Red Faction: Guerrilla

[[HSP]Sonix]

You may or may not have heard about this game and it's speciality; everything can be destroyed.
Now, when you hear everything you probably think 'Some story-based buildings can be blown up.'
wrong.
Every building, bridge, car, wall, bench, bookcase and computer can be reduced to absolute nothingness with ease.


Story.
Your name is Alec Mason. You're a miner from earth who came to mars for work. You arrive and your brother takes you to an abandoned research facility, where you are told to do some demolitions to gain some salvage. You do so, and return to him, only to watch him get shot by the EDF. The Earth Defence Force is a corporation that's taken over mars, much like the Ulthor corp from RF1. Lucky for you the Red Faction arrives and takes out the EDF, saving your life. You swear to avenge your brother and take down the EDF, and do just that over the course of the game.

Backstory.
SPOILER ALERT
Back in red faction 1 the Ulthor corporation forced the people on mars to start mining like hell, they really needed the stuff or something. Eventually, you (Parker, a miner from earth) pick up weapons together with Eos, leader of the red faction of that time and kick some Ulthor ass. Eventually the EDF hops on over to rape the Ulthor corp and keep some peace. The first place you get to in RF: Guerrilla is called Parker, and the luxury area is called Eos. Also, the Ulthor scientists ran their ass over to the caves and hid there, scavenging what they could, eventually becoming the marauders in RF: Guerrilla.

Gameplay
It's painfully obvious that this game wasn't developed for PC; When you're in cars the camera automatically pans back to view your front, tanks have to be moved manually, (in ut2004 you aim and the turret moves to your target, in this game you have to move the turret, which is horribly slow.) the small walker's camera is too fast, the big walker's camera is too slow. After a while you get a jetpack, which you can activate by double jumping. Sadly, it also activates when you hold your sprint button in the air, which makes quick landings a lot harder.

The good
You can run around destroying every building, jacking guns from your (many) enemies and beating the shit out of them with your hammer. You can take cars from every civilian since you're some sort of god or something and you can steal empty EDF cars. If you go over 2 Mp/h you can drive straight through walls and once you get your hands on a tank / walker, buildings'shouldn't even be considered as obstacles anymore. Speaking of walkers, if you ever get your hands on one of these (which is very rare, they don't permanently spawn anywhere.) You're in for a treat. They are almost indestructable and can take down entire bases. When you're attacking EDF emplacement some other Guerillas will usually come over and 'help' you. Your hammer instakills soldiers and breaks right through buildings. When you take down buildings (which is still awesome) and are dumb enough to stay inside the building will collapse on top of you. After that you'll just stand up and walk away with 3/4 your health left. Also, you can survive a car explosion to the face once you get armor lvl2. The world is HUGE. There's 5 sectors, each of which you have to liberate over the course of the game, and each of which has it's own colors, building style and vehicles. Once you get Guerrilla Express you can easily warp from safehouse to safehouse by pointing at it and pressing Y, but if you don't ahve that getitng across the world can be a real pain. When you die you respawn with all the stuff you gained before you died, without any real penalties. (You lose 3 morale.)

The bad
Rapists. The EDF has unlimited units and will gladly share them with you, always have weapon emplacements, normal tanks, missile tanks, Vulcan airplanes, Gauss bombers, better weapons, better armor and better aim. In the beginning of the game your equipment sucks, so you take major damage and can hardly do any damage back. There's usually 20 more EDF than that there are guerrillas (which is usually 1; You.) And they're usually armed with heavy weaponry.
Your guerillas suck, they can't kill anyone and usually just get their heads shot off, making the morale fall, which gives you less ammo. The weapons are somewhat lacking in power, the mining explosives you get only do alot of damage if you throw them all in one spot. Some missions are just retardedly hard, even on easy (Attacking a full-staffed EDF emplacement with just a pick-up truck, a hammer, some explosives and an assault rifle doesn't work.) Once you get near the end of the game the enemy will start using Gauss guns, which are rapid-firing hard-hitting wall-penetrating deathmachines, and they'll also deploy the elite soldiers, (the guys in the white suits.) and give the old soldiers riot shields. (that block EVERYTHING.) You'd think that being able to destroy every wall and building would give you a tactical advantage, but actually it just gives them more ways to shoot you. It takes ages to get somewhere, because once you finally get a vehicle and don't crash there's probably some EDF patrol that attacks you, and if you ahve EDF on your tail you can't accept missions.
For a game that focuses on physics the game has bad physics. If someone taps you with a car (or if you walk into a parked car) you go into ragdoll mode, if you get hit by a small piece of debris you go into ragdoll mode, if a EDF guy hits twice you go into ragdoll mode, if you try to jump out of your car (which takes 3 seconds) you, you guessed it, go into ragdoll mode. You don't stand up for 5 more seconds and usually get shot/run over/ get hit by debris and die.

Graphics/Sound
The game looks normal for todays standards, although the textures are horribly low-res. apart from that everything's good. Nice effects, nice lighting, nice vehicles, guns, other meshes, everything's good. The sound, however, is utterly screwed. In the main game it only works on stereo, and only on low quality, but in cutscenes the sound is normal! It'll probably be patched some time, but for now this is really annoying.


Overall
Red Faction: Guerrilla is a fun game, but apart from breaking down every building has little replay value.
It has a nice story, looks good, but sounds bad.
I'd give it a 8/10, and i reccomend you try it some time.



Gallery

Cliff warning.

Action shot!

Artillery mission, check out the text on the left.

Abandoned EDF Building.

Floating stuff bug

Eos Building before and after I play with it with my Missile tank.


The fancy ambulance in Eos



And a little fun to top it all off.

[Sergeant Kelly]

Oooh, nice review. You wrote it?

I'm debating whether or not to buy this for PC. Is it worth the 50-60 bucks?

[[HSP]Sonix]

[[HSP]Sonix]

DLC
Forgot about the DLC.

The game was originally released for consoles, and got some DLC. The PC version already has this DLC, free of charge.
The second DLC consists of a few maps for Wrecking crew, which is not really important.
The first DLC however, consists of the bonus mission 'Marina Valley.' Set a few years before the events of RF:G, you play as [spoiler]Samanya.[/spoiler] You're a marauder, and your sister is the leader of the marauders. The EDF managed to capture her, so you have to go bust her out. You do so, and then take revenge on the EDF.
The upgrading system works a bit differently from the normal game, instead of having to buy upgrades you get them instantly when you complete marauder actions. You also get access to two new vehicles (marauder buggy and truck) and a few new guns (Marauder lance thing, EDF SMG, Super gauss gun, and another thing i forgot about.) Marina Valley adds a bunch of hours to the game, and gives you some backstory to go along with the normal game.

[[HSP]@uToPL@y]

[[HSP]Sonix]

Actually, i checked, but you didn't really write anything about it.

[[HSP]@uToPL@y]