Smashing Their Stupid Shit into Tiny Pieces

Red Faction troubles me.

When not playing it I am haunted by visions of a trench coated hero standing amidst a pile of other people's property, hammer clasped in hand with said property reduced to a state approaching nothingness. Around me, overall clad rebels cheer at the fact that I exist and that I am hitting stuff. Continuously.

When I am playing it, I tool around smashing stuff up marvelling at how some people just get it.

I didn't use to think very much of Volition. Red Faction and it's sequel were so-so shooters and Saints Row drove me up the wall. Saints Row 2 on the other hand is a masterpiece. I use the term masterpiece in most cases as a subjective rather than objective term. When I say masterpiece it means I fell in love with something completely and then I have to explain the reasons why.

Saints Row 2 knows exactly what it is and then revels completely in the execution of this vision.

Saints Row 2 allows you to create a hermaphrodite who is tasked with throwing C4 at ninjas and pirates WHO ARE HAVING A TURF WAR. It never takes itself at all seriously and it is brimming with excellently crafted content.

Red Faction Guerrilla is another excellently crafted vision. It is more serious in tone than SR2 (but no less self aware) and Volition have obviously struggled without the ninjas and pirates and the excesses of crime comedy but have otherwise very competently filled a game world that feels coherent and whole.

I started out not having much fun as I was just running around, smashing stuff up and not really enjoying the combat and getting killed a lot. The gun play is lifeless and best avoided but the puzzle gameplay of demolishing buildings is fiendishly excellent. I found that to best enjoy the game I needed to knock it down to Easy so I could just run into a base, hit a bunch of fools with a sledgehammer and pick apart their buildings by identifying and crippling the most structurally important walls.

This post serves three purposes:

1. I felt like writing something.
2. I wish to evangelise RFG.
3. I want people to start engineering their games to cater to the player's needs.

Decide on a vision and stick to it. Make the core concept excellent and then deal with anything that you didn't have time to make amazing by providing options that allow the player to adjust their experience. Difficulty settings should be allowed to be changed at any point during the game. In RFG's case, I don't think this blocks any achievements either.

Red Faction Guerrilla is a brilliantly focused game that never strays from it's strengths and marries mayhem with very thoughtful destruction and it derserves to sell by the truck load.

I also want to talk about Fuel seeing as quite a few people are slamming it.

I love Fuel.

It isn't the best racer and it has a fair few flaws but I want to point a couple of things out:

1. It is beautiful and huge.
2. You race through the centre of a tornado.

Don't listen to the haters and give it a chance.

Over and out.