It’s a now playing- but really it’s was playing. 50 Cent’s first foray into videogames a few years back was a bit of a hit, selling over a million G-units. The sequel was kinda of a no-brainer for publisher Vivendi. But after the merger with Activision, Blood on the Sand was cut loose (as was Ghostbusters and Brutal Legend). THQ picked it up and while it’s not GOTY it’s a harmless fun time gosh darn it.
Speaking of no-brainers- here’s the story: 50 Cent is stiffed by a promoter on a Middle Eastern tour and thinks he can be reimbursed by some maguffin skull. The pursuit of this blinged out skull is why you, a rapper, are shooting people in an unnamed Middle East warzone. Either way, It’s just a flimsy way to stick 50 cent and his posse in the middle of a war. 50 Cent and one of his sidekicks (nee bitches) run around busting heads, popping caps in bitches’ asses and generally swearing like motherfuckers. It’s also rather well made and put together with full knowledge that the story is dumber than network programmers at Infinity Ward.
Swordfish have done a good job on the gameplay, settling a third person action somewhere between Gears of War and The Club. The gunplay is well-executed and the presentation is pretty top notch- the game runs at a fairly consistent 60 fps (on 360 a, at least) and yet still manages to have a pretty high standard of artwork which almost no one else has managed to achieve this gen (Infinity Ward, which their idiot savant network programmers, at least have good tech and art). The sound is a big flimsy since it’s made up of gangsta rap from Mr Cent and friends thought there is at least the option to have a purely instrumental soundtrack if you prefer. 50 and co are a pretty verbose lot and so by the time you get to actual in-game sounds, there didn’t seem to be much will left to make the game sound any good (things like smashing a crate and having a pretty obvious wait until the right sound effect played)
Alll in all, as this was a cheapie, I enjoyed the two or three hours I played of this game in the lead up to MW2. It obviously is blown out of the water in terms of quality by Uncharted 2 and Modern Warfare 2, but the game is cheap and more importantly, a fuckton of fun. It also doesn’t have dedicated servers or lean.
Reviewed on Xbox 360. Also on PS3 and PC. Developed by Volition. Published by THQ
Red Faction is the third in the Red Faction series since 2001′s original PS2 and PC title. The first game was a fairly linear First Person Shooter in the vein of the original Half Life with much vaunted Geo-Mod technology allowing you to make holes in the terrain. A great idea in theory but in reality it merely enabled you to widen doors by an inch. Red Faction II followed a few years later but wasn’t as well received as the original. It wasn’t as good. It was shit.
Fast-forward four or five years, and after years of inactivity in a series forgotten about by most, Volition released Red Faction Guerrilla for PS3, 360 and soon enough, PC. Rather than allowing you to carve your name in large letters in stone, RF:G lets you destroy almost structure, building, device, vehicle on the surface of Mars. Not quite everything but enough to make it interesting. Its like a poker game with the Grim Reaper (when you run out of money you’re betting the only thing he’s interested in).
So you start off as Alec Mason, a miner fresh to Mars. Within about 10 minutes, your brother is killed and you decide “what the hell, let’s overthrow the government!” Of you go with your trusty hammer and a pistol making mayhem wherever you go. The missions structure is interesting because there are various ways to progress. The Martian Landscape is divided up into six sectors, which, at the start of the game, are all controlled by the baddies, the EDF (Earth Defence Force). Each area starts with a number of control points, which you must get to zero in order to unlock a story mission in order to move on to the next section. There are only a few actual story missions in each area but dozens of side missions such as rescuing Red Faction members under house arrest, stopping a traitor from delivering info to the EDF, cause a diversion by causing mischief with a mech suit and so on. There are also a number of RF establishments throughout each worlds, such as a garage, admin building, barracks, etc, which you can destroy in order to reduce the EDF’s control over an area. You also need to collect shrapnel from any EDF property you destroy in order to pay for weapon upgrades and destroying EDF property is the best way to make a mountain of coin.
The Ghost of Crackdown lurks in this game in the amount of freedom you have to complete most of the destroy EDF property missions, though this isn’t a game that prides itself in getting you to inaccessible places like Infamous. Also- The Crackdown Voice Guy’s the leader of the Red Faction, though you never see him.
So how does it play? It is the more fun than a visit to Mardi Gras after you’ve just inherited a bead factory. Even though the game starts off as a third person shooter with a hammer as a melee weapon, the hammer turns out to be your secret weapon. You soon ditch the rifles and concentrate on explosive devices to get you through a mission. These upgrade rather nicely and each weapon has a tutorial of sorts in the form of optional side demolition challenges. These basically give you a limited supply of a particular weapon and a building you need to destroy within the time limit. These are great for practice and also yield a lot of shrapnel for upgrades to your arsenal. You can help the EDF in missions or you can blow up buildings in order to unlock those story missions.
There is a downside on that the game’s balancing needs work as normal mode is not particularly easy and I found myself dialling the difficulty down to medium for the last 5-10% of the game. Its mostly good but the aggressive AI of the EDF drones gets a bit wearing on missions like “Dogs of War.” There’s also a story in the game but it’s so slight that skipping the FMV scenes won’t crimp your enjoyment of the game.
Graphics are, to my eye, fairly pretty and the framerate (on 360) is pretty solid, but then it has some screen tearing (which can affect some people quite alarmingly). Sound is also quite good apart from the glitch I encountered when I first loaded up the game. The sound was actually disabled and all of the sound faders in the sound option where set to zero.
So, do you like to tool around blow shit up? Then this game is for you. The game makes you play story missions to progress but these are usually quite decent and fun to play. Depends on whether you ever get past the first island in a GTA game or not. Of the six areas, not all of them are as populated with missions as others but expect to play this game for between 12-17 hours. There is so much to do that there is little scope for not having fun. If you can’t have fun playing Red Faction Guerrilla, maybe you should reconsider gaming as a hobby and go and play WoW instead. Be aware, this game gets insaaaaanely difficult towards the end. So much so that with six missions to go I felt I had to dial the difficulty from normal down to casual. Even then I struggled with the final epic mission so much that I’ve done something I’ve not done in years (apart from GTAIV)- I turned on all of the cheats, otherwise I’d be dumbing the score down to a 2/3. I think the game is great apart from that insane spike at the end. Either that or put some more checkpoints in these epic missions Volition.
If you like Open world games, freedom to complete missions anyway you like, blowing shit up, get this.
Controller1.com Rating 3/3 It is easily the most fun 2009 release we’ve seen so far (it gets really hard though)
We Focus Test UFC 2009 and Fight Night Round 4. Clint tells us why these games about sweaty men touching other isn’t suspicious, how the fact they spend most of the game in the same positions as Bruno and Eminem isn’t remotely odd and which of these games is the shiz. And then he explains what a shiz is.
