Volition Studios helps answer the question: What's the difference between a good game and a good toy. Meanwhile, Austin loses fans.
When I was a kid I loved LEGOs. One summer my Uncle Chris (who is just four years older than me) and I spent all week building a dozen or so LEGO brand spaceships of our own design. At the end of that week we'd devised two opposing armadas of light attack craft, Zero-G carriers, space submarines (with cloaking devices), and dozens of small spacemen to pilot and operate them. We had played with those building blocks until we turned one set of toys into another set.While this initial action can house some debate about what separates playing from gaming, what came next had no such issue: based on the colors of the blocks, the antennas we called laser cannons, the positioning of the battlecraft, and the combination of rules and objectives we played a game. I don't remember who won, and I'm certain that I wasn't even close to aware about the difference between those two, but looking back it sure makes a good anecdote and helps make me cognizant enough to make this claim: Red Faction: Guerilla is a neat toy, and a mediocre game.
RF:G starts off by establishing a summary narrative: the old good guys have become the new bad guys, the Martian poor get Martian poorer, and the quest for equality rests in the hands of a normal miner. Actually a sledgehammer strong enough to crack space cement (but not the ground) rests in his hands, and in Volition's hands a computer keyboard typing out cliches about freedom for the people. The loose ideas that tie the narrative together are at best lazy and at worse irresponsible pastiches of Marxism and Rawlsian equality. Look, I don't expect the Grundrisse here, but damn it, Volition wrote this with the subtlety of sledgehammer playing Serious Sam. And then got the sledgehammer to deliver the lines in a recording booth made of sledgehammers.
The gameplay is structured into more-or-less six chapters, each dedicated to freeing one district the Martian colonies from the tinfoil-grip of the Earth Defense Force. Some missions have you defending a location, or racing towards checkpoints and orchestrated chaos happens all about you, but most have you smashing through and blowing up structures. You'll take out fuel depots, massive military installations, public art, clean energy sources. You know, everything. I want to talk about this in more detail, but first a diversion: let me paint you a picture of the world this mayhem happens in.
On top of this, the majority of the weapons feel weightless. The third person perspective action is imprecise and feels distant. Enemies and friendlies both flail around waiting for thing to fall on them. Bullets fire and strike with no oomph; rockets are floaty, low-velocity messes (sometimes I wasn't sure that I shot until something in the distance blew up); even the game's magic bullet weapon works by disintegrating what it hits in a soft "phoom" (though I do appreciate the visuals, here.) The iconic sledgehammer packs a wallop, and the lightning gun's utility (it takes out enemies inside of vehicles without harming the vehicles themselves) more than makes up for its aesthetic faults.
deckard47
said:
 |
It's interesting that your reaction to this game was so different than mine. I thought it was one of the best things I'd played in a while. It's not nearly as broken technically as was Saints Row 2, it isn't obsessed with its own badly written, hideously cliched and stereotyped plot as was GTA IV, it's story is (as you rightly point out) badly acted and written, but it isn't shoved down your throat, as were Infamous's insipid dialogue and plot, and it allows you to have fun everywhere you go. Also, when yo compare this game's travel/combat system to any open-world game (including the rabid, too much is too much Prototype), the combat was pretty fun, I thought (as long as you played on easy), and the "toy" section of the game meshed pretty well with the game part, I thought. As to the unsubtle use of common, much-used "revolutionary" or "marxist" tropes, you have them there. It's as if they read about revolutions and then took them all, blended them, and put them on a piece of paper. Same goes for your point about the Firefly theft... It was so, so obvious, as was blonde girl's "secret" connection to the Tuscan Raiders. In the end, I think that the game was more fun than any other open-world game (any other game this year, to be honest) I've played. The controls were good, transportation (and here I disagree, I used cars, on-foot, and jetpack movement to explore everywhere, and never felt hemmed-in), and it was never anything less than exciting. The plot was so barely there (as opposed to Saints Row 2's plot, which actively ate your brain cells), and compared to most games with "stories" and "writing" (from GTA IV to Infamous to others), this game mostly stayed out of my way and let me have fun. It's something few games can do. |
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|
x
