The sensation of power that came with using Parker’s hammer for the first time was awesome. I don’t know what space age technology or magic is packed into it, but it breaks stuff really well. With it, you can topple any building in the game, which is probably a lot more fun than it should be. During the few hours I’ve put into the game, the most fun I had with it was though aimlessly traversing through Mars, while destroying every building I came across.
But what’s there to do in Red Faction: Guerilla besides break stuff? How about joining the revolution? The game starts with the evil Earth Defence Force killing your brother, which is as good a reason as any to join a rebel group. In this open world third person shooter, your primary goal is to overthrow these unjust EDF jerks by any means necessary. I haven’t played enough to get a grasp of all of the potential mission types, but the story is told in a way where your motivation for doing these things is very clear and focused.
From the few missions I played, I got the sense that there’s a lot of gunplay involved, which worked well enough. Aiming and shooting felt natural, though the ability to pull the left trigger to zoom would have been nice. My problem with the combat was that I seemed to get outnumbered really quickly. On normal difficulty, I was dying a lot, and struggling through drawn out firefights, which isn’t the game’s strongest suit. In the interest of not giving up on the game immediately, I dropped the difficulty down to Casual just to experience more of it without throwing my controller away in frustration. Did you have issues with the difficulty in this game?
Though I passed on this game for many years, I never stopped hearing about how great it was. Though I’m glad to have finally gotten around to it, I feel like the game’s age has deteriorated some of the experience. I probably would have enjoyed its strengths and accepted its weaknesses more if this was the hot new jam, and not just another game on my backlog list. Still, I appreciate what its doing and might come back to see this through someday. At the very least, I’ll come back to smash more buildings with that hammer.
In Third Person 