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.