Destruction, friends, beer. All elements of a great night for a gamers, which Red Faction Guerrilla promises to provide. Volition and THQ return us to the red planet in the role of a terrorist and insurgent, which is surprisingly fun despite the negative stigma attached to the role in this day and age. Your mission is blow up everything of the bad guys’ and follow some stereotypical summer movie plot line. In this installment of the Red Faction series the focus of destruction is on buildings, beautiful explosions dismembering man-made objects and baddies too.

Destruction is the theme and main focus of this game; the sheer fun of laying everything to waste kept me playing hour after hour. Taking a hammer, a few rockets, and driving a truck through a building to listen to the slow creaking, painful shearing, and watching the implosion of a building was pretty amazing. The arcade style gameplay in a third person open world game was a ton of fun. Missions are varied, not too long, and don’t get dragged out with ancillary or secondary objectives which keeps things focused, fun, and not overly complex. If you aren’t that interested in the story there are plenty of mini-games are available to entertain players and mission mandates are vague at best, allowing players to do things any way they chose.  Replacing a points system is salvage, which is earned by picking up wreckage or completing missions/mini-games, not that players need any more incentive to destroy everything.  Multi-player adds another fun dimension to game with different online and offline game modes. Having a few friends over for Wrecking Crew is a great way to spend a night on the couch sharing a good smash with some brews and bros.

Even with all the happiness that the explosions and destruction in Red Faction can bring to a gamer’s life, it also brings plenty of pain. Blowing things up and leveling buildings typically result in death, with an astonishingly high frequency of that death being your own. While sending debris flying everywhere kills bad guys, realize it can, and probably will, kill you too. If flying I-beams don’t end you then expect the wave after wave of enemy troops to machine gun you to death instead. Where they come from I have no damn clue because I just blew up their barracks and every other enemy installation in the area. After completing a mission or destroying anything of value, expect hordes of the little bastards to appear after you and they are not the dumbest of AI’s either. The dumbest of AI’s is reserved for your fellow insurgents and random NPC’s. Consider yourself lucky if friendlies don’t run into your line of fire or the building where you just set a bomb. It quickly became easier when in trouble to give up escaping back to the safe house and allow baddies to kill you so you respawn without having to waste time driving across the world.  The only penalty was a slight change in morale and the pain of another extremely long loading screen.  At several points in the game (when it wasn’t busy loading) I experienced a slow down while I rampaged around a crowded area causing a plethora of explosions, something I thought the game should be able to handle smoothly.   My final disappointment was being limited to destroying only buildings despite the previous entries in this series allowing you to destroy the planet as well as buildings. More than once I wanted to cause a landslide to take out a target, but that’s just not happening in this game. In a game where you are a miner fighting for miners, I was hoping to be able to move some dirt around.

Red Faction Guerrilla is the summer movie of video games. Wafer thin plot of a hero fighting for freedom with big explosions and a girl who never gets naked enough (or at all in this case) to really satisfy the audience. Continuity, character development, and all that jazz is left back on Earth in this game. It’s all about the fun, the simple game mechanics, and blowing stuff up. Red Faction Guerrilla has plenty of problems, but the childish delight of destroying buildings, which is something I haven’t enjoyed this much since smashed my little brother’s Lego city, is enough to carry the game. The long lasting appeal of the game will be the multiplayer and simply passing the controller between friends amongst some beers as you level everything on Mars and in single player learning new, more creative, and more spectacular ways to blow stuff up. On that basis, this title just barely squeaks out a 4 out of 5 stars.