Red Faction Guerilla: Game Design Review

Red Faction has always been an average series to me with solid graphics and environmental physics. Red Faction Guerilla is the third in the Red Faction series. Unlike the other games in the series, Red Faction: Guerilla is an open world sandbox like Saints Row 2. Initial impressions of the game are positive. The main feature of the game is the destructability of the buildings and the Geo Mod physics tech which allows you to slowly take out chunks of the building and watch it collapse.

However the games shortfalls soon become apparent:
Lack of side mission variety- There are only a handful of side missions which get stale after a while.


Barren landscape- The landscape is just really barren and boring. It's much hills and mountains of different colour with ocassional trucks and cars.

Missions difficulty all over the place- Some missions are fairly easy, others are way too difficult. Especially the stealth misions or ones where you don't have backup.

Lack of customisation options- Can't choose vehicles, can't change clothes, can't chose walkers.


No control of guerillas- There's no way to control the guerillas so if you accidentally hit something, your rebel friends might appear and start blowing things up.


Always having to run back to safehouse to shake off military- There's no way to lower this except to run back to your safe house. It quickly gets repetitive.

Interesting weapons and abilities like jetpacks are only available late in the game- These appear way too late in the game for any real fun to be had. At that point I'm ready to see the end of the game.

Conclusion
Having played Saints row 2 and 3, this game is step down from the awesome fun that was Saints Row 2. It is fun for the first few missions but then repetitiveness starts creeping in and unlocks are somewhat slow and lack customisation. It's really clear what the problem is. There are just too many compromises made for the Geo Mod engine set in a sandbox world. This means reducing everything to make the game playable. Some gamers swear this the best Red Faction out there but it's really hard to recommend when there are other game series out there like Bioshock, Crysis or Far Cry or Saints Row.