Red Faction: Guerilla's Space Asshole returns on July 3rd
Hammer time
Mars's calendar is objectively superior to ours. For starters, their Independence Day comes one day sooner than America's, and trades up the fireworks for driving giant mining robots through buildings. At least, that's what I'm drawing from the pun-ishingly named Red Faction: Guerilla Re-Mars-tered's new release date trailer. This polished-up version of Volition's space demolition sandbox is due out on July 3rd, and they've even gone and licensed Chris Remo's fan-song 'Space Asshole' to accompany it.
Correction: The Re-Mars-tered edition will be free for existing owners of the game. My bad!
The re-Mars-tering process is admittedly giving a much larger set of improvements to console players, but some of the upgrades are universal, including an all-round graphical overhaul. Textures are sharper, shadows are updated to modern standards, lighting is improved and there's a bunch of modern post-processing and shader effects. Resolutions now natively go all the way up to 4k, which I'd imagine won't impact performance too badly as the game was always more CPU dependent (to crunch all those physics) than anything.
There's been no mention of it so far, but the one feature I'd kill for in this updated version is the ability to respawn buildings in zones. As great as the destruction model of the game is, and as satisfying as it is to see a building you walked through ten hours ago with a gaping hole still in it, it's kinda sad to stomp your way through a zone early in the game and find it completely barren later. Plus, sometimes a building is so fun to knock over I want to do it twice.
Still, a pity it's just Guerrilla that's getting updated and not its sequel, Armageddon, which I insist to this day was terribly underrated. I mean, yeah, it was obviously rushed and the story is complete bobbins that resolves itself instantly when the protagonist realises he's been living in a plot-hole for years, but I reckon that the ability to pick up and throw entire buildings at your enemies was worth the price of admission. Then again, I'm not much of a fan of open-world sandboxes.
Red Faction: Guerrilla Re-Mars-tered will be launching this July 3rd. So far, no price has been announced. They're not kidding about that Free Mars thing either, as existing owners of the game will upgrade to the new version gratis.