Man hits rock, rock dies

There is something undeniably fascinating about destruction. When we get our first set of blocks we learn how to stack them up, but then we learn to knock them down. Lego is for making cities that you then destroy by pretending to be Super Godzilla. Dominoes are more famous as tools of controlled chaos than... whatever else you do with dominoes.

I went into a shop the other day and a copy of Red Faction: Guerilla (R16 – PS3, X360) flew off the shelf and punched me right in my wallet.

Red Faction makes it very clear from the outset that your main goal is to break everything. It taps directly into the tiny part at the centre of the male mind that slightly resembles a pair of testicles, the part that is responsible for the phrase "OH YEAH!" and making all men secretly wish they could get into a bar fight.

Armed with nothing but a hammer to start with, the main character (who has a name, as if it matters) is sent out into the world to smash it. Simple as that. Geo-Mod technology makes the joy possible. Fancy computer algorithms allow each building to be accurately modelled, built and broken apart as if it was a real object.

Smack a wall with your trusty hammer and watch chunks of concrete fly outwards, leaving a satisfying hole. Smash enough of the supporting structure away and watch the whole thing crumble into a pile. Knock out all the columns under a bridge and it crashes to the ground. Blow up a radar tower, then watch the tower itself fall onto a nearby orphanage.

If you're of the nerdy persuasion, and I am, then your life is over. Hours of my time has vanished, used up by nothing but smacking imaginary walls with a hammer. The first thing I did when the game booted up was try to see how much of the foundation of a garage I could chip away before it fell over. Eventually it creaked and groaned and snapped in half, crushing a car and two innocent bystanders. Being a freedom fighter is hard. After that I set charges on the base of a three-storey building, then walked away from the explosion in slow motion.

Almost every mission involves destroying some object in the world. Go here and knock down this building. Go here and blow up this evil factory. Head to this region and kill these guys by dropping a building on them. Chase this truck and shoot it until it dies in a fire. Free the hostages by exploding thirty trucks and a smokestack.

You get access to all manner of destructive weaponry to help with all this community service vandalism. For human flesh you have assault rifles, pistols and other boring bullet-filled things that all work way better than the ridiculously awesome an totally impractical arc welder, which shoots lightning bolts. There is also that one that is basically a hand-held electric saw blade. For everything else you have remote charges, rocket launchers, heat-seeking rocket launchers, mines, bombs that create miniature black holes and, of course, the sledgehammer.

Your hammer has an almost mythical quality to it, and, given the ease with which it obliterates any wall, car, person, ideology or fluffy white kitten placed in front of it, it probably gives Thor a touch of penis envy.

Obviously a game with the premise "smash everything then smash some more things" doesn't need much of a plot. Luckily, Red Faction doesn't have much of a plot. They do try to buff up the whole idea with some commie nonsense about freeing the people from a tyrannous MacGuffin, but you could summarise the entire story in a few lazy lines. And here they are.

Arriving on Mars in search of a new life (because living on a dust planet controlled by fascists is a solid life choice), Alec Mason meets with his rather amiable brother who ends up being killed by totalitarian government heavies, carrying on a long legacy of characters who are only around to die at dramatic moments. This sudden murdering surprises our man, for some reason, and he reluctantly joins up with a terrorist organisation.

Sorry, I mean 'group of freedom fighters'.

Mason is given a gun and told to go blow up everything and kill the bad guys. Who are the bad guys? Those guys over there. Why? Because I said so, jeez. In his quest to free a big, red, ball of dirt from a government that must be evil because some lady told me so, our hero meets a series of characters who, unlike the buildings, are made entirely from cardboard. I haven't finished the game yet, but I assume we win or something.

But who cares, really? Red Faction is about smashing things to bits and blowing up other people's stuff. And communism.

- © Fairfax NZ News

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