Off-Site Preview: Red Faction Guerrilla

We at One Last Continue may not yet be awesome enough to travel around and preview video games, but that doesn’t mean I can’t link to other folks who can!

So check out this huge preview of Red Faction: Guerrilla because it comes with this 25-minute long video of pure, unadulterated, awesome gameplay.  Why am I freaking out so hard about this game that I’m telling you to go watch someone else’s preview?  Not only does this game take advantage of destruction physics to an insane level (which those of you with the demo already know about), but it takes the idea of a sandbox world and expands upon it in a way that other open world games haven’t even tried yet.

See, when you play any other sandbox game and you want to start a mission, you’ll have to reach some specific point to receive or activate the mission.  In most games, upon arrival at the right location, there will be some kind of cutscene to take you out of controlling the game and ruins all immersion.  This cut in action is supposed to set up the mission by explaining your goal ahead of time and possibly even showing you the locations of things that are important to completing the mission.  In other words, incredibly non-immersive and non-realistic.  About the closest you can come to doing that in real life is google mapping your destination and hoping it has a street view.

In Red Faction: Guerrilla it seems there is no mission briefing, no cutscene showing areas before you reach them, and no stop in controlling the main character.  You’ll receive a radio transmission and be asked politely (or not so politely) to do something for someone.  It’s then up to you if you actually go help or not.  Now, for gameplay purposes, you can obviously delay having to go to whatever mission and take it on later, but if you decide to take on a mission, it’s just a matter of arriving at the destination and doing what you need to do.

Now think about this for a minute and how incredibly entertaining and immersive it sounds.  Imagine just driving along the road and happening upon this all out battle between the EDF (Earth Defense Force [not 2017 {unfortunately}]) and RF (Red Faction) and having the choice of either engaging in it to help complete a mission or just continue driving along the road doing whatever you please.  Imagine having a tank and just rolling around for fun when you’re suddently told you need to blow shit up.  Wow, good thing you had that tank, right?  Or hell, take the reverse situation.  Riding around a tank when you have to intervene in an infantry battle?  Fuck yeah I wanna charge in and roll over my enemies.  Driving on the road and I have to knock over a tower?  How about instead of using those explosives, I just drive my car off a ramp and through the middle of the structure?  This is some open-ended awesomeness.

I’m not going to guarantee the whole game is like this; I honestly have no idea since the demo limits you to a single mission that, once you leave, makes the demo restart.  These are the impressions I’m getting from a friend within Volition and from the article I linked to.  However, I hope this simple idea of an organic mission structure, being told to do things without actually knowing what’s around every corner, being able to adapt to what the mission needs instead of being completely prepared, and having little to no cuts in action, is something that influences future sandbox action games.