Red Faction: Guerrilla

The original RED FACTION did not only break new ground and bring a number of innovations to the FPS genre, it was also GREAT FUN to play. It was the first game, if I remember correctly, that incorporated damage to the environments that was not just for effect but played quite an important role in the story. Now, its sequels... well, succession in times of revolution is never easy.

Like any revolution, RED FACTION (III): GUERRILLA, strives to overcome but falls victim to harsh realities - and some bad decisions. But there are also a lot of sparks coming out from under this hammer.

First off, this game tries to be too many things at the same time. It has missions and you get to augment your weapons - but it is clearly not a cRPG. And you get to explore and shoot - but, even if you will find yourself in some hairy situations, the moments of adrenaline rush and intensity are rare. Early on the weapons get too powerful and the importance of explosions overtake the gameplay. Do not get me wrong, I love the smell of a singularity bomb in the morning as much as the next guy - but you CAN have too many explosions.
Oh, and how come one can blow up building and vehicles sky high but the surrounding rocks remain intact? And while I am poking plot holes: where is all the oxygen coming from since Mars seem as barren as a red desert?

Now, unless the hero were to wear armor we would love to see, why was there a need to go from an FPS to a Third-Person Shooter perspective? There have been TPS games that work great (the excellent MAX PAYNE series spring to mind) but more often than not, the over the shoulder camera ruins the immersion - not to mention your aim.

Finally, there is the issue of graphics. I have an 8 months old system at home (i7 920, nVIDIA GTX260, 3GB of RAM, WinXP), yet the graphics were not crisper that (5 years old)...HL2 even when all parameters were all maxed out. I understand that there are way more particles on the screen and the physics of their explosion would make the game unplayable in 2-3 year old systems but I expected more effort on that department.

On the other hand, driving is great fun! A-la GTA, you can hijack almost anything: from personal vehicles to huge utility tracks. And then there are walkers you can augment. And you can drive them almost over or through everything. The most sturdy of them will take quite a beating before dying on you so I really enjoyed walking or driving through walls and demolishing buildings. Who needs a map if you can plow a path straight towards your destination?!

Did I mention explosions? True, they are a bit excessive, yet there is no denying their fun factor! And what I found particularly impressive is how the choice and design of weapons stay within the story of miners revolting on Mars.

Another piece of good news: the game may not be DRM-free (it is protected by Impulse and Windows LIVE online saves) but it has neither any malicious form of SecuROM nor does it require any type of activation.

I've just finished my first play through which took me 32 hours (and I didn't complete many of the side missions)and it was fantastic but still flawed. The story has elements of Star Wars (Dark Empire and Sand People), Total Recall (mining corporations and corrupt governments but no mutants this time) and Mad Max II and Beyond Thunderdome (Marauders and whacky vehicles). You are trying to free Mars from an oppressive regime similar to our Labour government (Labour government - that's an oxymoron right there).

It is an openworld game but not in the same style as Oblivion and Far Cry 2 where I ignored the main plot for weeks at a time. Here you have a great deal of freedom how you tackle missions but they still have to be completed in a certain order. You have to free one area of Mars before you can move onto the next. The best part of the action is the powerfull weapons, particularly the rocket launchers, and the way you can blow everything to bits - it's spectacular. There is a lot of driving with a variety of vehicles from slow trucks to fast but erratic dune buggies to my favourite, a stolen armoured personell carrier. Some of the side missions are driving time trials which are exhilarating. I've never played an actual driving game like Dirt but feel I might try one now.

However it's not all good news - there are a number of problems.

1) It's a Games for Windows Live Game which some other reviews have commented on. It's a pain but not as bad as some make out. I've downloaded and installed the GFWL software from Microsoft and after initial online activation I just play on an offline account and can save without problems. You don't have to be online to play singleplayer which was worrying some people but you do need a one-off online activation.

2) There isn't a quicksave function but a checkpoint style autosave function. There is a manual save function but this takes you back to the start of a mission so is pointless. This seems like a console hangover.

