I seem to recollect I was very enthusiastic about the first game in the franchise, which seems like a disturbingly long time ago now. It promised revolutionary terrain deformation technology within a genre fashionable at the time.

This latest installment of the franchise is going for the same thing, but time has moved on and nowadays the third person sandbox genre is kinda where it's at.

And much like my level of excitement about the franchise this time around, it's turned the whole thing inside out, upside down and back to front.

Good job really, cos though this game seems to have come out of nowhere - it wasn't on my radar at all - it's very likely I'll stick around long enough to finish it.

It all starts when main protagonist (who bears more than a passing resemblance to Sam Worthington's character in the new Terminator flick) arrives on Mars to work as a miner alongside his brother. It seems things still aren't quite right on Mars, since the terran 'peacekeeping' forces brought in to fix the mess made my overthrowing of the evil 'Ultor Corporation' in the first game (or two? I can't be sure) have locked the whole place down in a similarly oppressive regime. So once again you find yourself underdog as a Red Faction initiate and have to go about liberating the martian colonies once more.

What this effectively boils down to is a sandbox adventure which takes place across six sprawling zones. The core dynamic being demolition. Pretty much everything can be blown up, from people to vehicles and most importantly - all structures, big and small, can be destroyed. This is defined pretty early on, with the first of your limited arsenal being a two handed hammer and some demolition charges.

Blowing things up yields salvage, and salvage is the main currency of the game. The more salvage you have, the better equipment you can buy, though you still have the tough choice of what you can equip into your 4 weapon slots. The other 'resource' in the game is morale, which you gain by completing missions, which range from rescue attempts, courier interception, base defense, sabotaging enemy supply lines and so on... The more morale you have, the more 'resistance' members will fight alongside you and also - quite importantly - the more salvage can be harvested from any structures or vehicles you blow up.

So far, so sandbox, but there's a good reason this kind of game structure is so popular. The desruction elements seem like they could give rise to some pretty cool tactical options later on and the firearms are satisfyingly meaty too. There's a reasonable choice of vehicles you can comandeer as well as some quite entertaining wheels-based missions - the last of which involved me having to smash into a series of comms masts in quick succession, whilst enemy vehicles attempted to send me veering off target by ramming me from all directions.

So sort of like Grand Theft Mars, I guess, but with the ability to blow lots of shit up. Not sure how well this will translate to PC - it is very much a console-centric game. But those with the time for games like GTA, InFamous and/or Prototype should find plenty to like here...

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