Red Faction Guerrilla: Re-Mars-tered Edition

This is the blandest open-world game in existence blessed with one hell of a killer feature. It can't really offer you anything but blowing stuff up, but it is the best blowing stuff up money can buy.
It is kind of sad, really, the fact that no one has made this obsolete yet.

Aw man, this is probably one of the best games from the 7th console generation. This is THE example of gameplay over narrative.

Would it be better with a good story? Sure, maybe... But does a game with destruction mechanics that are still highly intricate and advanced 15+ years later really need to have a deep story? Mindlessly smash and explode your problems away until you bring down the entire political system of Mars.

You're the good guy in this, trust me :3

This game puts destruction physics front and center, and that is where it shines. Blowing up buildings never gets old, and the chaos alone makes it worth playing.
Everything else feels like it comes second. The story and characters go nowhere, which is fine for a gameplay-focused game but could have been handled better. Movement with both the jetpack and vehicles feels clunky and restrictive. You cannot even jetpack over a simple hill, and those limitations make the supposedly open world feel smaller than it should. Ammo is also stingy to the point of killing the fun. You spend more time scavenging ammo crates than going wild with weapons (on hard difficulty). The races and destruction challenges sound cool, but they are all timed, which makes them frustrating. The races in particular feel almost impossible without looking up a YouTube video to find the right shortcuts.
There is also a small DLC included where you play as a female character, which is very cool, but aside from that it only adds some collectibles and plenty of bugs without offering anything meaningful to expand the base game.
Despite all that, it is still a decent 7/10. The destruction is UNMATCHED, and if you are in the mood to turn your brain off and wreck everything in sight, or just kick fascists off Mars, it delivers.

This game is all about blowing stuff up, and it absolutely delivers. Even after all these years, the destruction physics are still some of the best in gaming. Watching buildings crumble never gets old. The story is nothing special, and the gameplay can get really repetitive, but the variety of weapons and ways to cause chaos keep it fun.
If you just want to wreck things and have a blast doing it, this game is 100% worth playing.

A Nostalgic Blast with Rusty Edges
Red Faction Guerrilla Re-Mars-tered is a love letter to chaos and demolition. As a remastered version of the 2009 cult classic, this edition tries to balance the fondly remembered carnage-driven gameplay with modern visual expectations. It largely succeeds—so long as you can accept a few old wounds re-opened in the process.
At its core, the game is all about destruction. You're Alec Mason, a reluctant rebel armed with a sledgehammer and a vendetta against the oppressive Earth Defense Force on a terraformed Mars. What sets this title apart is its still-impressive GeoMod engine, allowing nearly every structure to be torn apart in real time. Watching towers collapse in improvised ways, thanks to your carefully placed explosives or a truck driven through their support beams, remains one of the most cathartic experiences in gaming.
Sandbox-style freedom. The open-world design encourages experimentation, and the game never takes itself too seriously. The physics-based destruction, combined with rudimentary but satisfying combat and vehicular mayhem, turns every encounter into a personalized action movie. There’s a sense of gritty freedom rarely found in modern titles, and it helps Guerrilla stand out despite its age.
The Re-Mars-tered edition does polish up the visuals somewhat—lighting effects have been improved, textures are sharper, and framerate stability is much better than in the original. It also supports 4K resolution, which makes the Martian landscapes more vivid. That said, this isn’t a complete overhaul; it’s a facelift, not a full reconstruction. Character models and animations still look dated, and the voice acting and script carry the unmistakable whiff of early 2000s cheesiness.
Where the game falters—is in its mission design. Repetition sets in early. Many objectives boil down to variations of “blow up this building” or “kill this squad,” which, while entertaining in short bursts, can begin to feel like you're playing demolition derby on a loop. The lack of variety in side content and the simplistic enemy AI don’t help. Once the novelty of destruction wears off, you may find yourself slogging through missions out of obligation rather than excitement.
The story is also serviceable at best. It provides just enough context to justify the fireworks but never reaches emotional or narrative depth. Characters are forgettable, and plot beats are predictable, serving more as set dressing for the explosions than as compelling reasons to keep going.
Technically, the game runs well on most modern systems, occasional bugs and physics glitches, such as buildings defying gravity or vehicles behaving erratically. These issues aren’t frequent but can break immersion when they occur.
Final Verdict
Red Faction Guerrilla Re-Mars-tered is unapologetically fun in its core premise: pure, unfiltered destruction. It’s a great pickup for those who want to relive a piece of gaming history or simply blow stuff up without too many constraints. While the remaster could have gone further in updating the experience, what’s here is still a blast—both literally and figuratively.
Rating: 7.5 / 10
Fun, chaotic, and unique, but held back by dated mechanics and repetitive design.
If you liked my attempt at making a professional review of this game, please leave a like for this review and if you think I should continue doing professional game reviews, then click on "Award" in the bottom right corner. Thank you!

