The story of Red Faction Guerrilla takes place on Mars about 50 years after the Ultor corporation was dismantled by a combination of miners and the EDF. Over the years, the EDF have become more and more brutal at keeping workers in line as Earth's minerals have run out. There's now an atmosphere on the planet thanks to terraforming, but people are being regularly executed and arrested for trivial, almost non-existent reasons. The Red Faction has reformed, and it's this conflict between the miners and the EDF that the main character Alec Mason finds himself caught up in. As always in shooters, you are pivotal in the war, and you eventually triumph. Standard stuff.

Red Faction Guerrilla is no slouch on the graphics and sound. This is a beautifully realized game world, both in fidelity and in art style. It's also a monster. It runs well on decently-geared computers, but if you don't have a multi-core processor with decent speed, don't expect to run the game at its fastest or prettiest. It is relatively bug-free as well, which is a nice change of pace from some of Volition's buggier games like Saint's Row. You can alt-tab at will, the game runs smoothly, and there is little in the way of graphical or gameplay errors. The game also includes both auto-saves and save anytime, which is a godsend. However, when you save, you will always respawn at a safehouse with no mission, so keep that in mind.

Red Faction Guerilla is all about the Geo-Mod engine that Volition has gradually developed over the years. The latest version, used here, is 2.0, and it takes a decidedly different turn from the original engine. Rather than rendering most natural terrain destructible and man-made terrain indestructible, Red Faction Guerrilla completely reverses it, with the ground being immune to black holes and buildings that fall over at the slightest touch. You will never hear us complain, though, because Red Faction Guerilla actually uses the Geo-Mod technology to great effect.

Red Faction Guerrilla sets out upon the simple task to cause as much destruction as possible, and I am proud to say that it succeeds in this simple endeavor. Every building is completely vulnerable to attack, from your friendly buildings to those of the bad guys. You are rewarded for your time and effort in destroying buildings through the acquisition of salvage, which is the money that makes Mars go round. A typical play seesion may entirely revolve around you running around and blowing up everything in site. Red Faction Guerrilla entices and embraces the inner demolitionist in us all, and in doing so manages to be more fun than any other sandbox action title I have played.

The open-world aspect of Red Faction Guerrilla ties into the destruction through the EDF. Throughout most of the game, you roam around looking for things to destroy, and while you can technically destroy everything, only EDF-related buildings drop salvage. These buildings also affect the EDF in other ways. Destroy a lot of small buildings, and they begin to patrol less and bottle into specific sections more. Destroy guardhouses and be free to drive through the roads of Mars without being attacked by zealous guards. THis is a game about destruction, and it wants to make sure you know this at every possible junction.

Mars is divided into six sectors: Parker, Dust, Badlands, Oasis, Free Fire Zone, and Eos. Each sector relies on two attributes which affect how the game plays significantly: control and morale. Control is lost whenever you complete a guerrilla action or destroy EDF property, and represents the cost of working in that sector. You can not fully liberate a sector until all control is drained, making most of the game about sandbox exploration and destruction. You will never hear complaints about that! The second attribute is morale, which is increased by taking guerrilla actions, killing many enemies in a short amount of time, and destroying a large amount of property in a short about of time. Usually, you will find your morale rising for killing sprees, with the morale rising almost 1 for 1 each time you increase the spree's body count. Morale influences how often Guerrillas join you as well as the amount of ammo you get whenever you use a supply crate.

Weapons in Red Faction Guerrilla are a big improvement over the original, thanks to some truly excellent design in both gameplay and art. There are some truly funky and entertaining weapons, such as the singularity bomb or nano-rifle, mixed in with standards like shotguns and assault rifles. You will always have a trusty sledgehammer, and with this weapon you can single-handedly destroy strongholds. It kills any enemy in a single swipe, and annihilates structures like they were made of butter. Truly, the sledgehammer is the weapon of weapons, and you are incredibly beefy to swing it like you do.

Guerrilla actions are where most of the gameplay comes from, and they are divided into several different categories. In essense, they boil down to chase missions, destruction missions, and attack missions. Chase missions are normally given out by the radio, and include things such as stealing intel from a courier, finding a car and bringing it back home, or destroying a convoy. Destruction missions are just that: you destroy stuff to finish. These are the most fun, if just because they are usually inventive and the hilarious Jenkins missions offer a nice destructive reprieve. Attack missions are things such as getting into a tank and killing a certain amount of troopers, eliminating a key EDF structure, or rescuing kidnapped scientists. All in all, Guerrilla missions offer a massive amount of variety compared to the relatively low amount of single-player missions.

Red Faction Guerrilla single-player suffers from a few major flaws. First is the lack of consistent building reconstruction. Sometimes buildings destroyed will come back, other times they will stay destroyed forever. And this doesn't even count for buildings destroyed in missions. Another is the lack of co-op, which would be absolutely stellar in a game like this. Who doesn't love causing mayhem? The guerrilla AI is also painfully stupid, as they are almost unable to kill anything but die (which reduces the morale of the sector) and regularly steal your kills at the last second, which stops killing sprees. Finally, the safehouses do not have the capability to store vehicles, which makes your entire transport option off the cuff. Often, you will find yourself not even using vehicles. A storehouse like Saint's Row 2 would have been very nice.

Red Faction Guerrilla's PC release includes a new scenario that revolves around the marauders. If you have played the Saint's Row 2 DLC, you know the sort of thing this entails in the game. The best part is that the scenario was paid DLC for console owners, but came free with the PC version of the game. There is also some other extras such as new multiplayer maps. There will undoubtedly be more DLC later on, and as Red Faction Guerrilla uses Games for Windows Live, it will most likely be accessible only though the marketplace.

Red Faction Guerrilla multiplayer is divided into two sections. The first is wrecking crew, which is a sort of hotseat destruction game where players take turns destroying the terrain. This is as close to LAN as you can get. The online multiplayer is the actual competitive stuff, and it is effective, if standard. There is a ranking system based around XP that unlocks new avatars and tasks, and all the normal modes you would expect from a multiplayer shooter.. The one bad part is that there is no multiplayer server hosting, as the entire online portion is played using peer-to-peer networking.

Red Faction Guerrilla is interesting and fun all at the same time. It takes the premise that most players wanted from the original Red Faction and unequivocally delivers on this promise, making it easily the best game in the series. The sheer amount of destruction and mayhem that can be wrought makes it stellar in just about every way, and even if you aren't keen on playing through the single-player, it is a great way to relax through the destruction of everything. In short, everyone should buy and play Red Faction Guerrilla, either as a truly excellent gameplay experience or as a stress reliever that lets you blow everything apart.