Have You Played... Red Faction: Guerrilla?

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game recommendations. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.

There was a point back in 2009 when I became obsessed with Red Faction: Guerrilla. I've always liked destructible scenery in shooty, 'splodey games and Guerrilla looked like it might change the landscape of action gaming forever. No more would we tolerate canned collapses - instead, we'd demand authenticity of a sort, with physics engines ensuring that every building caved-in and crumped in a believable fashion. Hammer time.

In retrospect, my love for the game seems a little bit silly but Guerrilla's hammer and bombs destruction still makes for a fantastic playground.

I like that Red Faction's thing, as a series, isn't the rebellion on Mars - it's destruction. Just Cause has tethering, Far Cry has animal-satchels, Saints Row has a tongue penetrating its cheek, and Red Faction has rockets taking chunks out of walls and towers creaking and toppling as their foundations dissolve under a hail of hammer blows. It's not a bad hook to hand your hat on and Guerrilla is a blast when it's just you, an army's worth of weaponry and an outpost swarming with enemies.

It goes in the big pile of games that I've played for hours without making much progress in. I seem to remember something about the ghosts of aliens but my inclination was to turn away whenever dialogue or plot started happening. Forget all that. Back to the coalface. Back to the hammer. Back to breaking things.