It doesn’t look like much, but I spent hours on this map in Red Faction.
The glass effects are still really nice and satisfying. But this game isn’t known for
its glass effects. It’s known for the GEOMOD engine. This would let you destroy whatever
you wanted. For example: This blew me away. AND the walls! Hohoho.
I’d spend hours carving out holes, caves and tunnels on this map. I think there was
a limit to how many holes you could make. The game only supported up to 32 MB of RAM,
after all. Just imagine what it could do with today’s gigabytes!
Its last party trick was to recognise when something was no longer being held up, at
which point it would make it drop to the floor in a realistic fashion.
Okay… a sort of realistic fashion. Not bad for 2001.
The second game was kind of the same, but wasn’t quite so good.
But then came Red Faction: Guerrilla. Sadly, you can’t blow holes through the ground
any more. Nor the cliffs. But watch this. I still don’t know how they managed it,
but they designed each building with proper physics! You can smash bits off and once you’ve
done enough damage to the structure it will collapse under its own weight.
This was all managed on the Xbox 360 generation of consoles! Again, imagine what could be
done with it now, with modern computers. Sadly, the company made a sequel that wasn’t
quite so good, and then went bankrupt. What a shame.
Because Red Faction: Guerrilla showed the series’ potential. I’ve played through
it several times now, despite a bland world design, boring characters, repetitive, dull
and infuriating missions… don’t get me wrong, it tries its best to put me off, but
the destruction THAT good that I return to it, again and again.
This video will show the destruction. Don’t worry. But I also have to show you the friendly
AI because I swear they’ve gotten stupider since I last played it. They’ve gone from
useless to actually being quite offensive. And I hate them.
Wait for it…
If it wasn’t so infuriating it would be funny.
They make a beeline straight for you! Especially if you’re trying to get out of a combat
environment, they’ll be sure to block your escape and to make your experience as unpleasant
as possible. You know in GTA how people would pull out in front of you if you were trying
to get away from the police? It felt like some kind of conspiracy. But it’s worse
than that here because they’re supposed to want to help me. I’m their savior, the
one who fights for their rights, starting an uprising on Mars! It penalises you if they
die… but sometimes it’s still worth it just to see them go up in a firey mess.
If you’re waiting for your 5 star police wanted level to disappear, you might try hiding
somewhere, only for them to RUN TO YOUR POSITION AND TO START FIRING, alerting all guards within
a mile of your whereabouts.
You’ll try to destroy an enemy base, but they’ll spawn to ‘assist’ you by standing
EXACTLY WHERE YOU PLANT YOUR EXPLOSIVES. Sure enough they’ll die and it will penalise
your score and set your progress in the game back.
Here I am, making use of cover between firing rockets at the bad guys. They come along,
block my vision, then stand in front of my gun, then pretty much immediately die and
undo the progress I made from getting into the fight in the first place.
It’s enough to make you wish them harm.
But don’t worry- they do that enough to each other. The sheer lack of empathy some
of the drivers showed made me pity the victims, as they were run over over and over again
by their fellow man. I’m cold, but some of these peoples’ hearts are downright frozen.
It can’t be easy to program AI to work in a world where everything can be destroyed.
I thought this guy was trying to cross a bridge that no longer existed- so I moved my truck
out of the way, only to discover that he was just trying to ram my vehicle off the road
all along. Sometimes a bridge will be perfectly fine
but they’ll suddenly decide to end it all, right there, right then.
So many suicidal tendancies.
There’s even a mission where you have to save them all from a barrage of artillery.
And by ‘save’, I mean you run up to them and tell them to get out of there… because
they haven’t figured that out just yet. They’re just standing around in destructible
buildings, waiting for the inevitable to happen. There’s one who thinks that being upstairs
in this house is a good idea- I tried it twice and both times him being killed failed the
mission, so I was all like ‘screw it I’ll just make a youtube video about this instead’.
Now here I am.
Right, enough of the NPCs. Time to get on to the destruction!
I’ve deliberately kept the destruction relatively subdued so far. Don’t worry, it gets bigger.
But I think there’s something nice about small scale stuff. It really lets you appreciate
HOW much detail there is in every post and sign. Things don’t just break- they fragment.
They bend. Small chunks fall off to give the impression that they’re putting up some
resistance against your ridiculous sledgehammer. Signs splinter. Not sure where they got the
wood for it… but whatever. There’s something so meaty about each and
every swing of your hammer. Unlike most games, your melee attack in this game isn’t a mere
last resort in desperate moments. It’s a formidable weapon in its own right, and more
than capable of raising medium-sized structures to the ground in a dozen smacks or so.
