Word of Command

I spent the last week playing Red Faction: Guerrilla.

Single-player, it's an open-world GTA-style game. Since the original Red Faction, the series' gimmick was that you could blow up the environment - only, in earlier games, the destruction you could cause was awful limited. It was less "Blow up everything!" and more "Shoot the red boxes and they disappear!" So I was pretty happy that Guerrilla is more liberal with the wrecking. You can break apart anything except rocks and the ground; any building is ready to be destroyed, either by rockets, explosive charges, or your trusty sledgehammer.

The campaign revolves around a forgettable story about some sort of liberation from a vague evil bureaucracy. Honestly, I didn't need the fiction to be better, but I really wanted less of it. You play missions to advance the story, going through a small variety of side-missions to unlock further story missions. The formula is awfully familiar, and would be more successful if there were more to do in the world. There are buildings that you're encouraged to blow up, and you can get in skirmishes with the enemy, but I felt that the sandbox only existed so that you wouldn't merely select missions from a menu. The vehicle controls aren't objectionable, but driving around the world just isn't fun.

The multiplayer is Guerilla's ultimate redemption. I really don't play shooters online, but this one is a god damned blast. You're given a choice of power-ups with a variety of uses: cloaking, flying, earthquakes on command, wallhacking, and the positively delightful Rhino pack, which allows you to charge through walls, mowing down any other players in your path. The different gametypes work, your murder methods are plentiful, and the matchmaking is smooth like silk (on the 360, at least.) The single-player game is worth a rental, but I was late to work multiple times because I couldn't resist the lure of One More Game of deathmatch. The argot of online shooters is beyond me, so I'll put it simply: Play this game.

My Judgement: Idle Magic