When Red Faction: Guerrilla’s friendly tooltip “Hit LB while near a wall or an obstacle to take cover” popped onto the screen, my eyes were rolling to the back of my head in pre-emptive disinterest. But I played through the demo anyway, and discovered there is something more to this game. Or at least, developers Volition deserve a lot of credit for making it seem that way.

For its use of the ubiquitous duck and cover dynamic in third-person shooters, Guerrilla still plays more like Lost Planet than Gears of War. The controls feel a little too loose and imprecise. The “steady aim” is simply a zoom-in on the aiming reticule’s current position, instead of the solid over-the-shoulder view you get when aiming in Gears. The weapon switching mechanic was implemented contrarty to convention, too – the obvious choice of the D-pad was passed over in favor of the right shoulder button to bring up a selectable menu mapped to the four thumb buttons. It takes some effort to get used to, and often caused accidental weapon switching due to the additional step in selection and the buttons in close proximity to each other (unlike, say, the radial menu used in F.E.A.R. 2). It’s almost as if Volition wasn’t paying attention. However.

Despite being a bit clumsy in the way it integrates taking cover and gunplay, I felt like I had more freedom to pursue the objective in the demo for Guerrilla. Gears of War always made a point of herding the player through each level, to ensure the action was strung together seamlessly so the player could get back to using those incredibly refined controls and firing that lovely Lancer. Guerrilla, on the other hand, has a broader scope in mind. It presents an “open world” for missions to be completed. Another one of those review-ready, game design marketing phrases.

I can’t really blame Volition for trying to do this with Guerrilla because of their success with the Saints Row series. It’s a design decision that could effectively ruin the franchise for fans of the original FPS Red Faction games. However, it’s clear that Volition thought about how best to implement this to maintain the existing subject matter in the way Guerrilla is presented, and I think they got it mostly right. At the beginning of the demo’s mission, I never felt that I was being forced in any particular direction except to reach an objective. I could sneak around until I was spotted and the colony’s soldiers were alerted, or run in guns blazing. There is no health pool; rather, the game uses the popular method of regenerating health when taking no damage. Aside from the flexible approach to the mission, Guerrilla still follows many of the other current conventions of the third-person shooter genre, and I had to wonder where it was going. It didn’t apply any one aspect of the game’s dynamics especially well, and in the first few minutes of play was in danger of losing my interest. So I started breaking things with my hammer.

One of the features that made Red Faction such a landmark in PC gaming was its showcase for the Geo-Mod engine, which was released shortly after “ragdoll physics” (a.k.a. Havok) entered the game reviewer’s vocabulary. With the introduction of Geo-Mod, we had to read “destructible” as well. Guerrilla provides the latest version of this engine, with results that have actual impact on the game’s core mechanics.

Volition was wise enough to include the best examples for the use of this engine’s capabilities at the start of the level. Because every single environmental object can be destroyed in this game, there is always the risk of losing cover, which is now an essential part of combat. Charges can be thrown to blow up the side of a building and expose your position, or that fenceline you were using to corral troops into a choke point could be cut down by heavy machine gun fire from an enemy support team. Since there are vehicles available in this game to cover longer distances, these can be driven into a bank of explosive containers to cause a distraction or take out larger structures. It also follows that cover can, in effect, be created from debris resulting from explosions or collapsed structures. This is in stark contrast to a game like Fracture (2008), that only permits this kind of activity in areas where the designers wanted you to do it. Combat in Guerrilla often becomes a spectacle with this ridiculous display of physics, but there are environmental implications that directly affect the way it progresses.

Guerrilla also provides a suitable challenge. On Normal difficulty, there was always a risk of instant dealth if you weren’t under some form of cover – even if it was simply peeking around a corner or aiming through the window of a building. That alone made me think about my actions, and resulted in multiple attempts because of my sloppily executed plans. I actually played through the beginning of the demo about 15 times, but most attempts were used to test the responsiveness of the AI and gauge the damage I recieved with the “run and gun” method. I was even convinced that it was reasonable that the entire colony’s garrison was out to kill me – I was the lone rebel that would upset the balance bewteen them and the subservient colonists. And this is where the game gets really fascinating.

The mistake that many action games make is dropping the player into the middle of a situation and expecting them to take care of it on their own. The “One Man Army” phenomenon has been around as long as video games – probably cemented by Wolfenstein 3D, and simply reinforced by every shooter that has come out after it. Call of Duty, one of my favorite games of all time, made a point to move away from this general design. Especially in the face of the Medal of Honor series, which always seemed to revolve around one guy turning the tides of war in favor of the Allies. While the AI in Call of Duty was occasionally suspect (and likely the reason that Brothers in Arms introduced active direction of squad AI in WW2 shooters), the game always made sure there was someone by your side, fighting the good fight with you. You could protect your squad mates, but if they died they were almost immediately replaced with someone else and no emotional response from anyone. Guerrilla tries its best to avoid these conventions.

Morale is used as an environmental influence on the NPC colonists that are distributed about the map. There are colonists everywhere who see you, a member of the Red Faction, as the one that will unshackle them from the oppressive regime of the EDF. Blowing up EDF outposts, destroying EDF propaganda posters, killing EDF soldiers and causing general havoc within the work camps will increase morale in the area, which decreases the hold of EDF over the colonists. Similarly, if you kill one of the colonists during a firefight – even if you’re in the process of protecting them – the morale of the colony decreases, and they will be more inclined to run and hide than stick around to see the outcome. The missions in Guerrilla are all to further the cause of the Red Faction, and by extension increase morale. When morale in an area is high enough and the bullets start flying, a colonist might stoop over an EDF soldier’s corpse and pick up a gun to join in the fight. You might be the catalyst for the Revolution, but it’s clear Volition wants Players to know they don’t have to see it through alone. This is a much needed dimension in a game that on first glance (including my own) could easily be labelled as another copycat.

Red Faction: Guerrilla initially appeared as a game I should be reserving the typical scorn for in the way it mechanically repeats the trends in third person shooters. But I found reasons to keep playing, and I’m glad I persisted. From start to finish, the mission had a genuine flow to it: sneaking around turns to calculated street fighting turns to lumbering around in bulky mechanical armor, which ends with jumping on the back of a truck and firing a gun in a rail sequence. While it may have been contrived by today’s standards, it didn’t feel forced. Where previous installments were typically FPS-oriented and designed for a PC audience, this is a game that seems to want to take advantage of these recent trends in game design and provide its own flourish to the formula. Sure there are missteps, but it was abundantly clear at the end of the mission I played that Volition is trying to evolve this series. And I want to see where it goes.