Not meaning to be a killjoy but ramming each of these barriers in the same spot made them
break in the same way, so a bit like in the game, ‘Control’, I do think the breakable
spots in Red Faction are pre-designed. But it doesn’t matter! There are enough of them
that it took this sort of testing to discover that- before this point I had done 2 whole
playthroughs of the game without knowing. Plus the initial breakage is only part of
the fun. Most games are all like ‘yup, you’ve destroyed
it, nothing more to see here’. But the fun you can have from Red Faction’s destruction
STARTS with the initial breakage. Where this game really shines is when the
destruction leads to yet MORE destruction. A tower falling over will demolish anything
in its path. A collapsing billboard will hammer itself into the ground until there’s nothing
left but small fragments. But just because it’s collapsing, doesn’t
mean it’s given up completely! Check out this tower here, which gets awkwardly lodged
in a hard to reach spot. I’ve had buildings abruptly stop mid-collapse, becoming stable
again, albeit a bit shorter than before. Or how about this building- the roof of which
remains intact, then after some more smashing neatly breaks in two. It just makes you want
to smack it again doesn’t it. And this destruction does at points take me
by surprise, as cover that would usually be my friend decides to betray me.
You can’t beat a good bridge to test the physics in this game. As if you hadn’t already
noticed, structures in this game collapse once enough of their supports have been knocked
away, just as they would in real life. The bridges in this game I’d say are reassuringly
strong- you can demolish a section of it and it will remain standing. But they always fall
eventually! I don’t think that will ever get old.
Look at how this once solid surface pretty much liquidates and flows down this hill.
It’s next-gen stuff. But… last-gen. And then there’s this beast of a bridge,
which is perhaps out of our league for now. But we’ll still lightly graze it.
The one thing the technology can’t quite do yet is buildings large enough to have a
good fight inside. There’s something undeniably exhilarating about being in a building as
it’s getting chunks blown out of it, perhaps the best example of which I had here.
There’s clearly potential for this on a larger scale- suddenly you don’t just have
to worry about enemies, but also about flying rocks and dangerous holes opening up beneath
you. Later on in the game there are these apartment
blocks, but they’re too claustrophobic to house any meaningful fight… and it seems
like it’s pushing the engine too far, as sometimes, rather than collapsing spectacularly,
entire buildings would simply disappear. What does impress me is how it remembers the
stuff you’ve destroyed. You don’t come back 5 minutes later to find it all magically
rebuilt. It’s the opposite, in fact. After dozens of hours I’d return to early zones,
only to still find parts destroyed as reminders that I had been there before. And I’m not
SURE, but sometimes I’d find foundations of a new building where I thought I had destroyed
one previously. So maybe there’s some sort of world regeneration going on, but I’m
not sure. Similar to the destruction model itself, it’s probably flawed, but you’d
have to really be looking to notice. I love watching the largest buildings eventually
succumb to their damage, collapsing into a horrible, horrible, wonderful mess that someone
somewhere will have to clean up. Since this is what you’re here for, I’ll
just show a few examples before moving on. Sometimes they’ll tease you by looking like
they’re not ready to fall… but then they’re like ‘surprise!’.
All things considered, I’m impressed by how infrequently it got the physics wrong.
Get enough speed in some of the bigger vehicles and you can carve your way all the way through
a building. Don’t expect to know what’s going on- turns out visibility is poor when
you’re ramming through layer upon layer of concrete.
The biggest vehicles are the walkers, which are effectively giant battle-bots that can
walk through structures without sustaining any damage at all. Your time with these things
is limited as they do feel like they’re making your already-OP character just that
bit more overpowered again. The rocket launcher deserves some praise.
It’s got a range and accuracy that just ISN’T FAIR on the enemies! There’s one
mission where you have to run about a quarry, blowing up loud speakers. But if you have
a rocket launcher, you can just stand at the beginning and blow them all up from there.
Some might call this unbalanced. But I like it.
While I find a lot of the missions annoying, I did like this one where you shoot at enemy
vehicles as they approach. I like it because the rocket launcher is so overpowered, you’re
only spending a fraction of your time shooting them. The rest you can spend, smashing up
passing structures, improving your score faster than you can at any other time in-game.
Now I don’t have problems, but I also like how when the enemies in gun turrets get struck,
their bodies flail about like a tube-man. And it’s always fun to chuck sticky nades
at people and to watch them panic and run about.
In fact, that’s something I had hours of fun with as a child in the original game as
well! Not that your hammer is any slouch… but
if you’re in a big stompy robot and hit them in just the right way, you can really
make them go flying! Any way. I ran about, I upgraded my stuff
and am finally stronk enough to take down the big bridge.
These supports are one of just a few structures in-game that seems impervious to normal attacks-
thus needing the dissolver gun you get later on.
…Meh, I preferred the smaller ones. Sometimes, all these destruction elements
come together and it really makes the Red Faction experience special.
So while the company that made it has since dedicated themselves to Saints Row, the Red
Faction name has been sold to Nordic Games, who re-released the game last year as the
pun-tastic ‘RE-MARS-tered Edition’. If I’m honest, I can’t see any differences
with it. But it’s great that they’ve identified Guerrilla as the game that deserved their
effort the most… and it keeps the possibility of a sequel alive. If the publisher can keep
off 8chan long enough to make it happen. For destruction I give this game 10/10!
If you like EXPLOSIONS, I have one covering the ones in Red Faction Guerrilla just here.
There might also be a bit of destruction.