Recently, I did a review over “Red Faction: Armageddon,” and one of my coworkers seemed disappointed that you couldn’t drive everything you found. I recently found out why.

“Red Faction: Guerrilla” was made before “Armageddon,” and I now know it as “Grand Theft Auto: Mars.”

The graphics are all right, a bit grainy at times, but that’s to be expected in massive sandbox style games, especially on a platform game. The controls are great, though you might have a bit of trouble driving, as some of the vehicles go very fast, and the ones that non-player characters drive don’t. Isn’t that special?

The story is engaging, too, though I suppose if you only did the main story stuff, and enough optional missions, you could go through the game very quickly.

I, on the other hand, spent five days playing the game before beating it. There are a lot of missions, after all.

In “Guerrilla,” you play as Alec Mason, the grandfather of Darius Mason (from Armageddon), and are forced to join the red faction’s revolution because of bastardry from the Earth Defense Force (EDF.)

The direct result of this is a long series of confrontations with the occupying military, as well as a Martian Redneck named Jenkins.

His apparent retardation is actually explained by him, too. “I’ve been training myself to breathe CO2.” Wow.

Remember how I said you could blow up man-made structures in Armageddon? That holds true in Guerrilla, though you can’t rebuild them, which sucks.

You get to use your salvage to get weapon upgrades and new weapons though, which is amusing. My personal favorite was the thermobaric rocket launcher, which could level a building in two shots. This comes in handy when you are going on a raid and have to destroy the building.

And now, on to the missions. There are several types of missions (the game calls them Guerrilla Actions) you can take in Guerrilla. Here are the missions that you find on the map.

First, there’s “House Arrest,” which is simply going into a building defended by EDF forces, and rescuing hostages.

Next is heavy metal, which is where you use what amounts to a walking forklift to destroy EDF vehicles, buildings, and EDF forces. That one is a blast.

Next, is EDF Assault, which is simply defending a building or group of people from the EDF. Those get challenging.

Next is Guerrilla Raid, which is to either kill all EDF forces inside, or if you are feeling kinky/destructive/lazy, blow up the building itself.

And then there’s Collateral Damage. Remember Jenkins? You get to ride shotgun on his gigantic motorcycle. That is to say, he’s mounted a rocket launcher on the back, and you get to blow things up.

You do have to listen to him though; however, listening to his nonsense is kind of funny at times.

My personal favorite mission is the Demolition challenges, which are puzzles with explosives. If only they had those for real.

There are several other missions that the people back at the safe house will inform you of as you play the game, but you can ignore them.

Most of them involve hijacking an EDF vehicle, which you don’t want to destroy, or to stop a convoy for various reasons (which you do want to blow up)

In all, Guerrilla is stuffed to the gills with explosions and highly destructible environments, though you still can’t blow up the terrain.

I find this somewhat disappointing, but everything else makes up for it.

Rating: A-

To contact Robert Bolton, email onlinewriter@occc.edu