By Sam Coles:
If you know me personally or on Twitter you will know my
strong opinion on Remasters and Remakes, I’m not opposed to them but they have
to be particularly old games with 10 years being the minimum. Red Faction
Guerrilla Re-Mars-Tered (what a stupid title), is a remaster that I am fine
with because the game was released all the way back in 2009 and plus it ran
badly on the PS3 and 360 due to the ambitious destruction physics which weighed
down on the limited hardware.
Red Faction Guerrilla’s story takes place on Mars, where the
people of Earth have colonised it and it is under martial law due to a small
rebellion started by some miners. You play as Alec Mason a miner who has been
transferred recently, his brother is killed by the Ultor cooperation as he was
a part of the Red Faction resistance and gets mistaken for being a part of the
Red Faction due to his association with his brother. Alec joins the Red Faction
to get revenge against Ultor, what transpires is Alec smashing, shooting and
exploding anyone or anything that gets in his way. The story is not
particularly interesting it’s a standard revenge plot, plus the voice acting is
spotty it has some decent delivery where other times it just sounds off.
Gameplay is a third person shooter and open world, although
the world is rather condense and is not the most varied, see one dusty and
sandy path you’ve seen them all. But enough of the dull world you want to hear
about the explosions and destruction you can cause on Mars, and I must say
being an almost human embodiment of a thunderous Norse god is rather fun. If you
see a wall, building watch tower or pretty much anything you can reduce it to
dust and cinders, and I always have a grin ear to ear when I’m playing this
game because of how fun it is to go around and cause mayhem.
You are tasked in each area of Mars of taking out high value
buildings or targets which are generally high ranking officers within the Ultor
Corporation. You do this until you have total control of the area, you can also
help the cause by freeing POWs or just causing havoc around the open world. It
is fun but some of the activities do get a tad repetitive due them never really
deviating. You can get the job done with a decent cast of weapons, from you low
range but powerful hammer where you can smash through walls like the Coolaid Man
to explosives which can level an entire building in one sitting if you lay them
out in the correct manner as well as an assault rifle to dispatch Ultor goons.
Visually the game is rather dull, now I’m know what you’re
going to say “It’s Mars what do you expect”. That is true but the environments
are really boring and flat, this was during the period of gaming where
developers were shooting for a “realistic” look with grey and brown hues, which
was the equivalent of rubbing faecal matter in my eye. This is a game from 2009
and the character models definitely look like a game from 2009, this is a
remaster rather than a remake so they have done the bare minimum by touching up
textures, resolution and framerate characters have stiff animations like
manikins. I also had an issue with the pre-rendered cutscenes as they look
really washed out and compressed, it’s really jarring because when you jump
back into gameplay it looks really crisp. Performance is good for the most
part, it runs at 60 frames per second but it will stutter a bit when you start
to get carried away with explosions.
Red Faction Guerrilla Remastered is a good game, if you have
played it before then there is no real reason for you to come back as they have
done the bare minimum instead of a massive overhaul. However if you have never
played this game before you are in for a treat with plenty of things blow up
and tear to pieces.
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