Red Faction: Guerrilla (Xbox 360)

This thing is going to make Guerrilla one fun game

It's the Mining Walker that makes Red Faction: Guerrilla, Volition's third in the popular series, the absolute blast I hoped it would be. It's also the game's best vehicle for showing off what Guerrilla is all about - the most impressive destruction you've ever seen in a video game.

Imagine what the love child of Transformers' Bumblebee and Ripley's exosuit cargo loader from Aliens would look like. Now, imagine splicing that with the city-destroying Godzilla - that's what the Walker feels like to play with. The game's protagonist, Alec Mason, a Mars miner who finds himself at the centre of the Red Faction rebellion against the oppressive EDF, climbs into the small cockpit and sparks the hulking beast into life. It rises, like a Transformer stretching its legs after sitting in the same place for too long, and stands up straight, towering over the now puny enemy soldiers below. Now, with you in control, Guerrilla's world is begging to be trampled, walked through and smashed into smithereens. At publisher THQ's recent Gamers Day in San Francisco, California, where a brand-new Xbox 360 build was playable, I just couldn't resist.

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It really is fantastic fun to use. It has two attacks, a down to up arm sweep which sends vehicles spectacularly spiralling off into the distance like swatted flies, and an over the top smash with both arms, perfect for blowing up cars and making a mockery of underlying building structures. So much fun was it to wreak havoc with the Walker that I found myself ignoring most of the available missions and laying waste to everything in sight instead.

Alas, the Walker had to be put down in order to get a more rounded feel for Volition's GTA on Mars. And it's on foot that you see the headline changes the developer has implemented first-hand. The first is the switch from first-person to a third-person view. Already this change has split fans right down the middle, and there's little surprise why. The first two Red Faction games' destructible FPS gameplay received excellent review scores and enjoyed healthy sales. While the trademark structural destruction has remained, indeed taken to a completely new level, the switch in views has been lamented by those who were expecting more of the same.

The on-foot combat actually feels a bit like Gears of War, but then again, what cover-based third-person action game doesn't these days?

There's nothing to suggest that the switch has led to a worse game. Of course, Red Faction is a completely different game as a result, but the destructive capabilities and fun factor have not been diminished. The on-foot combat actually feels a bit like Gears of War, but then again, what cover-based third-person action game doesn't these days? Most gamers will find themselves instantly getting to grips with popping in and out of cover and driving the game's various vehicles around the dusty Mars terrain. There's nothing revolutionary in the third-person combat, but that's OK. You'll be too busy tearing down a wall to get to a holed-up enemy soldier to care.

The second big change is the return to Mars (Red Faction 2 was set on Earth). Set 50 years after the events of the first game, players assume the role of the aforementioned Alec Mason, a recent arrival on Mars. At the beginning of the game Alec isn't part of the Red Faction resistance - he's a simple miner - but he soon gets caught up in the guerrilla warfare. While the Alec Mason in the build at Gamers Day wasn't the final version, he was a pretty good indication of how he'll end up. Alec wears a long, greenish trench coat - a look that surprises at first, and might even look a bit ridiculous to some. I'm told by Jeff Carroll, associate producer handling multiplayer and PS3 development on Guerrilla, that the team didn't want to play him up as some kind of super soldier. He's a miner at heart, or, with the game being set on Mars, a red collar worker, who's found himself having to adapt his mining tools to get the job done.

Did we mention the destruction?

Alec joins Red Faction, a rebel force which is trying to boot the Earth Defense Force off Mars once and for all. The demo, set in the Dust area of Volition's Mars gameworld (incidentally, I'm told Guerrilla's game world will be twice the size of Stillwater, the main city in Volition's other upcoming open world game Saints Row 2), showed how the game will play out. Mars is divided up into various areas which all have story specific missions to complete, usually involving joining a rebel raid on an EDF stronghold. But at any given time there will be plenty of other stuff going on, including EDF raids on Red Faction strongholds and vice versa. You'll see random gunfire off in the distance as Red Faction and EDF go at it. Occasionally a flying carrier will cruise overhead. You'll repeatedly hear cries for help, requests to destroy EDF convoys and instruction to destroy EDF buildings over the communications channel.

It's up to you to decide if you want to tackle these side missions or not. If you do, and you complete them, you'll improve Red Faction's overall morale, increasing the chance that civilians with join your cause, and lower EDF's influence. If you ignore these missions you'll eventually hear a broadcast message telling listening resistance fighters not to worry about whatever it was that caused so much concern. The goal in each area is to reduce EDF's control to a point where they give up and leave. It's an interesting concept, one which should ensure there's something new to do every few minutes.

Guerrilla's graphics have come on leaps and bounds in recent months. It's hard to imagine that it's the same game I saw at the unveiling in London earlier in the year. It looks polished and has a sheen that you don't often see in open world games. While there's still some work to be done on Alec Mason himself, the environments, vehicles and structures all come together to provide an overall aesthetic which is sure to do even the biggest of HD televisions justice. The most impressive thing? Fire a rocket into a wall and it blows up into scores of steel chunks and electronic wiring, almost exactly like you'd imagine it would. Blow a hole in the roof of a building and you'll see rubble collapse down into the soldiers below. Jump down and you run the risk of the roof collapsing on your head a minute or two later. The physics at play here really are impressive.

The large open world is bigger than that of Saints Row 2

Like its predecessors, Guerrilla will have an extensive multiplayer mode. Volition is keeping its cards close to its chest right now, but I did manage to glean some new info from Jeff. The team is currently trying to establish how many people the game will support per map, but multiplayer will feature all of the destruction, as well as the Walkers, from the single-player game. Deathmatch and capture the flag modes are confirmed, but I'm told there will be destruction specific modes that will only be possible in Red Faction: Guerrilla. And, get this, there may well be a mode where one player is in the Walker and the rest need to take him down. Nice.

I'm left genuinely excited by Red Faction: Guerrilla. It's a game which showcases impressive real-time physics, complicated calculations and plenty of polygons, but at the end of the day it will live or die by how fun and cool it is to play. The Walker already looks like it may well go down as one of the best tools of destruction we've ever seen in a video game. Here's hoping the rest of the game ends up being just as good.

Red Faction: Guerrilla is due out for Xbox 360, PS3 and PC in THQ's fiscal year 2009, which started April 1 2008.