Red Faction: Guerrilla (Xbox 360)

Get your ass to Mars for some out-of-this-world pyrotechnics, personality and gameplay.
6/4/2009 3:19 PM | 3 Comments | Page 3 of 4

Martian McGuffin

Red Faction deserves immense credit for not taking the usual videogame route of carelessly tossing in a McGuffin and letting the gameplay take up the slack. "McGuffin" is a term coined by Alfred Hitchcock. It refers to an object in a story that the audience might not care about, but it motivates the characters in the story. For instance, a rare stamp, plans to the Death Star, the Ark of the Covenant, and Milla Jovovich have all been McGuffins. Most videogames opt for simply a glowing ball with a fancy name like Ray Sphere, Piece of Eden or Crystal of Unimaginable Power. But there's no mere McGuffin in Red Faction: Guerrilla. There is, instead, something called the Nano Forge, which might sound like a name slapped onto a glowing ball. Instead, it's really cool and useful. It figures prominently into the gameplay. And I know exactly why the bad guys want it so badly, because Red Faction: Guerrilla is happy to let me play with its awesome power.

The writing is mostly serviceable, but it does a terrible job of developing any sort of villain, and the main threat you fight at the end of the game isn't very well developed. Mostly, it's a shame there's not more of a Veerhoven sensibility here. The setting is perfect for satire, or at least a little pointed political commentary (Mars as Iraq is teased, but it could just as well be an accident). Unfortunately, as with Saints Row 2, Volition seems content to aim pretty low. And also like in Saints Row 2, there's a weird episode involving torture that just seems as mean-spirited and out of place as injecting a dude with acid and locking his girlfriend into the trunk of a car and then crushing it. Who's the sadistic bastard at Volition responsible for these unwelcome tone shifts? The game wraps up -- well, the storyline, at any rate -- with one of those terrible final missions that you'll have to fail and replay so many times that you're liable to just turn around and leave Mars unsaved. Seriously, game designers, can you start going out with a graceful note instead of a long, drawn-out combat slog that confuses challenge with discouragement?

Finally, the multiplayer game adds a whole new set of legs to Red Faction: Guerrilla. The weapons from the single-player game are combined with backpacks, each conferring a special ability. These backpack abilities range from standard combat buffs to stealth to new ways to navigate the level (note that the Rhino Pack that lets you run through walls wouldn't be possible in any other game). This synergy of weapons and backpacks is the heart of the multiplayer gameplay, but since the items are scattered randomly around the map, you'll have to improvise rather than just rely on your favorite combo. Of course, you can also set up custom games. The breadth of options is almost as flexible as in Halo 3. A steady stream of unlockables -- mostly cosmetic -- adds just the right amount of incentive to the ranked games. The "Wrecking Crew" party game lets players take turns wreaking havoc for points, but really it just makes me want to play the core game.