So I’ve been gone for a while and neglected my own blog and as always I have my excuses (lots of work, even on weekends being one of them), but that’s not important yet, so I’ll just get back to my usual shtick.
A while ago I played through Red Faction: Guerrilla. I guess the quickest and easiest way to sum it up would be the cheap man’s GTA on Mars. Except it’s not very cheap, and it’s not exactly GTA either.
Shall we start with the good things first? Well alright then. It’s fun. Or let’s put it this way, it can be a lot of fun. If you like running around, blowing things up and generally causing mayhem, you’ll like Red Faction: Guerrilla. A lot.
Graphically it looks quite nice, it’s not top of the line, but I sure enjoyed watching those explosions. Just like GTA it’s free-form and you can run around doing whatever you’d like. You can do a plot line mission, or maybe a side mission, or even just go and blow up random structures.
Heavy Metal & Mechs. Yes, there are mechs in RF:G, and they are a lot of fun as well. Especially in the Heavy Metal missions which are basically “Destroy as much property/vehicles as quickly as you can”. Sadly, that’s where the fun for me ended.
The story, while it isn’t bad, it’s very predictable, and almost non-existent to be honest. At least when you compare it to other games. While it’s there somewhere in the background, most of the time it’s just destroy this, and that, go from point A to point B and do some more destroying.
Then there’s the difficulty of the game. It’s just too easy in my opinion. As soon as you duck behind an object (and there are plenty of those in the game), it would only take a couple of seconds before your health starts regenerating again, and that at a very quick pace. So as long as you keep killing people and hiding behind objects you’re quite indestructible in the game.
The one thing that annoyed me the most about RF:G though are the loading times. Now this was probably related to my PC configuration, but with a quick Google search I was able to confirm it wasn’t just me, and I certainly wasn’t having the same issue in Mass Effect 2 or BioShock 2.
On average it would take me anywhere between five and nine minutes to load a game. Now this wouldn’t be so bad if it happened just once, but it would also need a complete reload every time I would fail a mission (ok, so this didn’t happen that often, but when it did it was most annoying).
It’s not all bad of course though, and as I said if you like blowing things up, chances are you’ll love Red Faction: Guerrilla. It must be said though that given some more time to polish the game it could have been so much better. A more fleshed out plot, smarter AI, more challenging gameplay.
But if you are willing to overlook those things, then RF:G can be a very enjoyable game.