2009’s sledgehammer-swinging simulator Red Faction: Guerrilla ended up being one of those games for me. As in a ‘whoa, this is what I dreamed the future of video games would be like as a kid’ type revelation. Emerged from deep within the dustiest corners of my mind; created over countless weekends of rental regrets. While I may have technically been playing the likes of Virtual Bart or Brutal: Paws of Fury, I was actually elsewhere – looking forward to a distant time where a game would reward me for driving a truck into the side of a building to somehow complete a rescue mission which should have required a certain degree of care and planning.
I’m currently replaying Red Faction: Guerrilla three years after release, and it still sits upon the high-chair of what this generation’s leap in virtual silicon gigaflop processing power actually added to the open world genre. This is a game about breaking shit in the most unrealistically true-to-life way ever seen. You’re given machine guns, but you don’t need them. You’re given an experimental electricity-spewing death ray, but it’s worthless. Everything in this game can be solved with some good old fashioned demolition.
Entire enemy bases will be completely wiped out – buildings collapsing to the ground in a chaotic avalanche of rubble – in no time at all. And they’ll stay like that for the rest of the game. “Retrieve these stolen documents” they say. So I go borrow a space taxi, park it inside someone’s house through its new custom-made door, throw some remote mines around the place like confetti and put my forearms to good use by knocking out support beams and explaining how I feel about their interior dectorating through interpretive dance.
Eventually the place falls down on my face, I shrug it off, and there’s a pretty good chance I’ve gotten back those documents. Done. Let’s celebrate by destroying the local diner.
Volition’s GeoMod 2.0 engine is a thing of beauty. Well, I mean, as far as the whole Mars setting goes. Visually the game is just sixty thousand shades of brown, grey and red; like the horrible aftermath of a midnight kebab. It’s a war-crime that this engine wasn’t licensed out to other developers, and that the only other game to use it this generation was last year’s suicidal follow-up, Red Faction: Armageddon. They threw everything out the window in favour of a third person corridor shooter. I haven’t played it myself, but it was apparently bad enough to destroy the entire franchise, wipe out a huge chunk of Volition, and sent THQ spiralling even further out of control.
Wait. So… so GeoMod 2.0 essentially crossed over in the real world, then? This is huge. I never would have expected this while getting confusingly aroused by the bicycle short-wearing fox in Brutal: Paws of Fury.
In closing, if the world were a decent place, we’d have a sequel to Blast Corps using this technology by now. But it’s not, so it would likely be Kinect-exclusive. You are the dump truck™.
Pietriots 
This is amazing, you’ve inspired me to play this game again. Too many games will just say “nope, you can’t do that” when you try and bulldoze your way through a problem. The Saboteur is another awesome game with this free approach.
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Didn’t Virtual bart let you turn into Godzilla Bart and destroy Tokyo?
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I don’t think that’s the same one, but you could probably destroy Tokyo by throwing one of those tomato’s far enough.
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I’m thinking of Bart’s Nightmare.
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I loved this game too for its destructive capabilities.
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Project HAMMER – this is not
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Swell post is swell Ferny, I had no idea this game was a more over-the-top Blast Corps and now I have to hunt down the game… used if I have to.
And I saw wat ya did thr with the third screenshot. I laughed at that, and its great to see your photoshop skills are still top-tier.
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Guess this means you’re a real ‘bomberman’ amirite?
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I…. I loved this game. Just finished borderlands 2. I was super disappointed. I lost all faith in open world games. It was repetitive as hell, with no sand in the sandbox. Fetch quests abound and no amount of clever writing could make me love it. So i brought this game out of my collection, dusted it off, hoped it would still work after burning at least 150 hours on it, then started a new campaign. RFG was the best. You literally jotted down my thoughts. I swear I was reading my mind for a good minute. Destruction engines are put to shame in the face of geomod 2.0. With all my love for Guerrilla and the unholy amount of playthroughs i have gone through it , I have 10 times the hate for Armageddon. I saw how bad it was when they first released the concept. I was just like…. aliens? dafuq? then i played the demo. I loved that gun that let you pull stuff from the wall and pull them into another wall and the one that let us rebuild things. I loved rofl stomping the aliens. The mech was awful. a shoot em up? really? I ended the demo with hopes they scrap everything but the new guns that let us toy with the environment. You know what my best moment from RFG, heck, from any videogame was? It was a hostage mission in RFG. I was Driving a car in hopes of barreling over most of the enemies. Then, it happened. I flew off a hill and into a building. But wait! It was the wrong building. There were no hostages inside. It was the building right next to it. So, i got out of the car, lodged inside the building. Then, i had a plan. I used the jetpack and got myself on top of the car, still dangling inside the building. I then pulled out the rail driver and sniped the edf, dropping remote charges when necessary to remove any enemies below. Man when i finished that mission, i felt so bad ass. Other moments came earlier in campaigns, where i would stick remote charges to those hydrogen tanks, then chuck them at edf patrols and send their cars rolling. I even tried stealth, which works surprisingly well using a hammer and the almighty nano rifle. Heres hoping someone picks up Red Faction and the Geomod engine. On a side, note, with lots of holiday shopping, does anyone know any GREAT open world games? the only other open world game i had was just cause 2 which was fun for its time. I spent a good 40 hours on that game. I have heard fallout is good, but im not convinced. I heard GTAIV was great, but would like a second opinion. just read reviews for far cry 3 and was impressed. If anyone picks that up and finds it to be great, let me know.
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