Red Faction Guerrilla Diaries Epilogue

This is my ongoing exploration of the Red Faction Universe. Whether you’re a newcomer or an old-goer, I hope to make this something you can read along with and enjoy. I have finished Red Faction Guerilla.

I’m honestly surprised that it took me 10 parts to finish writing about Red Faction Guerrilla. I didn’t remember it being that long a game, and at 13 hours playtime I have still only completed a little bit more than the main story mode. There is a multiplayer online mode, a challenge mode and a mission set prior to the main game called Demons of the Badlands, which sees you playing as Samanya.

I don’t normally touch online modes, plus both it and the Samanya mission isn’t in the scope of this series so if I try either of those it won’t be recorded. However, it has a LAN mode, which I may have to keep in mind…

Alex Mason is very much like Parker from the original Red Faction. Both are everymen who just want to mine and earn a living. They are quickly thrust to the upper echelons of the Red Faction, when they prove themselves to be pretty much better than anyone else. The only females which both appear to know personally are alive at the end, with everyone else dying not long after meeting them.

Having played Guerilla already, I knew that the GeoMod engine was used only for structures. In that way, it’s quite similar to Red Faction II which didn’t have deformable terrain -- though that was mainly because it took place inside city limits. It presented interesting ways to take out enemies, but I still would have liked a meter or so worth of terrain to also be deformable.

Again, this comes back to the open world. Every section of Mars is open to you from the start -- barring some explosive or shielded barriers -- and there are no loading times. If you pass through Dust six times, everything you have destroyed will look the same, whether you left jagged edges or straight ones. If the terrain was also destructible, this would tax the engine beyond the limits it was capable of at the time.

Unfortunately, I don’t believe Red Faction: Armageddon managed to update the engine enough to do both, but as this will be my first time playing it, I’m sure we can learn together...