Whenever I find myself reminiscing about the video-games of yesteryear, I often find myself asking the question Why. It's after a realisation that some of the games I played in my youth once offered ideas that where considered ground breaking at the time, and that for some reason where ignored and abandoned as time went on. I've been asking Why a lot recently as I blast my way through Red Faction: Guerrilla, Volitions's long overdue sequel to their cult First Person Shooter hit Red Faction from eight years ago. It struck me as odd that the games use of the Geo-Mod technology, a gaming engine that allowed you to destroy practically everything, has seen little use in the decade between it and this new sequel.

I mean really, why have we had to wait this long for someone to copy Volition? Their Geo-Mod tech showcased a level of destructible detail that was well ahead of it's time back in 2001, and only now are games approaching that same level of environmental interactively. We gamers love to blow things up, it's why we sigh and moan when another linear FPS comes along and we get pushed once more through a series of indestructible corridors with impassible wooden doors with environments that feel more like fish tanks where we're made to perform in rather than be let loose and make our own fun. Why has it taken so long for someone to realise Red Faction's potential for destructive mayhem? I doubt I'll ever get an answer, but I'm glad that someone appreciates my need to unleash a barrage of death and destruction.

Volition certainly know what it was that made the original Red Faction the huge hit it was, although they've been quick to prevent themselves from simply churning out an identical game. Guerrilla is an altogether different beast, no longer a FPS, it's now a 3rd Person open world sandbox game featuring such novel things as freedom of choice. Some people might not like the change in perspective, but with a new viewpoint comes a greater expanse of your field of view and a greater appreciation of the destruction you'll cause. It's a change that probably makes more sense than sticking to the stuffy nature of the FPS genre where the game would likely not have made full use of the upgraded Geo-Mod engine.

Although one very noticeable change is in the limit of Geo-Mod's capabilities. While previous Red Faction games have allowed you to deform the landscape and carve out huge chunks of rock like you where a terraforming machine, here the red surface of Mars is indestructible, so there's no chance of you being able to dig out make shift foxholes in the ground or blasting tunnels under enemy bases. As a compromise, everything that's man made, every building, bridge and outpost can be utterly decimated, and boy, don't Volition love presenting you with every possible opportunity to take advantage of that.

Set some 50 years after the original game, the sinister mining corporation Ultor have been defeated and pushed off Mars, the rebels success allowed the Earth Defence Force to sweep in and help the colonists regain control of their world. However, years after the EDF's arrival and the military organisation has gained control of the planet setting the colonists to work in order to mine Mars dry of it's resources and fund a destitute Earth. Failure to comply to these demands carries heavy penalties and with the EDF's impressive military might on show, anyone who rebels doesn't last long. You enter the fray as Alec Mason, a newly arrived colonist intent on leading a normal, dull life as a miner, but who is thrust into the throws of a new revolution when his brother is killed by the EDF and he is implicated as a Red Faction member. Inevitably, Mason becomes Mars's new saviour, helped along by his expertise in demolitions which conveniently allows him to take down the EDF one building at a time.

From the beginning there are few limits to where you can go and what you can do, although in order to explore the next zone you will have to first complete all of the story missions in the previous. Explore is also perhaps the wrong word to use when summing up how you progress. As pretty as the game looks it's a largely dull, desolate place where the only points of interest involve man made buildings. This isn't an adventure game so that lack of things to discover is hardly something you'll miss or notice, you'll essentially only be here to test the limits of the newly upgraded Geo-Mod.

Given the power backing today's computers and games consoles, it's little surprise to find that this new destructive engine is far more formidable and absurdly more detailed than it was 8 years ago. It's no longer a case of punching huge chunks of walls through with a well placed shot of a rocket, hit a building with an explosive in Guerrilla and it first disintegrates as each individual piece of brickwork and masonry flies off in every direction. Taking down a building is no longer a case of shooting it until a pre-determined animation collapses the thing, it's a case of pinpointing the weak spots and destroying them one by one.

