Remove lower walls and the upper levels will come thundering down to the dusty red dirt or carefully dismantle one end of a bridge and the weakened structure will no longer take the weight of a vehicle attempting to cross it. Right clicks carry out vertical swings, left clicks handle the horizontal swipes, together they allow for an almost surgical level of control when destroying the Martian scenery. If it's not part of the terrain, you can take your sledgehammer to it and reduce it to rubble. Mars has been terraformed, and despite the harsh weather and wild variations in atmospheric conditions (dusty bits, grassy bits, snowy bits, all conveniently demarcating the game world's zones), everything the colonists have put up appears to be built of sponge cake and Styrofoam.

Although, ironically this is the first game in the Red Faction series in Which the ground itself isn't breakable. And though the free-roaming, missionbased side of things has its downsides, the technology Volition have managed to cram into their engine is honestly groundbreaking. Red Faction: Guerrilla can claim to have done that. Up until now, games have struggled to properly emulate large-scale building destruction in a believable way, and then go on to marry that sort of technology with a proper game. He no doubt found it thrilling, and the fact you couldn't just enjoy the sound of smashing glass waking you at 3am says more about your joyless personality than it does about the funloving, masonry-tossing man.

That's why we have vandalism, and that's also why a man threw a brick at your window last Tuesday. It exists because destruction on any scale is cathartic, spectacular and satisfying.

There's a place you can go (in America, would you believe) where they let you write words like 'wife'', 'mortgage' and 'lifetime of guilt' on crockery before flinging it at a wall.

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