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The Red Faction series may not have been as
revolutionary as hoped, but it retains a warm spot in many gamer’s
hearts. The announcement from THQ that Volition are working
 on a
third title for Xbox360, PLAYSTATION3 and PC may have shocked many,
but intrigued many more. Now, after a handful of teasers, we get to
see exactly where Volition intend on taking the series.
The biggest jump, of course, is that the game now takes
place in a third-person perspective. Red Faction: Guerrilla
is a Third-Person Action game set on Mars, fifty years after the
events seen in the original title. Set in a Free-Roaming world,
players take on the role of an insurgent fighter within the newly
re-established Red Faction movement as they battle for liberation
from the oppressive Earth Defence Force.
Although the E3 build was pretty much the same that has
been demoed by THQ at previous Press Events, it now appears to be
coming together quite well. Everything looks more polished, and the
game now holds weight alongside the likes of
Soul Calibur IV,
Dark Void,
Mirror's Edge and
Dead Space as a well-rounded Current-Generation release.
The player takes control of an on-screen avatar equipped
with a mining hammer. Being more of a technical demo than a
demonstration showing how the final build will play, bashing
specific areas of buildings bring them crumbling to the ground in a
positively stunning demonstration of the title’s complex physics
engine – dramatically more so than SEGA’s recent
The Incredible Hulk: The Official Videogame and even far
superior to the destruction technology in DICE’s
Battlefield: Bad Company. Obviously, making light work of
tons of concrete, a quick bash can make short work of human
adversaries. However, currently at least, there’s no blood; human
bodies are propelled a significant distance, but have no visible
injuries.
The final title will feature a Campaign in which the
player is tasked with supporting the uprising from the inside. Mass
destruction is the order of the day, with targets including
vehicles, equipment and enemy forces, as well as sources of
propaganda, such as billboards and broadcasting towers.
Side-Missions are promised, an entertaining example enlists the
player on an automatic gun mounted aside a lightly armoured vehicle,
with the solitary objective of destroying a pre-determined value of
Earth Defence Force hardware.
How all this will function, and what effect your
demolition actions will have on the world as whole, is yet to be
seen. Exactly how the developers intend on keeping players from
destroying a Mission-based objective too early in the Free-Roaming
world, or exactly how Missions themselves are issued, and many other
basic principles are still under wraps. However, with the title not
due until early 2009, expect more information to be forthcoming in
the next few months, and
Electronic Theatre
will be the first place to find it. |
