THQ Gamers Day - Red Faction Guerilla

by: Chuck - posted: 4/4/2008 8:00:00 PM

The original Red Faction featured some fairly innovative destructible environments at the time it was released. The GeoMod system had some cool features but it was only worked in certain parts of certain levels. When I asked why they went back to the Red Faction franchise (and not FreeSpace…grr) I was told it was because they were looking at the new physics technology and figured that the Red Faction franchise would be a great game to re-invent and use this new technology.

 

A lot of games claim to have destructible environments but they are limited to certain objects and certain parts of the game but Red Faction: Guerilla is the first one where you can destroy every single structure in the game component by component. Buildings are built of these components and can be torn down piece by piece with whatever weapons you have on hand. I watched on other journo tear down a building with a mining sledgehammer by taking out all the lower walls of the building. I was able to repeat this feat a bit more quickly by using some well placed sticky grenades. Vehicles can also be used to destroy buildings and while destroying a building by driving a truck through the walls is nice, being able to drive a giant walker (pictured below) through a building is a hell of a lot of fun. The world is persistent as well so when you come back to that building later on in the game there’s still going to be that same walker sized hole in the game.

The destruction is strictly limited to the buildings in the game though and you won’t be able to re-shape the Martian landscape at all. This was disappointing for about two minutes until I realized I could blow the floor out from beneath enemies on the second floor of a building. I have a feeling there are going to be more than a few YouTube videos of people doing crazy stuff with this game.

The innovation in the game doesn’t stop at the destructible environments; another key feature is the morale system. The more good deeds you do, the higher the morale and the more people who will stand up and fight alongside you. We didn’t see it but Volition is saying that if it morale gets high enough you’ll see large scale riots break out. The morale system works the other way as you can kill morale by indiscriminately killing people and destroying their structures. It’s a nice sounding system and should prevent people from going Grand Theft Auto in the game.

The game is broken into ginormous zones which are all open to you at the start of the game. The zone I saw at the gamer day was huge and in the 30 minutes or so I watched the demo I’m not sure we saw the edges of it. 

I do get the feeling that THQ and Volition are worried a bit about the graphical look of the game as they did not want to show any footage of the game before the event as they wanted people to experience the gameplay rather than just focus on the graphics. If you couple this with the early concept art that was leaked on NeoGaf a few months back and you can see why they are a bit hesitant. Honestly the graphics are fine and while they are a little short of the standard set by the Unreal Engine 3 the innovative gameplay should more than make up for any shortcomings in the looks department.

What works:
 - The destructible environments are impressive as you can take down buildings piece by piece.
 - Morale system, it’s nice to see some additional consequences for your actions in the game
 - Environments have weight, if you blow stuff up and it falls on you, you are dead. Can be used against enemies as well

What doesn’t:
 - Graphics aren’t best in class which may prevent stupid people from not checking out this game
 - How many people remember the Red Faction series?