Red Faction: Guerrilla Far Cry 2 on Mars

[Herbert1405241469 0]

I'd been a big fan of Red Faction since it came out years ago. I purchased Red Faction 2 the night before a final, and ended up staying up all night playing and totally bombing that final, but overall not a bad game.When I heard that there was a third game coming out, I couldn't wait. I was sad and disappointed that Consoles were going to get first dibbs on this game, seeing as how it was a PC franchise, but I waited patiently. Thankfully, they didn't screw up the PC port (THANK GOD) and I am happy to report the game is very awesome.The big selling point of this game was the destroyable environments. If you've played Red Faction 1, you know that the ground was destroyable, as well as some buildings and whatnot, but overall very low quality and not super awesome (though innovative at the time). The sad thing about this game is that now they made the buildings destructible but the ground is a constant solid. You can't blow up a ledge above a road and crush your enemies with boulders. Thankfully, knocking down a building with your own bare hands makes up for this minor setback.I was surprised at the sheer superhuman strength your character has. He can knock down solid pilars and walls of concrete, and has unlimited sprinting, which makes him feel more like some sort of Superman than a guy who specializes in demolitions. It helps the game move quickly, but it's somewhat realistic that you can knock down a 4 story building in 1 minute just using a sledgehammer. If they had made the explosives just a bit more powerful, they could have balanced the game just a bit so you had to rely more on placing C4 than you would just hitting the support beams. But with the number of enemies you will encounter, you'll be happy that you have infinite sprint and a powerful overhand whack :DGraphics are very good. I have a Core 2 duo (3ghz) and a nVidia GTX 260 and it runs fine. There is slightl slowdown when a building collapses, but it's not bad and otherwise, this game is optimized very well. Gameplay is smooth, and controls are solid.Sounds are good, and the explosions are satisfying. The voice acting is great.Gameplay doesn't get boring. I felt like I was playing a better version of Far Cry 2. It's the same principle. You run around doing missions in a sandbox-type area, and some of the missions are repetitive, but there is enough variety, you don't have to do them a lot. The main story is simple but effective, and the ending was satisfying. (the last mission was hard as hell though and took me awhile to get through it even on Medium difficulty because there were so many guys :\)One of the great things this has over Far Cry 2 is the fact that the bad guys don't attack you on sight. There is a meter that goes green = they won't mess with you. Yellow to red means they're increasing hostile because you hit something or blew something up. Red means basically infinite guards until you can either get to a safehouse zone or hide for a determined amount of time and lose them. There are demolition challenges that are fun and test you to see how quickly you can blow up a structure using a set number of items or tools. ie, blowing up a whole building using 1 remote bomb and 12 proxy mines.There is a bonus, which I didn't really figure out until I finished the game. They included the DLC which is like a prequel to the game itself where you play as the female lead character playing out missions leading up to the game. Those follow the same formula, but have different objectives, so gives it some more replay value.The game also comes with multiplayer, which is pretty decent because they have unlockables for playing and winning, which motivates you to keep multiplayer games going so you can get better weapons and characters to play as. Sadly, they use some sort of matchmaking system, so finding a game can be somehwhat hard, but overall a decent experience. Get this game today, lots of replay value and lots of hours for the price. No problems whatsoever.