Red Faction is Back and Now in Third-Person

It’s been a long time coming, but THQ has finally formally announced that a new Red Faction is in development and will be released for PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and PC in fiscal year 2009, which runs from April 1, 2008 through March 31, 2009. The third game in the series will make a major departure from the first two games by swapping from a first-person to third-person perspective with an emphasis on a new cover system. What won’t be changing, however, is the shooting aspect where you can annihilate the entirety of the environment which is what any Red Faction fan will tell you is what really matters. From the THQ press release:

Set on Mars, 50 years after the events of the original Red Faction, players will take the role of an insurgent fighter with the newly re-established Red Faction movement as they battle for liberation from the oppressive Earth Defense Force.

Players will carve their own path, wreaking havoc across the vast, open-world environment of Mars, from the desolate mining outpost of Parker to the gleaming EDF capital city of Eos. Utilizing improvised weapons, explosives and re-purposed mining equipment and vehicles, Red Faction: Guerrilla allows players to tear through fully destructible environments in an unforgiving Martian landscape.

I’m cautiously optimistic about Guerrilla, but after what I saw as a major disappointment in Red Faction 2, my hopes aren’t particularly high. It was a competent shooter, but after the first game made such an impression on me – to the point where it’s probably my most played online PC FPS – that a competent shooter really wasn’t enough. Hopefully this new direction will be able to really mix things up. It’s going to have some stiff competition from Gears of War 2 if it releases later this year, so THQ certainly has the odds stacked against it.

via 1UP