3) There are too many annoying screen prompts (press x to continue etc) which again are console based.

4) Graphics are mixed - some parts look awesome (the view of Eos from the safehouse high up in the mountains for example). However some textures seem low resolution and there is noticable tiling on most open areas (lines where the same block of texture joins the next one). Also quite a few car wheels and pipes are hexagonal not circular which means the polygon count is too low.

5) There isn't an in-game vsync option which is very unusual these days. This isn't a problem for Nvidia graphics card owners as you can easily enable vsync in the forceware but when I owned a Radeon I found the Catalyst vsync just didn't work. Instead you have to use D3D overrider which comes with Riva Tuner (free app - just google it). As an aside you might like to know that the triple buffering in both the Forceware and Catalyst software is OpenGL not DirectX so doesn't work for the vast majority of games. I use D3D overrider to force triple buffering in all games and set it to run when Windows starts. This stops your fps jumping between 60, 30 and 15 when you enable vsync to stop tearing.

6) There seems to be a problem with DX10. If you have Vista or 7 DX10 should be used automatically by this game. If you have XP the game will use DX9. However I've got Windows 7 and the game keeps switching between the two DX modes at random on start up. You can tell because ambient occlusion and sun shafts disappear from the advanced graphics options under DX9 and the framrate increases. Other people have commented on this on the forums and there doesn't seem to be a fix. Personally I'd like to be able to force DX9 because I find it looks the same as DX10 but you get higher framrates.

7) The game needs a good system to run smoothly. I use a Core i7 920 quad core processor with 6GB DDR3 RAM and an Nvidia GTX 285 2GB graphics card. At 1920x1200 in DX9 with full settings but no antialiasing FRAPS shows an average fps of 50+ (might be higher if I switched vsync off). The minimum never goes below 25 in very heavy combat scenes. In DX10 this average drops into the 30's but I can get it back into the 40's by turning ambient occlusion off (this is a sysyem hog and I can't see what it does - case of the Emperor's New Clothes I think). I don't get any stuttering or noticeable slowdowns using either api. If you have a lower spec system you may get problems with the explosions as the physics calculations the CPU is making are vast. In some missions you are blowing up whole squadrons of tanks and armoured cars in a frantic battle and the smoke from explosions is so thick and realistic you can hardly see. This is probably a game where a quad core processor is better than a dual core to deal with these CPU based physics.

Overall this is one of the best games I've played and I suggest you get it asap. I'm about to play the prequel which was extra DLC requiring additional payment in the console versions but comes free with the PC version to find out more about the Marauders. It's a pity the developer didn't take a little more care porting the game over from the console otherwise this could achieved legendary status.

I hope this review is useful to you.

Update:
I've just noticed (1st May 2010) that another patch is available for Red Faction. You can now enable vsync in-game and there is a switch for the command line which selects DX9 or DX10 among other tweaks - well done THQ

I'd seen some gameplay footage of this game and it looked really fun. I also recall really enjoying the previous Red Faction releases.

I saw this on here for £5 and thought "Why not? What's the worst that could happen"

This is one of the few cases where I would actually want my £5 back. Had I not already used the serial code... or at least I think I did.

Because, as mentioned in other reviews, nothing about setting up this game is simple, bar choosing the directory for it.

To save your game, you need to be either have and existing or create a new Windows Live account.

I used my old Xbox 360 account, said it was downloading the profile and then said I needed an update.

The game then proceeded to crash on the update, so I tried again another 6 or 7 times until I decided I may as well make a new Windows Live account to see if it helps.

It didn't so I decided to test out the start of the game without the ability to save, which waasn't bad. The vehicle control and weapon aim is vague, unresponsive and lackluster...

But blowing everything up provides enough fun to keep you amused for an hour or two if you're blessed with the same primitive sense of humour as myself.

TL;DR?

If you're willing to risk £5 to get past the shoddy, touch and go Windows Live setup... You're most probably stuck with what is essentially a very expensive demo game, here.