It was the most disappointed I've ever been by a sequel, and was once described to me ahead of release as being like Dead Space, which couldn't have been less accurate.
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It just squandered everything this game was good at-and seemingly killed the series. Volition followed this up with Armageddon in 2011, a bad sequel that kept the destruction, but took us away from big open set pieces to the tedious, more linear underground. I like those too, but Guerrilla shows open worlds and destructible buildings are a perfect match.Įven old THQ didn't seem to know why Guerrilla was good. We're instead in an age of open world games packed with busywork and towers to climb. But that is the type of open world game I've always wanted to play, where you can manipulate the environment and feel like you've left a mark on it.
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It's noticeable that all the biggest and best buildings are far away from each other, and it probably wouldn't have been possible for Volition to replicate the Geo-mod system in the vast cities of Saints Row. It might've been Red Faction's sparse Mars setting that made Guerrilla work in the first place. It's the idea of blowing each building up like it's a physics puzzle, efficiently using your arsenal so it collapses in the most satisfying way possible. Destruction features in everything from Battlefield to Minecraft to Just Cause, but Volition's game still offers something that no other game does. It's weird that no one else made a game like Guerrilla after its release. Over the years, I've probably played it more than the campaign. Oh well. Wrecking Crew is where it's at: it's all the good bits of Guerrilla with none of the waiting around for the best weapons or opportunities. Sadly for me, all of the leaderboards have been reset from the Steam version, meaning I'm no longer 12th best in the world on the Abandoned map. I have played this mode every year for nine years, and I will never stop. It makes a great pass-the-pad party game, and there's a challenge mode with leaderboards, too. You pick a loadout, set the parameters like time limits and how easily the buildings fall, then knock them down as quickly as possible. It's basically a score attack that gives you a quick dose of the game's destructive physics in a variety of settings. I'm not really in the mood for finishing the campaign these days after doing it twice before, but that's where the game's Wrecking Crew mode comes in. The big destructive opportunities in this campaign need to be seen, though-I still talk about them with friends years later. You'll wait a while to unlock all the really good toys, but the singleplayer will give you plenty to blow up along the way, as well as a dull story about miners rebelling against an army that's a bit like a boring version of Firefly. That's where the biggest destructive opportunities are, like a huge bridge and a massive tower, which take meticulous use of the object-melting nano rifle and rocket launcher to bring down. To anyone picking this up for the first time, I recommend focusing on the campaign. I can't say I really notice vast visual improvements on my strange 1050p work monitor, but environmental textures like rocks and the ground look a little sharper up close. The lighting is nice by today's standards, too, but it's not a vast upgrade. For a freebie, it seems pretty good after four hours or so. The new version is a 24.3GB download, while the existing Steam edition is 6.7GB.
#Red faction guerrilla free
In this Re-Mars-tered edition, which is free for owners of the Steam version as of today, THQ Nordic touts heavily reworked textures among other visual improvements, along with better shadows, lighting, a shader and postprocessing rework and native 4K support. That's partly because no big studio or publisher has really imitated what it does in the same way. This destruction felt great in 2009, and it still feels good now. You'll melt the beams of a tower and watch it fall over. You'll detonate mines and blow up a bridge, which will then collapse on top of an enemy settlement.
![red faction guerrilla red faction guerrilla](https://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/20500/0000005105.1920x1080.jpg)
But knocking down buildings in an open world is more than enough to carry this game. Hell, Mars doesn't even look that nice, because it's Mars. It's an otherwise uninspired open world game, with okay driving, unimpressive shooting and a boring story. Guerrilla does this one thing really well.