Format: Xbox 360 PS3 PC
Developer: Volition
Publisher: THQ
Genre: First Person Shooter


Best in-game destruction - and they can prove it!





When it comes to proving that its in-game destruction system is the best in the industry, Red Faction: Guerrilla developer Volition isn't messing about.





"This is Mercenaries 2: World in Flames," Volition's Dan Cermak announces across the packed London hotel room, as a video clip appears on screen with a rocket hitting and destroying a large monument.




"What they're doing is taking a model and replacing it with a dead one," the Red Faction man notes. "The building actually drops through the world and another model appears in its place. It works very well and it's a good way to show destruction, but it is basically a slight of hand."

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Volition then boots up footage of Battlefield: Bad Company, which EA also boasts has one of the best destructible environments in a shooter.

"This is the same thing," says Cermak, knocking EA's claims down a notch. "What they're doing is on a smaller level; a wall is replaced, a corner of a building is replaced... but it looks good."

Finally Crysis appears on screen, flirting its own system across the room with a truck smashing through a metal jungle hut. "It's just blowing into the parts that made it up - the pieces that were part of the original," Cermak notes.

Here it comes: "Now you can see what we're doing in our game; this is true physics-based destruction," the developer brags, clicking up a montage of flinging concrete and buildings exploding all over the place.

"Every piece has mass; it can be damaged; it can kill you; it can damage other buildings. There's a stress system, a load-bearing system in the world, at all times." It certainly sounds impressive on paper, but the proof really is in how good it looks in-game.

Volition punches up an in-game video clip of a truck hurtling towards a small settlement in the desert. "In most games that's either going to bounce off, or it's going to blow up," notes our demo man, smugly pressing the play button to show that neither happens here.

The truck ploughs right through the wall of the building, knocking individual bricks into the air and rumbling support beams with the weight of the crash. It looks impressive, and incredibly dynamic.

"Here's the Walker that I'm going to show you in a second," Cermak announces, booting in game and running towards a very Aliens-like yellow exoskeleton.

Apart from the endless sea of red sand, Guerrilla isn't instantly reminiscent of the Red Faction games on PS2. For a start it's in third person, a switch the developer says is crucial to both hopping into a new free-roaming sandbox set-up, and a world where you can be killed by a factory chimney falling from 100ft away.


"Unfortunately destruction in a first-person shooter doesn't work that well," the developer notes, strolling through a concrete base in the walker, with bricks and plaster flowing over its yellow arms like water. And to be fair, this wouldn't have looked as cool from a driver's seat angle.

"When we started the artists didn't understand; they created these buildings and when we put them in the game world they just collapsed," Cermak says, noting that it had to create structure using real-world rules of how a structure is built.

"You can walk through buildings; you can destroy anything. There's no stopping you," the developer boldly claims, although noting that plot-central buildings will be rebuilt over time to keep the game from breaking.

As you can imagine, Visually Volition's fancy new system works a treat even if texture quality has to suffer a bit in the process. Oh and the landscape itself isn't destructible.

But the really exciting thing about the ridiculously dynamic wall-crumbling is what it means for gameplay, which now takes place in a totally sandbox environment (and the sand is red - very, very red).

Guerrilla takes place 50 years after the original Red Faction. Once again all isn't well on the old Red Planet. At the end of the first game you managed to overthrow a corrupt Mars mining corporation with the help of Earth's EDF.

Now that mining has progressed to the surface of the planet, the EDF is ironically the firm oppressing the workers and inhabitants of Mars.

With the help of the old boys from the first rebellion, Mars miners are once again kicking off the Red Faction to liberate the planet. This basically means rolling around the planet in trucks blowing the shit out of their big poncy buildings.


"In 2004 we looked at Red Faction and thought as an open world game, this would've been amazing," Volition adds. "We thought with an open world setting we'd have something very special, so we decided to take Red Faction and re-work it.

"I think it's about 15 square miles. If you tried to walk across it it'd probably take an hour or more," the developer reveals, sticking a sheet of artwork on screen to reveal that the world is artistically diverse and not barren and empty like, well... Mars.

There's a ton of different towns and settlements across the world, and with the amount of content on show it looks like its set to be a very action turbo-charged Saint's Row.



In set-up it looks fairly similar to Pandemic's Mercenaries. The main character runs around effortlessly, swinging a gun the size of his legs and launching grenades to kick off the kind of plaster and brick ballets we're happy to stare at for for weeks.

As the name suggests, Guerrilla's gameplay seems to be all about planning and surprise attacks - not at all far way from what Ubisoft's attempting with Far Cry 2.

EDF encampments are made up of plenty of small buildings surrounded by vertical terrain, so it's easy for Voltion to come at the enemy from whichever direction it chooses.

The destruction system, as we noted up top, makes this style of gameplay even more interesting by allowing you to enter the buildings from any direction as well.

Volition demonstrates by heading towards the rear of a small EDF structure, and simply blowing its way through the back wall, again exposing support beams and metal skeletons in an impressive display of brick physics.

"Buildings do feel stress and if you damage them in the right places they will fall apart," Cermak says. "So you can blast a damaged building and it'll fall down, or you can jump on a damaged building and fall right through the roof."


Not leaving us to take its word for it, the dev does just that; hopping onto the roof and blasting a massive whole through the ceiling. The armed EDF soldiers inside don't seem to be too startled by a futuristic Solid Snake coming through the rooftop, but AI is something we assume will improve over time (Guerrilla is still almost a year away from release).

We were also worried in our first look that the impressive amount of physics-crunching had effected the size of structures Volition can get on the screen (towns were made up of only small-ish sized buildings in our demo) but it's only early days.

The background tech is there then and everything looks great, but when it comes to showing us gameplay we're sure Volition won't try to persuade us this is the best shooter in the business. But we're sure the team would say it'll stand shoulder to shoulder with the competition. We're already looking forward to the end result.

by Andy Robinson