Do you like blowing stuff up? Do you?  Do you?  I sure do.  I like blowing stuff up action movie style.  You know, beating some guy to death with a hammer, setting a few remote mines near well placed explosive barrels, then shooting some baddies as I steal a truck, causing the enemy come running after me just as I detonate the mines blowing up all the buildings and most of the baddies.  For the guys who survived, I’ll drive the truck through the flaming wreckage and run them down.

That was the first 5 minutes of gameplay for me in Red Faction: Guerrilla.  The opening sequence plays like a movie, including Action Movie Voice Over Guy.  The story? Do you really care?  Fine, it’s about one man, blowing stuff up to right the wrongs of the oppressor corporation/government on Mars or something, didn’t you listen to the Voice Over Guy?

The demo is one level and it’s short and very large.  This is not the classic First Person Shooter Red Faction.  This is all from the third person, slightly over the shoulder view, but in an open world setting.  You can run in any direction, jump into any vehicle, and see plenty of NPC’s walking around.  The demo did not include any direct NPC interaction, but hopefully that will be included in the full version, otherwise it would just be a lot of disappointing civilians.  A neat component of the civilians are they can support your revolution if you save them from the harsh hand of the EDF and destroy EDF facilities.  Or you can let them suffer and get killed by EDF goons.  Either way it will impact your Morale Meter, which if ranked high enough will unlock new weapons in crates scattered around the world.

The game plays like an action movie.  You shoot stuff, it falls apart, you use a bomb, it blows up.  BEWARE OF FLYING DEBRIS!  I’ve been killed by several twisted former I-beams as they have hurdled back to the ground after a short journey skyward.  Turns out there is plenty of gravity on Mars… that was unexpected.  One thing to note was I died a lot.  I don’t normally die very easily in games, but in this game it didn’t take much.  There is a cover system which helps you avoid taking damage, so learn to make use of it, the baddies will.  Oh yeah, do realize the destruction of the environment bit does work for them as well so expect a well place grenade to make short work of your cover.  Charging in guns blazing doesn’t really do the trick either.  It could be due to my crap aim, the baddies being a little too resilient, or the troubles I initially had changing weapons, regardless it’s still fun.  The second part of the demo is controlling a mech through EDF forces to a truck where the game turns into an on-rails drive & shoot with you doing the shooting, formula – yes and enjoyable – yes.  The only comment I have about the destructible environment I noticed on this part, I wasn’t able to make massive pot-holes for these guys to drive into.  You can destroy everything but the ground.  I wanted to tunnel under the bastards like the Vietcong… what kind of Guerrilla can’t tunnel? Pathetic. Even Fracture let me dive into the ground and shape the landscape.  I hope the GeoMod 2.0 has the same capability, they just didn’t turn it on for the demo.

The controls are fairly decent, I did grow to like the weapon selection function of using the Left Button and selecting one of four weapons from A, B, X, Y.   You can control the mappings whenever you reach one of the weapons crates, of which plenty are spread around the level.  I advise anyone picking this title up to watch to keep your eyes peeled and your ears clean for debris raining down or that clatter of metal and bodies landing near your location.  The sound was pretty full on hearing bullets strike, metal shear, and successive explosions blend together for a pretty chaotic evening.

Go piss off a couple bad guys, steal a truck and drive it through a building, you’ll get the picture real quick.