GTA Mars

I'm still trying to burn down the pile of Steam games that the amazing Holiday Sale provided for me. This last week, I managed to finish off Red Faction: Guerrilla.

On paper, Red Faction seems like the perfect game for me. I mean, it's GTA on Mars! With destructible buildings! I like the GTA style of gameplay and I've always been a nut for good physics in games, so I was fully convinced that Red Faction was going to be fully amazing.

Unfortunately, I was a bit disappointed.

For any of you not familiar with the game, the basic idea is that you come to Mars to do some legit mining work, but immediately become embroiled in the cause of the Faction after your brother is killed by the evil corporation that is controlling the planet. The game plays very much like a Grand Theft Auto game; you run around on foot with a variety of weapons, can get into vehicles of various kinds, and you complete both main mission and side objectives. You are tasked with liberating each of the various sectors of Mars and eventually driving the overlords from the planet.

Loved

• Destruction. This game is all about pure, wanton destruction. With few exceptions, every building in the game is destructible. You can drive cars through buildings, blow up their supports with sticky bombs, and even just take them down with your trusty sledge hammer. The destructible environment is definitely the big selling point of this game and I must admit that it delivers. I had a blast (pun intended) blowing stuff up and driving large trucks directly into turret filled buildings. It truly is a very well implemented game mechanic.
  
  
• Mission variety. There are quite a few different side quest types and even though I didn't enjoy some of them (see below), there were a lot of choices here. My favorite one was the demolitions master. In each of these, you are given a target to destroy (a building, some pipes, etc) and a very specific set of equipment. Sometimes it's just your sledge and other times you get thermabaric rockets. Each of these has a very generous completion time and stingy pro time. There were some of these missions I literally attempted dozens of times trying to hit the pro time. I had a ton of fun with these. Lots of the time I was reminded of bowling: you throw your ball (or set off your explosives) then just as you often see bowlers leaning left or right to "steer" the ball or get that last pin to fall down, I was finding myself doing something similar trying to will the building to topple. Besides the demolition missions, other favorites included Heavy Metal (get inside a Mech Warrior style walker and kill a set number of enemies) and some that had you riding on a the back of a vehicle shooting a turret.
  

Hated

• Am I there yet? Red Faction seems to delight in making you drive all over the planet. Besides the missions that are nothing more than driving a car halfway (or all the way!) across Mars, it felt like every mission would have me drive to the starting spot then drive somewhere else to actually do the mission. It got REALLY old to always need to drive somewhere else. While the game does offer some quick travel options, in at least 2 of the zones, the safe house (where you quick travel to) is at one side of a really long zone. In all seriousness, when I was done playing this game, my middle finger hurt from holding down the "W" key to move forward. In fact, it still aches a bit, and I finished playing this game last Thursday! And yes, I played the GTA games with the keyboard, and no, they didn't make my finger hurt the same way.
  
  
• Inconsistent Difficulty. Most of the Red Faction missions seemed to either be trivially easy or insanely difficult. The last mission in particular took me at least a dozen attempts (with each attempt being 5+ minutes). In addition, the save points in many of the missions were very unforgiving requiring me to repeat large sections of the game. Meanwhile, some of the other missions boiled down to little more than driving my car somewhere and shooting a couple of guys. Side missions in particular suffered from this bipolar difficulty scale, which I'll discuss below.
  
  
• Terrible side missions. While I appreciated the variety, some of the side missions were just terrible, mostly because they were just way too hard. A particular class of mission had you infiltrate a building of some kind, liberate some hostages and drive back to base. These hostages were all guarded quite heavily. You basically have two choices: perpetually kill guards (as you kill more, your wanted level goes up and more come) or kill very few and merely make a break for it with your comrades. Unfortunately, all the comrades seem to have large targets painted on their backs as they are gunned down insanely fast. I only did a handful of these (as they annoyed the hell out of me) and I nearly always lost all but one of the hostages. The other truly bad side mission were the ones that had you get in a random car parked somewhere (often somewhere VERY remote) then drive it to a safe house. Not the nearest safe house, mind you, but a specific one. The one that was nearly always the absolute farthest away from your current. I won't even mention the fact that the time requirements were often very unforgiving and you could easily drive for 4-5 minutes and still fail the mission.

I've already perfectly summed up Red Faction: it's GTA on Mars... with destructible buildings. If you are a big fan of the genre, you'll probably find something to enjoy here. If you aren't, it really just isn't worth your time. Red Faction: Guerrilla is an absolutely brilliant game mechanic stuffed into a very mediocre game. There were plenty of other minor annoyances here, such as the absolute astronomical number of "collectibles" this game has which have little purpose other than to provide something to wrap achievements around. The game also has a third faction (the marauders) who could have been a great addition to the game, but are barely used at all. It physically pains me when developers come up with such amazing ideas but fail to provide us with a complete package.

I suppose it comes down a single question: was it fun? I'd have to say that it was despite the problems here. Whether or not it's enjoyable enough to overcome its shortcomings is an exercise I'm going to leave up to the reader.