Red Faction: Guerilla Multiplayer Demo Impressions

Wow. Red Faction's single player demo didn't really make me care for the game. If anything, it kind of turned me away, but I've heard that it was a bad point in the game to showcase since it's so limited. The Multiplayer demo on the other hand features the Damage Control mode, which is just a standard multi-point King of the Hill similar to Conquest mode in the Battlefield games. WITH A TWIST!!! While you have to capture and hold points and you're thrust into a large Martian landscape, you've also got the hammer, different movement packs (jetpacks, faster movement, etc), explosives, several different guns, a nice ranking system, and the entire destructibility element that's always been the major selling point of the franchise fully present without any limitations in multiplayer. Instead of just running over to a point and standing there to capture it, then defending it, in order to capture a point, you have to pull out your repair gun and construct a satellite device to capture it, but only after annihilating the other teams previous one to make them lose their capture by any means necessary. There are several buildings that make perfect spots for snipers, but if you've got the time and communication, you can actually topple an entire building, completely destroying that snipers nest, and then later use your repair gun to build it back up or just leave it alone and destroyed.



Unlike most games, when you take down the supports for a building, there's a chance that the building will crush under its own weight, destroying it completely for that game unless someone rebuilds it, but it's also incredibly likely that the building will drop a few floors, maybe have a few walls get crushed along with the roof collapsing, but you're still able to jump into the remaining areas and use the rubble for cover instead of it just becoming some modeled pile of rubble that you can walk through that eventually fades away. It's also incredibly likely that you'll see a guy jumping from a building with a jet pack, applying it when they're right on top of you, and shooting electricity from a gun while you're frantically running to avoid them while shooting back with whatever you've got or maybe even jumping into the sky and smacking them down with a hammer. The sheer randomness of every match makes each game pretty unique and it feels like different groups of players, when working together, might take on the same level in completely different ways. Once you capture the points, your points slowly start to go up, with your goal being to reach 500 before the other team. The easiest way to do this is of course to have your team divided into either offense or defense, all out one way, or split into groups, which is pretty awesome since the game does reward players extra points for getting kills while near other characters. While I’m still not particularly excited for the single player still, I’m thinking of picking this up for the multiplayer as long as I can convince myself that people are going to be playing it online for a long time, especially since there’s nothing else like it out right now.