Tiny Diggers – An iPad Construction Truck Game for Kids Age 2-5

As announced earlier this week, the Red Faction: Guerrilla demo hit both the Xbox 360 and the PS3. Recalling the original game, I got decently excited at the chance to play the game. See, I never played the original. One of my roommates in college, ahem… ‘borrowed’ a copy of it, so I got to see some of it over his shoulder. To be honest, I paid no attention to the development of the latest iteration until the demo hit. I was expecting to re-visit the old Red Faction: ‘fully’ destructible environments, in a FPS game. Let’s see how that expectation lived up.

The first thing that caught my attention was the trailer that played before the demo started. It was only 2-channel audio, no 5.1 surround sound. So, immediately my hopes were dashed in that I was going to be receiving a mediocre demo. Luckily, as soon as the actual demo hit it flipped back into 5.1 audio mode, WHEW! As with any new action game, the first thing I do is hop into the settings to ensure that audio, video, and controls are optimized. One thing that was nice in the video settings department was that they were categorized based upon how you were viewing it, not upon making some box disappear on the screen until it was barely visible. I always hate those, since they’re too subjective and usually need to be tweaked during gameplay later. The next noticeable item was the myriad of control options/settings. After tweaking the setup, I choose what I thought would be my preferred control setting.

From a presentation standpoint, the graphics have a nice blend of colors. It’s not overly colorful, but also does not break down into shades of red, grey, black, and some sort of metallic silver. The sound does a good job with the positional audio, and everything is as one would expect. The trailer before the demo showed off some nice voice over, but alas the demo was devoid of any in-game video.

So how’s the gameplay? Well, to sum it up in one sentence: like a late night at a drunken college party. It starts off fun and quickly turns to destroying The Man’s property. As expected, it’s still a fully destructible environment. There’s an added bonus of needing to destroy things to collect ‘salvage’ that will be usable for something that was not available in the demo. After swinging around my sledgehammer at things, I decide to try towards the goal of retreiving “a walker”, which is a large robot similar to the exo-skeleton in Aliens and a key item for the resistance. My first attempt was abruptly cut short as I attempted to cut down the enemies using only my sledgehammer. So now I was greated by the dead/load screen. Not too bad, but the load time took a little bit long for my liking. Once the game moves to a disc, this may become even worse. The next time I decided to opt for the assault rifle I was packing. Switching between normal view and the zoomed/scoped view was straight forward and improved aiming considerably. This method of walking and shooting still proved futile since I was unable to meet my goal.

Next go around, I decide to steal a vehicle and drive it through the EDF compound. So now is an opportune moment to accentuate a very important feature: flexilibility, or to use the buzzword: sandbox. On my 3rd attempt, I’ve played the same level in 3 orthogonal methods. It’s always rewarding to allow the player to follow, or plow through the path they’d like rather than having to guess who the designer laid out the flow of the level. If this mindset holds true throughout the rest of the campaign, Volition has an excellent game on their hands.

So long as the controls can be tightened up. Just like after a long night of drinking, control starts to break down. Until this point, the on-foot portion of it played out mostly how one would expect. Since the game is played in a 3rd-persion view, not the 1st-person I was expecting, you have all of the standard 3rd-person things including a cover system. Now this is one feature that I was never able to use. In my control setup, cover and sprint shared the button, and I kept sprinting when I wanted to cover. In the driving aspect, the camera did not follow the vehicle as much as I would like. Now it is nice to be able to swivel the camera while driving, but when I start to turn the vehicle and I’m now staring at the driver’s side door,  I think we have a problem. Oh, and if you flip a vehicle, don’t worry you have god-like strength. Just hop out, hit a certain button multiple times and your character will flip it right-side up. This definitely breaks some of the realism of the game, but is better than just killing the player off.

All in all, Red Faction: Guerrilla is definitely on my “To Play” list. Whether it makes “To Play Release Day” is another thing, since Prototype, Ghostbusters, and Batman: Arkham Asylum all hit within a week. Bad release from a publishing standpoint, if you ask me. Here’s hoping that it doesn’t get lost in the shuffle since there seems to be a decently good game hidden in here.