Words like “terrorist,” “insurgent,” “resistance fighter,” and “freedom fighter” are loaded. All of them could potentially be applied to the same person, but we choose the one we want based on its positive or negative connotation and our own viewpoints. Red Faction: Guerrilla, a new game from Volition Inc. and THQ, challenges players to re-evaluate their perception of these subjective descriptors.
Two parts Total Recall, one part Far Cry 2, with just a dash of Half-Life 2 dropped in for good measure, it’s an open-world sci-fi shooter set on Mars featuring a lead character named Alec Mason who joins the titular group of men and women who take up arms against the Earth Defense Force, the oppressive, militaristic occupational organization that governs the planet.
Mason is a reluctant soldier. A demolition expert by trade, he arrives on Mars with no goal other than to work side by side with his brother. When his sibling begins praising the Red Faction’s exploits, which he says is the people’s only hope against the government’s Gestapo-like arrests and death squads, and describing his involvement, Mason calls him a terrorist and swears not to get involved.
Things change when his brother is gunned down by the EDF in cold blood.
Having lost everything that meant anything to him on the Red Planet and been marked for execution simply by association, Mason decides to join the resistance group. He is put to work not so much as a soldier (he’s capable of holding his own in a firefight but not much more), but rather as a demolitions operative. He carries out strikes against various buildings and materiel targets in an effort to choke off the source of the army’s strength and boost the morale of the repressed locals, perhaps giving them the courage to stand up and fight for themselves.
It strikes me that, despite its non-stop and fairly intense violence, this game could be viewed as a clever bit of anti-war propaganda. It’s targeted directly at an audience of teens and 20-somethings; the very people who are joining the army and going off to become involved in far-off wars fought against what we normally refer to as terrorists and insurgents. By making these players take on the role of a man who, for all intents and purposes, is just an average American experiencing family loss during a military occupation, the game could make its players—potential real-world soldiers—begin to think about what life might be like for civilians in occupied countries, and perhaps even install some empathy in those in which it was previously absent.
Of course, the parallels only go so far. This is just a game, and it paints a very black and white picture in which the EDF occupiers are malicious and corrupt and the citizens are honest and noble.
Plus, the narrative, as intriguing as it might be to start, often fades into the background as we spend long stretches lost in the fun that comes from using Mason’s sledgehammer and charges to destroy pretty much everything he sees.
Still, it’s not unrealistic to think that Red Faction: Guerilla could cause players think about real-world wars in new ways, and that’s a rare and laudable feat for a video game.
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