Red Faction Guerilla Preview
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E3 2008 Preview
The Red Faction series began with one extremely cool idea: players should be able to blow up, demolish and abolish everything they want. At the time of its release, PlayStation 2 hadn’t seen anything quite like it. The results were fresh and exciting, bringing a new flair to the world of first-person shooting.
Red Faction: Guerrilla, the long-awaited sequel for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, is taking that idea one step further. No, make that 100 steps further. THQ passed me the controller, told me to dive in and said that anything in the game can be destroyed. But with the game mentality that I and the rest of the world are stuck in, we didn’t believe it. We’ve tried to destroy every little element in other games, only to find that, even when a game is highly destructive, it has severe limitations. You may not notice them right away.
That right there is the reason why Guerrilla is going to blow you away.
Sledgehammer Days
Taking place 50 years after the first Red Faction, Guerrilla shows how Mars has evolved since the original story. You’ll see massive industrial environments, all of which are very well detailed. Without even picking up the controller, it was obvious that this was one of the best-looking games at E3. But then I picked up a sledgehammer and began to work my way through concrete, steel, wood, and a plethora of other materials that were no match for my wrath.
The results were stunning. THQ says that the destruction elements were only possible after creating buildings that were based on the real thing. In reality, buildings have a structure/support system. To make the in-game buildings fall apart accurately, they had to design them the same way.
And it’s not just a sledgehammer – far from it. Guerrilla also includes a host of weapons that will aid you in your destructive desires. They range from traditional chargers that can take out bridges and nearly everything else to mining tools that, when tweaked slightly, become a deadly device for winning a battle. Buzz saws (shot from a special weapon) were particularly interesting, as they can slice enemies, bounce off certain materials and will cut into harsh materials and stay put.
It's a Third Person Game
No game is too good for the view Gears of War populated, it seems. Thankfully, this is one of the few shooters that doesn't feel like Gears of War. Rather, it feels like something from the world of Grand Theft Auto, only more seamless and more destructive.
Any vehicle may be controlled, including a giant walker that can apparently be used to crush other vehicles. The standard vehicle controls are solid, and the controlled action sequences -- where someone else drives and you command the gun on back -- are joyously exciting. The gun had two kinds of ammo: rockets and bullets. Both were capable of annihilating everything they hit, and the effects were amazing. The explosions are enormous and, while not perfectly real, look fantastic in this world-bending setting.
Toward the end of my Guerrilla experience, I passed the controller to a developer and stood up. He then threw several remote bombs on top of this giant pillar. As if I had completely forgotten everything I had just seen and everything they had told me about the game, I asked, "You can blow that up?" It was a pillar. You can't blow up pillars in games unless they were meant to be destroyed. And this one looked obscure. Surely it had to be solid.
"Yes," they responded, laughing. It turns out I'm not the only one who keeps forgetting: most people don't believe Guerrilla even after they've played it because, as we all know, games just aren't this open-ended. They may have wide-open areas to explore, but you can't destroy everything. In this game, however, there are no limitations. Simply amazing.
