a manageable world to explore either on foot or in a stolen vehicle. The sum of its six segmented areas is massive, and your primary goal is to lather a thick layer of hurt on the Earth Defense Force as you try to crush their oppressive planetary supremacy. Obliterating their munitions storage, garages and communication centers lowers their influence over the area, raising the morale of the Red Faction rebellion and the colonists they’re trying to protect.

You’ll spread from Red Faction’s HQ in Parker to the small town of Dust, eventually breaking through to the EDF-infested Eos. Missions typically center on a smaller pocket of Mars, containing your wild acts of terrorism without restricting you. This ensures that you’ve got a lot to see without being overwhelmed, and leaves room to freely roam or wreck between jobs. The main objectives are typically summed up with “blow everything up at this location,” while side missions include hostage rescues, sabotaging convoys, or assaulting EDF strongholds with a few allies.

These AI friends leave much to be desired when it comes to brainpower. More than once, a rescued hostage refused to hop into the escape car in favor of running into enemy gunfire. Another time I watched a friendly to blow himself sky high by standing on and then shooting one of my explosives. These instances aren’t common, thankfully, but you’ll have to deal with intolerably long load screen if you muck up a mission. Try not to doze off in the 40-50 second interim, because the variety of objectives throughout Red Faction Guerilla hold up for the entire 20-ish hours it takes to save Mars.

Guerrilla’s balance of freedom and focus keeps you engaged, but the reckless pandemonium makes it truly worthwhile. The detailed destruction in Red Faction is gloriously satisfying. I was giddy every time I detonated a half-dozen remote mines at the base of a building, reveling in the chaos of fleeing colonists flying enemies, and collapsing structure that followed. Chunks of concrete crumble when clubbed with your trusty sledgehammer, and entire walls will turn to dust as a rocket smashes them, which makes your outrageous acts of violence a spectacular sight.

Red Faction embraces your creativity, allowing you to walk to the front door with guns blazing, or to smash through it with a bomb-filled dump truck (taking the foundation with it). When an architecturally sound structure, complete with rebar reinforcement and organized support, tips into a facility full of baddies, you can take comfort knowing that your physical impact on the world is permanent. Revisiting areas and seeing husks of EDF encampments you wiped from the face of Mars has a tangible, remarkably fulfilling impact on the story.