Red Faction Guerrilla Demo
==========================

Friday 1 May 2009 20:12

If you, like me, don't know anything about the
game, which means you haven't played any of it's
predecessors in the previous ten years or so, the
demo provides very little information about how to
play it. As usual, you start out on your own on
some planet and have a mission. But it's totally
unclear how to go about doing that mission. Are you
supposed to sneak up on enemies using cover, hit
them from far away, sabotage their base first, find
hidden paths to get somewhere or get in a vehicle
to get moving? There are a lot of options in the
map, but only after you find out by other means
that the USP of Red Faction is that you can break
everything on the map it becomes clear that you
don't have to look for buttons to open doors, since
you can smash your way through any door, wall or
building. After dying a lot, you find out the
mission has a limited time, so you can't demolish
the whole base within that time, and then when you
decide to just speed through the level it becomes
all very easy. So I see indeed potential for some
very different approach to gameplay because you can
break everything - imagine GTA IV having that - but
I don't like to dash through maps and in the end
wonder if I was just lucky I made it or I really
made some good strategic and tactical desicions in
a way the creators of the game intended. Did I
survive because I was lucky or because I was good?

And what's up with all these analog distortion
effects in the interface? Killzone 2 has it,
Gamekings has it now in their tags, and it looks
sooo 2009. At first it might look cool to pretend
your screen is on the blink, but after a while it's
just annoying.

by Roland van Ipenburg
http://www.xs4all.nl/~ipenburg/blog/posts/play/2009/05/01/red-faction-guerrilla-demo/