Red Faction: Guerrilla

Red Faction, in case you missed it, was a cool first person shooter (set on Mars) for the PC, PS2 and Xbox. Its hook was a trick of its very special "geomod" engine - you could actually destroy the ground, tunneling through solid rock to skirt a door for which you hadn't been able to find the keycard (etc). Set in a series of tunnels underneath the surface of the red planet, your goal was to defeat the evil authoritarian government and bring about a better future for the people.

Jump forward a few years and times have changed - much newer, fancier tech abounds and people are less easily impressed. Destruction has become something of a buzzword recently, with titles like Mercenaries 2 and Battlefield: Bad Company championing the concept as the future of the shooter genre. In those games, however, the destruction is a trick - buildings collapse only as part of a pre-canned animation. The impression of power and chaos was just an illusion.

Enter Red Faction: Guerrilla. Scrapping the original engine, Red Faction this time around is not about destroying the land. Instead, Red Faction's hook for it's third outing is the destruction of buildings and other man-made objects, such as bridges. Instead of opting for a pre-canned system, Red Faction uses physics in a way not seen (not on this scale, anyway) ever before: the buildings are actually constructed out of individual materials, each with their own real-world physics properties.

To create a building like a house, for example, the walls are made up of sheets of plaster, lengths of lumber, roofing iron - etc. In fact, the physics properties are so important that the artists needed to be trained in architecture as the first buildings they put together looked pretty enough but they'd fall down when the game engine was switched on.

This construction of physics materials into larger structures has a number of significant gameplay payoffs - if you hammer at a structure inexpertly, for example, you might not do much damage to it or at best, consume a lot of ammunition to destroy it. Analyze the building, however, and a single blast at a key structural weakpoint will bring the whole thing down. The most significant reward for the dev team's work, however, is the incredibly visceral feeling of satisfaction you get when you see these massive structures reacting precisely to your blows as you might expect a building to react were you to fire rockets at it.

That brings us handily to the weapons, of which there are many and various. There's standard stuff, guns that won't be unfamiliar to an FPS player. In addition to those shotguns, etc, there are some rather nifty things to wield in your campaign of destruction. The hammer, for example, is not only awesome for tearing a hole in a wall so you can shoot enemies through it, it also handily tears a hole in the side of an enemy's head. The singularity bomb is glorious to behold, as it sucks in anything anywhere near it (including vehicles, people, etc) before detonating and flinging it's engorged contents at high velocity in all directions.

One of the coolest "weapons" we saw was the rebuilder. Not really a weapon per-se, the rebuilder does what it says on the label - it reconstructs objects which have been destroyed. It's useful in singleplayer but where it really comes into its own is the multiplayer side of the equation. In addition to key multiplayer objectives (where you might have to destroy an enemy simulation then rebuild it to claim it as your own), the ability to reconstruct cover that your opposite number just destroyed is a skill which looks to be very handy indeed.

In addition to that which we've covered here in detail, there are also vehicles to play around in, including three different types of mechanised walker things, each of which has it's own purpose, extensive multiplayer options and loads more variety in the level layout and visual styles. Mars is being terraformed, you see, so there are areas with lush vegetation in addition to all that red dirt.

It's still a while off (it's not due until Quarter 1, 2009) but given what we've seen so far, we're anticipating something very special indeed. We'll keep you posted as more comes to hand - this is one to watch in '09.