The Eos area—like Parker, named after the character from the original Red Faction because Guerrilla loves to invoke nostalgia without earning it—is a train wreck. I knew that going in, of course, and was dreading reaching it for that reason, but now I have a whole lot more video to back up my points. The gameplay around this sector becomes so horribly broken in so many different ways that Red Faction Guerrilla: Re-Mars-tered Edition gets my very first 0/3 stars in the gameplay department. It’s a repetitive, tedious disaster in so many ways that I won’t even be able to get into all of the ridiculous things that I encountered lest this become 5,000 words long.

[Click here to start from the first progress log]

The unfathomable depths of Guerrilla’s failure

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: your revolution is going all fine and dandy, with minimal resistance encountered considering all of the domestic terrorism (which is exactly what we’re going here—we’re basically the IRA in spaaaaaace) you’ve been involved with, when all of a sudden it turns out that the baddies found your base and killed a bunch of allies. No one you’ve been given any particular reason to care about, of course, and certainly not the vague love interest character, but lots of nameless NPCs and a single voiced character who reaffirm the fact that bloody revolution has (meaningless) stakes while enforcing the necessity of your terrorism.

That’s basically every video game revolution in a nutshell. It can be done fairly well, as the original Red Faction demonstrated, but in Guerrilla this is plugged into the plot with the sole purpose of doubling the number of mandatory missions in the last sector. Other stalling tactics abound, as well, with there being constant long drives, poor checkpoints that ensure that dying sends you really far back, and irritating smoke effects that make avoiding enemy fire amid the chaos virtually impossible.

I had totally blocked out my memories of this mission, which speaks to how atrocious it is, and it’s not a stretch to say that it’s the worst mission in the entire game despite how much competition it has on that front. As with all missions around this point, it begins with a long, long drive. What makes this so bad is that Eos is mountainous (with its peaks being full of invisible walls if you try to get too creative), which forces a winding, labyrinthine route to even the closest areas. Again, it’s padding. Thankfully, this is one of the missions that has a checkpoint after the driving—that’s not always the case. That’s not enough to save it, though, as the next sequence turns into an escort mission. You’re never told that the areas you’re protecting and the incoming enemies both show up on the minimap, so I quickly failed the mission on my first try. This failure was entirely on me, admittedly.

The others weren’t. I still hadn’t figured out the importance of the minimap on my second attempt, but Samanya is also protecting the area and the enemy near her died. Then the mission failed when no enemies showed up on the map. My third attempt is where things became truly abysmal, however, as I used the minimap and quickly mopped up the incoming enemies, but running down the road a little bit to clean up some far away enemies caused the game to assume that I had abandoned the mission despite being right there. There’s no “you’ll automatically abandon the mission after X seconds” or anything. It just fails the mission and sends you back to do it again. I was careful to not be too ambitious on my fourth attempt and succeeded, only for Samanya to clip into the console we were protecting. I had to smash it to get her free so that we could leave and finish the mission despite not knowing whether that would cause an automatic failure. And then, of course, I hit a rock on the way back, causing her to fly out of the vehicle. She survived (thankfully), but the whole thing is awkward beyond reason or logic. It’s baffling to me that a human being not only designed this, but looked at it and went, “yeah, good enough.”

Re-Mars-tered’s final mission and ending

Red Faction Guerrilla’s final mission is a close second as far as sheer badness is concerned. It starts with a second one of those awful “shoot at things from the sky” sections that gives you no sense of how far you can go in any direction, which point you’re protecting, or where enemies are coming from. Then it only gets worse. For one thing, the mech I specifically brought along disappeared, and while it wouldn’t have been very effective compared to the tank you’re supposed to use, it was still insulting to bring it all that way and then have it evaporate into thin air. There are two objectives: destroy the door of a missile silo so that the new Red Faction can shoot down a ship full of villains (in spaaaaace), and kill the villain who’s in a tank.

A group of rocks and dizzying number of enemy attacks ensure that you have to abandon your tank long before this point, of course, and the road to the top of the mountain to complete both of these objectives takes forever. Oh, and if you die, you start from the bottom again. You can climb up the mountain by foot to avoid enemies, but the starting point is covered in invisible walls, so you have to get lucky choosing where to start climbing. Then there are the questionable hitboxes of objects when facing the tank; I managed to hit myself with two giant rockets in a row because of the awful controls (the second time it was because Generic Protagonist was running back, which caused him to fire a rocket behind him rather than remaining focused on where I was aiming with the right stick), targeting, and hit detection. This rocket stuff starts at 21:52 and highlights this game’s trashiness.

Here’s one final example of badness

I’m pretty confident that I’ve made my point already, but I want to include this last thing as the cherry on top of the garbage sundae. There are these side missions (basically required in Eos because destroying buildings doesn’t reduce enemy control of the area enough) where you ride along as a passenger and destroy things. Since you’re not driving, you can’t avoid enemy fire, and if you accidentally destroy something crucial to the path you’re on, the computer freaks out and eats a bunch of hits, getting you destroyed. Words don’t do justice to how bad this whole thing is.

Story: 1/3 Gameplay: 0/3 Visuals: 1/2 Music: 1/2 ★★★☆☆☆☆☆☆☆ – 3/10
*Click here and scroll to the bottom for a detailed explanation of what these numbers mean

[Click here to go to RFG Re-Mars-tered Edition log #4 – Oasis]

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