Destroy one side of a building for instance, and it'll hang their momentarily, creaking under it's own weight as bits of wall and building material gradually fall of before it can sustain itself no longer and the whole thing comes toppling down in a pile of debris and smoke. Plant a few remote charges on one side of a chimney stack and you'll be able to forcibly cause it fall to one side, time it just right and you'll even be able to cause it collapse on a nearby building or onto a road where it can block EDF patrols. If you're lucky it might also come down on a pile of inconveniently placed explosive barrels, the resulting explosion of which can cause even more mayhem and chaos. It's ridiculously, stupidly good fun, and is precisely why I play videogames.

There's ample opportunity given to test out the games various weapons it allows you to use, though truthfully I only ever relied on a couple of these. The more conventional weapons such as the rocket launcher just never quite seem as fun to use as they initially appear to be, while the more exotic such a lightning gun that electrocutes groups of enemy soldiers or the Grinder, a gun that fires off spinning blades of death, just never quite reap the same enjoyment as straightforward rifles and shotguns. For me though, switching between the remote charges and nano rifle (a futuristic weapon that melts whatever it shoots) where all I ever needed, and all I ever enjoyed using.

That freedom to run amok doesn't last however, buildings may eventually respawn but once you've reduced them to their foundations you'll often only be left with the missions to complete in order to progress. Thankfully many of these remain optional secondary objectives you can choose to take part in or ignore completely, although given how entertaining many can be it's unlikely you'll settle for the latter.

Throughout each zone these missions, scattered everywhere, provide you with important rewards such as salvage that can be used as currency to buy new weapons and upgrades and provide the Red Faction with some much needed public support. The more missions you complete, the less control the EDF retain over that zone and the more Guerrilla fighters join your cause, even joining in to give you hand when things get a little too hectic. It comes much closer to giving you that feeling of being part of a revolution rather than being the one man army who shoulders the entire burden of overthrowing the EDF as was the case with the first Red Faction game, but while it's nice to see some involvement from friendly NPC's, their use in battle if fairly negligible and if they die (and they often will) regardless of whether you where responsible or not, you foot the blame and take a hit to that zones guerrilla support.

That's a minor quibble however, a far more persistent pain is with the ferocity in the EDF response to your wanton destruction. Cause enough trouble and they'll respond with the kind of force you'd expect, armoured jeeps, tooled up troops the usual. Continue to show a flagrant disregard for authority and they'll send more, and more and more, until you find yourself fighting against well armed APC's, tanks, Aerial gunships and troops who carry with them bullet proof shields. The problem is that as you'll be causing destruction all the time you'll almost constantly be fighting against the impossible, ever spawning odds of EDF personnel who never let up regardless of how many of their buildings you've destroyed. It only gets worse as the game progresses, and the EDF send everything they have your way.

Given that many of the side missions tend to revolve around blowing things up, it's surprising the amount of variety they offer. The more mundane tend to take the form of base defence against and EDF attack or an ambush of an important convoy, the more exciting include sitting on back of an absurd looking three wheel bike as you seek to cause as much property damage as possible. But by far the pinnacle of these optional missions are with the Demolition Master challenges. These seem simple enough, giving you a strict time limit to work against while you destroy a certain building as fast as possible. The catch is you'll only be given certain weapons with limited ammo for doing it, and so the need to experiment and figure out the quickest way to destroy these targets becomes quite maddeningly addictive.

It's perhaps more of a credit than anything that the side missions are of such a high quality that when you do eventually decide to tackle the main story missions, they tend to feel like a let down. It's certainly not for their lack of forcing you into situations that require brute force and leaving behind a trail of destruction, rather that with the game being so open and with you perhaps spending much of the first few hours engaged elsewhere, by the time you do get back to the story missions, they just feel a little lacking. Often they involve rather simplistic objective that aren't overly difficult to complete and tend to pan out rather unspectacular, drawing to a conclusion that feels too abrupt.

