To be released as a public beta on or around the 25th, this new Red Faction title is looking very good and we expect to see much more of it in the news.

Following the original Red Faction (not 2, as the developers pointed out), Red Faction: Guerilla takes place 50 years later on a terraformed Mars. While the story remains a mystery, it’s clear that the current powers at hand are unjust and unfair, and thus the title Guerilla.

Also following said title is the form of gameplay that takes place, namely guerilla warfare. Using nothing but mining equipment (albeit powerful, dangerous and weaponized mining equipment), players must strike fear into the hearts of the enemy government, which acts more like a military corporation, and put it back in the hands of the people.

To do this, developer Volition, probably still best known for the PC marvels of the 90’s Descent Freespace 1 & 2, has made Guerilla as real as I’ve ever seen a game. The story goes like this: in making the environments destructible with realistic physics utilizing the Havok physics engine, Volition found that their current models for all the buildings and vehicles were, well, wrong. Because they were made for a game, not for the real world. Ever turn the camera while up against a wall and see ugly grays or browns? That’s because most game buildings are completely hollow and only portray certain qualities.

Not so with Guerilla. During development, they made the game engine and started plopping buildings in place only to watch them fall apart the second they were put down. Why? Because they had no framework, no stability, no nothing…they were fake. So the development team had to go and recreate everything from scratch, and make it right.

That means that if someone were to be interested in finding out exactly what makes buildings stand, they could play this title and break apart buildings piece by piece. Having done so, I can attest that soon we’ll see schools promoting videogame use in their blueprinting design classes.
Running off of a custom made stress engine, all buildings and vehicles are destructible.

In fact, certain game modes require players to go and do just that: blow stuff up. And for good reason; it’s never been so enjoyable. The amount of detail in destroying buildings is immense. Use an axe to chop away at walls, use mines at either strategically placed positions or whatever appears to cause the most explosions, and it will break differently based on how exactly it is done. The Force Unleashed may be showing off Digital Molecular Matter, but Stress has so far proven to be much cooler in that it is realistic. No, it’s real.

So I asked, how real? Buildings don’t have a specified weight; their connecting pieces have individual weights. Meaning if attacked, it won’t react like a single piece, but a set of pieces that can be broken separately. It’s not on a molecular scale, we’ll have to wait for the holodeck on that one, but on a large 46” monitor, I couldn’t tell the difference.