Red Faction: Guerrilla is ostensibly an open-world action game. It is actually an escalation of opportunities for artistic demolition. Other aspects of Guerrilla—shooting, narrative, driving, logic—may be generously labeled as dated or defective, but rarely distract from the lure of explosive Martian terrorism. Re-Mars-Tered Edition is a convenient and good-enough way to treasure its spectacle in 2018.
2009 was the year games succeeded Crackdown’s open-world superhero boom. Prototype cast Alex Mercer as a mutated misanthropic violence junky on the streets of Manhattan. Infamous surged with electricity and fueled a dreary Cole MacGrath across yet another depiction of New York City. Red Faction: Guerrilla deposited Alec Mason on Mars and gave him a large hammer and explosives. All three of these guys have the most generic names allowable but only one starred in a game worth revisiting; the space asshole himself, Alec Mason.
Regardless of what it appears to be, Red Faction: Guerrilla is only a game about blowing up buildings and being a menace with bombs. Through the use of Volition’s “Geomod 2.0” engine, Guerrilla allowed for the systematic demolition of every visible structure. Everything is a house of cards. Tearing through walls with a sledgehammer, detonating remote mines on steel beams, and disintegrating metal with the Nano Rifle could eventually collapse an entire building. The ensuing mayhem would devolve into a pile of rubble, a veritable throne for Mason’s crumbled kingdom.
In between leveling buildings, Guerrilla attempts to fulfill its obligations as a contemporary videogame. Its story pits Mason as a new arrival on Mars, presumably out to make a buck on the thriving mining economy. Instead, his brother Dan appears and tells him all about the Mars’ hostile governing body, the Earth Defense Force, and the virtuous Red Faction rebels. Dan is murdered by the EDF and Alec is somehow elevated to a leadership position in the Red Faction. Guerrilla’s attempt at a narrative depicts a union dispute against a corporate overlord, with shades of Mad Max thrown in because it’s a suitable backdrop for weird cars in a desert setting (Mars is indistinguishable from a desert). Guerrilla’s story contains a premise for conflict without actual character or cause. It’s junk, albeit the unobtrusive kind.
Guerrilla’s core loop follows the open-world model Volition began with Saints Row 2. Different regions of Mars are under EDF control. Completing side activities (Gunner missions! Rescue missions! Drive this car here really fast missions! Demolish this building missions!) weaken the EDF’s hold and increase the Red Faction’s resolve. Reducing the EDF’s presence to zero births heavily guided story missions, which further Guerrilla’s plot. Once one region is conquered, another becomes available.
Surrounding missions is an economy of scrap metal. Completing missions rewards the player with meager amounts of scrap, which can be repurposed into a series of weapons and upgrades. Additional inventory space for ammunition is complimented with better armor, more efficient sledgehammers, increasingly chaotic weaponry and, for some reason, a jetpack. You’ve really got to grind out more than the necessary amount of side missions to be able to afford all of Guerrilla’s toys, as the bare minimum only accounts for the essentials.
Guerrilla only succeeds when the player is allowed to improvise with its systems. Jenkins’ mobile turret missions are a functional point-and-shoot experience, but offer nothing unique inside of Guerrilla’s structure. Same goes for the missions where the player is tasked with racing across the map under the stress of time. This “stuff” was compulsory material for an open-world game in 2009, but time’s decay has revealed its extrinsic value. Guerrilla only works when you’re either delighting in chaos or strategically obliterating a structure. Everything else, even nine years ago, was done bigger and better elsewhere.
An overly aggressive AI presence is another trait Guerrilla shares with the Saints Row entries. Buildings regularly fall on top of Mason and he’s often unfazed. Guns, however, present a lethal threat and reveal his mortality. Guerrilla’s solution for opposition is to spawn ceaseless EDF soldiers with automatic weapons and allow them to fire at will. There’s no real strategy to be found, reducing combat to a mixture of luck and endurance. Being able to take cover, Gears style, on any surface is a nifty feature, but it’s in service to a dull an uninspired combat system. Simple shooting isn’t fun. It’s a shame, given Guerrilla’s suite of ridiculous weapons.