The Most Underrated and Misunderstood Shooter of All Time
People love to say the driving and shooting in this game are terrible but let’s be honest, that usually just means they’re terrible at the game. Both driving and shooting work how they do in literally any other game, at least to me. If they are any different I guess I got used to them pretty fast. The world looks scarred, lived in, and bleak but in a beautiful way. The art style is one of the best things about this game, oh yeah and the destruction too, but there's way more to this game than goofy boom boom.
The one and only objectively bad thing about this game I won’t even try to defend is the story. It's nothing deep without a doubt, it’s the weakest part of the whole game, but it can be interesting. A meaningful story matters a lot to me in games, and sadly this one's missing that. Every single one of the characters are all forgettable except two, the main character, Alec Mason, and a side character that only shows up in a few optional missions, Randy Jenkins. Both are hilarious. Alec is a cool and confident character who says the dumbest things with complete seriousness. One example is when Kepler says “Who taught you to shoot? Your mom?” and Alec says with complete confidence and seriousness, not as a joke, and maybe with a little bit of anger, “You leave my mom out of this.” It’s definitely dumb on purpose. 99% of Alec’s dialog is just cool cheesy lines which makes any serious situation funnier with him. Alec also has great voice acting done by Troy Baker who's popular for voicing Indiana Jones and almost perfectly mimicking Harrison Ford's voice, you can actually hear a little bit of Alec Mason in there. He's also voiced Talion from Shadow of Mordor and Shadow of War, and honestly Talion sounds like Alec with a old English accent. Randy is hilarious because he’s basically a crazy hillbilly on Mars, just play the missions with him in it and you’ll see how funny he is, he might be more memorable than Alec, but in regards to the crap story as a whole I think the best part of the story for this isn't the story at all, it's the world you explore. The world is futuristic but industrial at the same time, like my futuristic car runs on propane and sounds like it’s about to break down or something. The world feels very lived in and interesting, and combined with the soundtrack it's just really cool to look at before blowing up.
But don’t even get me started on the soundtrack. It is criminally underrated. It very much fits the mood with beautiful yet eerie ambience, and some of the best combat music for any game ever. It’s unique, it’s insanely catchy, and it’s absolutely better than people tend to notice. (Most people treat music in film and games as background noise unfortunately) A lot of the soundtrack was never even officially released which is way too common in games. The soundtrack was actually made by a group of people rather than one guy, which explains why each part has a billion counter-melodies every fifteen seconds and multiple music styles all at once in some parts. It’s seriously unique and fitting to the Mars atmosphere, and I’ve never listened to ambient music this emotional aside from TES Oblivion. (Oppression Ambience is the saddest and most mysterious piece of music I’ve ever listened to) If you want to listen to the soundtrack I would recommend checking out this music edit I made for one of the combat themes “Uprising Combat” which has the exact parts I’m talking about when I say it has one of the best soundtracks for any game:
If you look at the negative reviews of this game they’re all saying the exact same false statement pretty much word for word “The only good thing about this game is the destruction and that's it, and the game is very frustrating” but that’s not true. Hear me when I say anyone who says a game is frustrating just sucks at playing it, and that’s no reason to write a negative review for any game. As for the only good thing being the destruction, that’s a much better argument, but I think that’s just the result of overlooking what this game does right and not giving it enough of a chance. A lot of reviewers say they quit playing very early on which shows they were never going to give it much of a chance to begin with.
So if the game really is as good as I’m saying it is, then why is it so unpopular? I think I know exactly why, it's because so many people go into this game from 2009 and expect it to be just as polished as any modern game. If you don't play anything outside of the modern era I wouldn't expect you to like this, you also don't have to love retro games to enjoy this though, for 2009 the gameplay still holds up really good, its just a little more hardcore than what modern gamers are used to, so I guess a lot of people just expected something more modern and polished. Red Faction Guerrilla isn’t trying to be some big cinematic story with perfect gameplay. That’s probably why most people just say “yeah the destruction is good but that’s it.” They never noticed everything else this game quietly does right.
Overall I like this for way more than just the destruction, and if you’re good at looking past the surface I think you will too. This game has so much potential, all of which was ruined with one bad sequel, and there’s never been a game like this since.
Underrated gem is putting it lightly.

i think it's a great game but would have been better and have improved it by being ''remastered''
the game is sometimes very bugged, some funny bugs that are cool is when you shoot in enemies and they die & then fly like you throw they very far
i had one crash during gameplay, and if you are too much on game, the game start to have werid lag even if your PC is good enough to run it, sounds like the game remastered have performance issues such as bad poor optimization problaby
a negative point of game, is that you can't save the progress when you are doing in main mission, if you die, it already lost all, i hated that when i was doing mission for enter dust
some parts of game are well boring, or maybe would be me sure, i dont want to talk bad all the game just because maybe the game is too different for me, but i found out game cool and kinda fun in some point, at last playing the mode campaign is still awesome
Right now its sale -80% i do recommend if you are looking for something different, it's like GTA in Mars but would have been better, that's all.
it's just a simples game, some cars are cool and the game have nice weapons but not a lot of weapons or cars to do than just doing the missions, the cutscenes of game are pretty great and the open world of it is pretty good though.
7/10