'Red Faction' starts a good kind of trouble

• By JOSHUA WASCOM
• Special to 2theadvocate.com
• Published: Jun 24, 2009

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The year is 2125, and Mars just can’t catch a break. Just 50 years after breaking free from the cruel grasp of the Ultor Corporation, the colonists of Mars now find themselves virtually enslaved by their former allies, the Earth Defense Force. As a fresh-off-the-shuttle immigrant from Earth named Alec Mason, you quickly find yourself caught up in the underground rebellion known as the Red Faction.

“Red Faction: Guerilla” looks like almost any other open world game. It has collectibles, main quests, side missions and plenty of vehicles conveniently on hand to shuttle you between them. The game’s main addition to the formula is fundamentally simple, but it has a huge impact. Everything man-made -- from cars to crates to massive buildings -- is destructible.

You’re free to carefully place remote charges to bring down a massive structure, to drive a huge tanker right through an EDF barracks, or to simply use your trusty sledgehammer to methodically knock down every wall between you and some hostages. Regardless of how you choose to cause destruction, the way this game presents the results of your efforts is generally believable and always satisfying.

There are a number of other nice details in the game. For instance, your actions inspire those around you, and ordinary citizens will often suddenly turn on their EDF overlords and help you regardless of whether you are in a mission or just generally causing mayhem.

On the other hand, a number of woes still plague “Red Faction,” most notably the lack of variety in many missions and the fact that, given your ability to collapse huge structures on yourself and the general ubiquity of heavy explosives, you can quickly and easily go from not at all dead to absolutely dead, sometimes forcing you to replay large sections of missions. The shallow plot and absolute lack of characterization are somewhat striking as well. The bad guys are just bad, and the good guys just good, regardless of who’s blowing up what.

Ultimately, though, the breakable nature of the world overwhelms all of these problems. The tactical depth it creates lets you create your own variety in the missions, and there’s a certain savage personality in your sledgehammer. The multiplayer side of the game is also very well-developed, particularly the modes that take full advantage of the unique opportunities present in the annihilation system. In short, there’s enough here to reward any purchaser, provided that said purchaser likes blowing things up.