Setting the difficulty to easy, which appears to reduce damage values, is the only viable way to play Red Faction: Guerrilla. I was too proud to do this in 2009 (and largely every other game today) but it really does absolve most the game’s sins. Melee attacks, until the last third of the game, kill EDF soldiers in one hit. Bullet spray mows down waves of bad guys. The EDF is fodder instead of a nuisance. It’s not a perfect solution, but putting the game on easy surfaces the reasons people fell in love with Guerrilla in the first place. You’re there to destroy as much shit as possible and distracting the player from that objective must be avoided at all costs.
Easy mode allows a reinvention of Mason as a businessman with explosives. It even looks like he’s carrying a tiny briefcase when he’s holding remote-detonation mines. Mason’s hammer and his explosives are his tools for high powered negotiation, and his power move is murdering whoever he encounters. He can demolish his own shelter and people rebuild it for him. Martian citizens surrender their vehicles to him without asking questions. Killing friendlies doesn’t matter (much). Looking at Mason as an uninhibited god is the correct point-of-view, and a vista only possible through dialing in easy and embracing his divine power.
Immortalizing Mason doesn’t affect Guerrilla’s obsession with destruction. Demolition missions are where Guerrilla is allows spurts of creativity, challenging the player to destroy a building with a fiercely limited set of tools. How can I destroy this sky scraper with thirty Nano Rifle shots and two thermobaric rockets? Answer: dissolve the top spire’s support beams and crash it down on the remaining structure. Controlling Guerrilla’s chaos develops a sense strategic carnage left unattended since the Dreamcast’s Bomber Hehhe.
Within the remainder of Guerrilla is the unlimited potential for stupid activities. Set up an ambush by lining the road with remote bombs. Drive through a base at full speed. Blast into a base with bombs all over your car, bail out at the last second, and detonate them as it enters the building. Impose a rule that you can only use the sledgehammer for the entirety of Red Faction: Guerilla. Under this premise, Mason operates with the potency of an actual super hero.
Despite appearing in the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 generation Guerilla, feels like a remnant of the PlayStation 2’s “b-game” heyday. Drakengard, Mister Mosquito, God Hand, Siren — there was a time when lower-budget games could get by on a kinetic risk AAA games were too afraid to take on. Guerilla supports this movement by featuring amazing, still unmatched levels of player-authored destruction and almost nothing else. Even its sequel couldn’t be bothered to push, or even revive, its commitment to chaos.
While there is value in preserving the original experience, pieces of Guerrilla’s Re-Mars-Tered Edition port would have benefited from improvement. NPC’s still bail out of the car, for no reason, in the middle of rescue missions. There’s no retry option available in the middle of a mission, and most don’t even restart the player near where the mission started. The Emergency Broadcast System mission, toward the end of the game, retains a bug where following the GPS will place you outside of mission boundaries and auto-fail the mission. Booting the game prompts the player to start a new game instead of loading a save file. It also crashed around ten times in the ten hours I spent with the campaign. This sucks? Guerrilla is sloppy by nature but I wish that sentiment wasn’t passed off to its current-generation debut.
As expected, Guerrilla looks a bit better on newer hardware. My PlayStation 4 Pro runs Guerrilla at sixty frames-per-second in 1080p, or at least it does until lots of things start exploding and it crawls to a halt or a crash. 1500p resolution is also available but it halves the frame-rate (it’s also only able to be selected from the start menu, for some reason). Press for Guerrilla notes standard generics like “improved lighting” and “improved shadow rendering” which mean nothing to regular people. Additional texture resolution, however, is apparent. This attention is nice but, as previously stated, stability would have been a more valuable upgrade.
Guerrilla survives its remaster in a photo finish. The monotonous mission structure, expressionless story (where everyone looks exactly the same), and conventional shooting are nails in a coffin. Fortunately the coffin’s lid is obliterated by Guerrilla’s screaming half corpse and its giddying commitment to destruction. There’s still nothing quite like it, no matter how many “what about” claims are lobbed in its direction.
