Of all the weapons you’ll find in Red Faction: Guerrilla, the simple sledgehammer is one of the best. This powerful object has the ability to bring down entire buildings, giving you a tactile feeling of gleeful abandon as you watch your character leave nothing but rubble and havoc in his trail. The brutish, direct sledgehammer exemplifies what the excellent Red Faction: Guerrilla is all about. Destruction is this game’s currency, and it puts its considerable wealth to good use. Mars is yours to annihilate, so though the main story is uninvolving and the action is repetitive, you’ll find plenty to like in the game’s mayhem-filled single-player campaign and impressive multiplayer offerings. And while some significant performance issues prevent the PC version from being the smoothest Guerrilla experience, it is the most complete, coming packed with the Demons of the Badlands downloadable content, an extra multiplayer mode, more maps, and enhanced visuals.
Mayhem is built into Guerrilla’s DNA, and its impressive physics engine realistically showcases destruction on a massive scale. The game ditches the deformable landscapes that were a staple of its predecessors and instead offers the ability to blow apart anything in the game. Any man-made object can be reduced to rubble, and every structure or vehicle–and every one of its parts–features its own unique physical properties. Everything from smokestacks to bridges appears to have been built with real-world engineering principles in mind, and you can see the various supports and reinforcements in their design. So to demolish a small building, you needn’t take out all its walls–simply identify its support columns, take those out with charges, and watch the whole thing implode. All of this destruction is performed in real time, which means no structure collapses in the same way.
