Red Faction: Guerrilla is the third installment in the Red Faction series and deviates from the first-person shooter genre featured in the previous two incarnations by incorporating an open-world sandbox environment similar to Mercenaries, Grand Theft Auto, or Saints Row (all of which were also developed by Volition).
Set 50 years after the events of the first two games, Red Faction has liberated Mars from the nefarious Ultor Corporation, and the E.D.F. (Earth Defense Force) has stepped in to assist the Miner Community in regaining its footing. However, the E.D.F. has evolved into an occupying force, seizing control of the planet, executing citizens, and enforcing martial law. As a result, a new Red Faction element has emerged to combat the E.D.F. and restore peace and liberty to the Martian environment. The player assumes the role of Alec Mason, a recently arrived Earth rebel intending to start a new life on Mars with his brother Dan, only to be swept up in the Revolution and liberate Mars’ five sectors (Parker, the Badlands, Oasis, the Free Fire Zone, and Eos) from E.D.F. domination. To accomplish this, the player must execute missions and damage E.D.F. vehicles and property, reducing their influence over each sector and improving citizen morale.
The missions include Transporter (returning certain vehicles to a safe house in a certain amount of time), Guerrilla Raid (where the player and a group of Rebels attack and destroy an E.D.F. building), Heavy Metal (where the player provides a distraction allowing fellow rebels to complete another mission without alarming the E.D.F.), and Demolition Master (where the player offers a distraction allowing fellow rebels to achieve another mission without scaring the E.D.F.
Some missions appear on occasion, such as Courier (in which the player must track down and kill an enemy spy to collect the information he is carrying), Assault (in which the player must defend a specific target against incoming E.D.F. forces), and Convoy (in which the player must either destroy a line of vehicles or capture a target vehicle and return it to a safehouse). Completing these tasks will reduce enemy control of the area, boost citizen morale, award scrap, and unlock more advanced weapons. To liberate each section, the player must reduce E.D.F.’s power of the site to zero and complete the story missions; after this is accomplished, a final story mission will be unlocked, allowing the player to liberate that sector and unlock story missions for the next.
Players can choose from various vehicles, including cars, trucks, dune buggies, dump trucks, tanks, and A.P.C.s (Armored Personal Carriers). There are also pistols, shotguns, assault rifles, the sledgehammer (the player’s primary weapon that cannot be removed), remote mines, anti-personal mines, rocket launchers, and the dreaded Nano Rifle (which fires a stream of nanobots that can disintegrate targets in an instant). The player can carry four guns simultaneously and swap them out via safehouse access or ammo boxes scattered around the area. The most advanced weapons, such as the Nano Rifle, can only be obtained through story objectives. Still, others, such as the Singularity Mine, may be found in E.D.F. facilities, and each weapon can be upgraded through safehouses, which feature extra ammo and increased firepower through the trash. Scrap is the game’s currency that may be gained by completing tasks or destroying E.D.F. structures and vehicles.
The game now has an improved Geo-Mod 2.0 game engine, which allows the player to practically destroy a building in realistic ways, such as making it lean left by blowing up the left side of the structure or leaning forward by blowing up the front. Players can take advantage of this by destroying the building from the ground floor, toppling it on enemies and vehicles, or blasting bridge support structures with explosives, causing the bridge to collapse with a convoy of enemies on top. It also includes the Havok physics engine for character physics.
There’s also an offline two-player game called Wrecking Crew, in which two friends take turns in four different modes, including Barrel Dash, Total Chaos, Rampage, and Escalation, and play a certain number of rounds to win an event. Online multiplayer games such as Anarchy, Team Anarchy, Capture the Flag, Damage Control, Siege, and Demolition are also available, which offer players experience points that may be used to customize their online players and purchase more powerful weaponry. There are also backpacks for the Wrecking Crew and Multiplayer modes that improve the players’ abilities, such as Jetpacks, Stealth, Vision (basically an X-ray), and more power-based ones such as Concussion, which knocks over nearby enemy players, and Tremor, which can damage enemies as well as structures.
The P.C. version includes the DLC Demons of the Badlands, previously only available on the Xbox360 and PS3 platforms.