It's also a bit of a pain that you have to drive everywhere. It's not a particularly thrilling environment to sightsee in and some of journey's between the Red Faction safe houses and the missions can feel far too long. You also have to contend with some woeful vehicle handling as you drive to each destination. While each vehicle is as varied as their looks, all tend to handle like bricks on wheels that have been pushed across a frozen lake, given the twisting roads you sometimes have to drive down, there will be far too many occasions of you flying off the road and into the side of a rock or another passing motorist.

Volition make up for this with the big heavy hitters. Tanks, although far more sluggish to handle, have the befit of being tanks, and can grant you the power to unleash a barrage of destruction normal hand held weapons simply cannot match. But it's the Mechs that get top billing for vehicular mayhem, huge hulking behemoths that come in a verity of sizes and shapes, these allow you to sweep aside troublesome EDF soldiers with their giant metallic arms or just wade in and through any building with ease. Getting hold of these are one of the many highlights of the entire game.

Which sums up the problem with levelling criticism at Guerrilla, as no matter how many things you tend to find are wrong with the game, or just don't work as well as they could have, it all boils down to how much fun you inevitably end up having with toppling things over and reducing everything to dust. About the only real problems that hamper the enjoyment of the game comes from a more technical point of view. Namely, it's a PC conversion of a console game, and as anyone who has ever experienced ports from another platform before will be all too familiar with, it's hasn't exactly been a smooth transition.

Graphically things have improved, the PC version boasts an increase in detail with anti-aliasing effects smoothing out the rough edges of the console version of the game with added atmospheric sun shafts providing a new graphical sheen in prettying up the lighting, it's a game that makes full use of the PC hardware, and that also seems to be the problem. Drops in frame-rate and other technical faults have either hampered some peoples ability to play the game or forced them to do so in windowed mode, it's far from being a broken, buggy mess (although I, and it appear many others, where beset by a bizarre audio bug that forced me to switch to 2.1 surround sound lest my ears bleed to the uncontrollable increases in the volume) but given the months in-between this PC version and the release on the consoles months ago, they're problems that really should have been quashed long before now.

The multiplayer modes also suffer, not because of any performance issues, more because with the Games for Windows Live tag attached to the top the game, few people actually seem to be playing it. It's a shame too as the mutiplayer aspect of the game does offer up a variety of game modes that follow or sometimes change familiar online templates. Many of the best game modes even make full use of the destructible terrain with special power up that can be used to either work around the environments, or simply pulverise them. There's fun to be had, and given the unique nature of the use of Geo-Mod, if you can find a game with other players it's well worth the punt. It's just a shame that for now it remains a largely deserted part of the game.

It's not all grim news though, the Wrecking Crew mini game on menu screen offers up hours of entrainment outside of the single and multiplayer part of the game, a mode that simply has you, some randomly places weapons and power ups and a time limit to work against as you set about destroying a variety of buildings as quick as possible. It's fun, addictive and with your scores able to be uploaded online, competitive. Beyond that Volition have seen fit to sweeten we PC gamers who might have been waiting patiently for this port with the the added inclusion of the Demons of the Badlands Downloadable Content, presenting you with a whole new zones to liberate with new weapons, vehicles and a host of new challenges and missions to overcome. It isn't the longest DLC you'll play, but considering it's here for free when our console brethren had to pay for it, you can hardly complain too much about the length.

Whether or not it'll make up for the technical problems that still hamper the game is another story. Truthfully though, and while it may make me sound like a bit of sucker, I can live with them, because this is one of the most enjoyable mindless action games I've played all year. The sheer volume of things to do and blow up is unrivalled, and the Geo-Mod engine spoils me so much that I don't think I'll be able to play another action game without expecting a similar, if not better use of physical destruction. Just one word though, to those developers who might be reading, please, please copy Volition, steal their ideas if you must, I really don't want to wait another 8 years for someone to top this.

Reviewed by Kieron Giacopazzi for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).