Wesley Fenlon | Not with a bang but a whimper.

Remember Mission to Mars and Red Planet, the two films Hollywood cranked out in 2000 that coincidentally starred imperiled astronauts on desperate trips to our closest galactic neighbor? If not, I can’t blame you — despite solid casts, both movies managed to be utterly blase. That’s what I was expecting when one of my friends showed up with Red Faction: Guerrilla last week. I’d hardly even been aware that the game existed. Maybe I’d skimmed over a demo on Xbox Live, but I quickly assumed Red Faction: Guerrilla was just another third-person shooter, an average action game with nothing but the setting of the rocky Martian surface separating it from its contemporaries.

Boy, was I wrong.

The open-world, third-person action game genre remains as flooded as ever; this year may be even more jammed than the last, with Infamous, Prototype, and Red Faction: Guerrilla all competing for sales in the month of June alone. Compared to the anticipation I’d seen on the web for Sucker Punch’s first Playstation 3 outing and the ultraviolent screenshots of Prototype, Red Faction hardly garned a bit of hype. But after a couple hours of playing Guerrilla — followed by a couple days of playing Guerrilla — I realized this sandbox action game is much more Total Recall than it is Mission to Mars. Totally ridiculous, but in such a good, good way.

Read the rest of this entry on GameSpite »