There can’t be many game series out there where most people's first experience is actually with the third part of the series.
GTA is an example of this, and maybe a lot of people played 'Street Fighter 2: Turbo' first, (Which is the third version of SFII after 'World Warrior' and 'Champion Edition') but I can’t think of any others.
I have no knowledge of the first two 'Red Faction' games at all. I don’t know how they play, I don’t know if they are any good, I don’t even know what system(s) they were on.
Marketing people get a bad rep in the world of video games. They’re the people who decide that putting a shaven-headed white guy on the cover of every game in history is a good idea, after all.
But marketing works, and the above example says more about the ‘closed space’ of videogames than it does about a lack of creativity from the people selling them.
So when, at some point in the marketing phase of 'Red Faction III', someone said “We don’t want to deter people who didn’t play parts I & II, let's call it something else.” it was a very wise move - as it turns out the people who didn’t play parts I & II were pretty much everybody.
Alec Mason is a guy whose [Spoiler] brother dies in the prologue, and so he takes his vacant place in the titular 'Red Faction'; a band of resistance folk who are reclaiming Mars from… an evil corporation… I think… possibly military types… who are called the EDF.
Which is weird at first because, y’know: “EDF! EDF! EDF!”
Anyway, Alec needs to take down the EDF to reclaim Mars and be a hero to the people he just met. He does this by employing a campaign of leaflet dropping and bake sales to raise awareness DESTROYING EVERYTHING!
Almost every single building, vehicle, and object on Mars, did I mention we’re on Mars? It doesn’t matter - we’re on Mars and everything can be knocked down, blown up, or otherwise reduced to a pile of rubble that can be scavenged for parts to be converted to provide better weapons so that it’s easier to knock down, blow up, etc, etc.
It’s brilliant.
However, the EDF (still weird) don’t take kindly to some grieving skinhead (yes, he’s on the cover) reducing their infrastructure to rubble, and are pretty well equipped to prevent that happening. By which I mean: You have a hammer, they have a tank that fires electricity.
Well, not just a hammer. You actually wield any one of four weapons. These get increasingly creative as the game goes on until, a good few weapon-unlocks down the line, you can even replace your trusty hammer with a Singularity Grenade. That’s a grenade that creates a black hole, for those not up on the parlance.
'Red Faction Guerrilla' is in the 'Crackdown', 'Just Cause', and more recent 'Saints Row' ballpark of open world games, in that it actively encourages creativity in completing its objectives.
For me, this is Chapter one, page one in the “How to make a game fun” manual.
I failed an early mission to rescue a couple of hostages because I got over-run with enemy soldiers. So on the second attempt I drove around the back, knocked a hole in the wall, knocked a hole in the guards, and then the three of us skipped off into the sunset with very little trouble.
And on page two of that manual it just says DISTRACTION in big red letters…
As I mentioned in my 'Urban Strike' post recently, I love it when I set off on a mission and never actually make it to a waypoint because something else catches my eye en route. The 'Just Cause' series is the undefeated champion in this regard, but 'Red Faction Guerilla' is not far behind. From buildings that look like fun to destroy, enemy outposts that look like easy pickings (but turn out to be hornets nests of lasers and pain), to outcrops of ‘ore’ that reap salvage points that can be converted to provide better weapons so that it’s easier to knock down, blow up, etc, etc.
The vehicles, of course, are quite important too. Mars is a big planet and you’ll be rolling across it in some really well designed, very industrial looking, vehicles. They come in all shapes and sizes and all are good, bouncy fun to drive about the planet/crash into buildings with.
I know there are people who like games to have a deep plot and ‘EMOTION’ but there’s a lot to be said for just parking all that and bumbling around the red planet being successful at a game by literally just mucking about with sticky grenades and explosive barrels.
But, there are a couple of things that prevent 'Red Faction Guerrilla' being an endless knock-about lark of destruction. Or one thing really, and another that is a consequence of that thing.
This game is hard. Or, more accurately, it has a level of difficulty that catches you out. You expect a game that's so much fun to play to be a bit lenient with the whole dying thing, but no such luck.
It only takes one failed attempt to attach half a dozen sticky bombs to the front of your own vehicle before ram-raiding a power station, to learn that you have to be a little bit careful with blast radii in this game.
Also the EDF are dicks; they reinforce quickly and usually, at least early on, have much bigger weapons than you.
But difficulty doesn’t detract from the fun in itself, it just means you die more often than you would expect. The fun vacuum comes when that happens and you face the second part of the problem: Loading is sooo slow.
I expect this is a Switch thing, and I can’t claim that it’s great to twiddle your thumbs for what feels like an hour after a terminal event, but, if, like me, you grew up in the arcades, you’ll remember that you always did your best run on your last 50p...
Obviously it’s not by design and this is very much a case of searching for a silver lining - but the load screens seem so long because the game is so much fun, and avoiding being taken away from the fun for a week and a half is a real incentive to not run out in front of the lightning tank carrying a barrel of hydrogen this time, Andy!
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