As far as PR stunts are concerned, THQ’s launch event for the console versions of Red Faction: Guerrilla gets ten out of ten for blunt attention-grabbing. “Smash and grab around London,” yoked the suppressed rage apparently harboured by resident Londoners, when THQ placed 100 copies of the game inside a car in Covent Garden and invited the public to use a sledgehammer to smash their way inside and get one for free. Clever, but that doesn’t come close to conveying the destructive potential you wield in Red Faction: Guerrilla… especially on the PC.

Let’s be perfectly honest here: Havok made its engine with the PC in mind. And with technology now pulling rapidly away from the current generation of consoles, the only way you’re going to see the third episode of the Red Faction series in all its destructible glory is on a multi-core desktop system. Smashing a car up is one thing, but when you have multiple simultaneous explosions blowing out supports and incredibly complicated chaos physics being calculated on the fly, a three-year-old box of bespoke circuits isn’t going to match today’s PC hardware running Red Faction: Guerrilla – especially at a 24-inch resolution.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves with our partisan rant, so if you don’t know the series here’s a quick update to get you up to speed: Red Faction: Guerrilla is set 50 years after the events of the original Red Faction. It’s set on a Verhoeven-style Mars, where the EDF (Earth Defense Force) hold an oppressive martial law regime over the resident miners. Growing unrest has seen the rise of the freedom fighter group known as Red Faction, which has seen some limited success in unsettling the EDF sway on the area via its guerrilla tactics. You play the role of Alec Mason, a miner that arrives on Mars in search of work and relatively oblivious to the unrest in the area. Meeting up with his brother Dan, Alec initially wants no part of the conflict, but he’s swiftly introduced to the methods of the EDF when Dan is executed on the spot for being a Red Faction ‘terrorist’. Alec is a tad miffed by this to say the least, especially when the EDF turns on him and tries to confiscate his mining licence. Enraged, he picks up a nearby sledgehammer and sets his mind to usurping the EDF, beginning with his would-be killers.

Red Faction: Guerrilla, like many open-world games, is easier to slip into than a greased prophylactic. Because progress begins with exploration, furthering your in-game career comes as naturally as wandering along the next dust-rimmed canyon road to see what lies beyond. Your ultimate goal to take down the EDF begins in a typical martian wasteland town known as Parker. The fog of war obscures most of the map and encourages exploration, so picking up our first mission from the Red Faction safe house, we wasted no time taking the conveniently parked 4x4 and heading down into the EDF-controlled valleys.

… continued