Sometimes it pays to be subnormal.
Half an hour into Red Faction: Guerrilla, I was wondering what kind of crack my fellow gamers were smoking. I’d seen loads of praise for Guerrilla, a game in which you play a freedom fighter (terrorist?) bringing down a repressive military government on Mars by bombing buildings, assassinating generals and using a gigantic sledgehammer to unleash all kinds of mayhem.
Provocative political messages aside, the videogame, released earlier this month for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, had been hyped as a sleeper hit, a surprisingly fun sandbox game about creative devastation.
But I wasn't seeing it. To my eyes, the Mature-rated Guerrilla bore all the hallmarks of an unpolished game: Walking and driving around felt stiff and janky. The gunplay wasn't much fun. And the tight, awkward camera was making me claustrophobic. Not to mention the fact that I was dying a lot, and every time I met some grisly fate, the game flipped back to a loading screen, whirring and wheezing as it chugged to reload the entire level.
Meanwhile, all I could think about was my friends' universal praise of the sledgehammer. The heroes of most shooter games have melee weapons, but they're usually weak, ineffective and only used in desperate situations. Guerrilla's hero carries his massive iron hammer at all times. It's a hallmark weapon with great potential, but when I tried using it, my enemies mowed me down mercilessly with their machine guns as I charged them.
Shooting them from afar worked better than slamming them with the sledge, but this approach seemed as rote as the hammer was unique. Finally, after dying one too many times on a mission that was becoming pure drudgery, I thought perhaps I should take the in-game instruction manual's advice and turn down the difficulty level from "Normal" to "Casual."
What a difference. I could absorb far more of the enemies' bullets, meaning that instead of having to hang back and pick them off from afar, I could run up to the soldiers swinging my sledgehammer, taking all of them out with brutal bashes to the head. I could destroy enemy buildings with impunity, not having to worry that I'd be sniped as I was gleefully reducing a communications tower to splinters.
I'd never have been able to do these incredibly fun things on "Normal" mode. When I dialed down Guerrilla's difficulty, the game became an entirely new experience.
My elation at this great revelation was short-lived. Immediately after putting the game down, I went to my PC and saw an article that had just been posted to MTV's game blog: "Why I Played Red Faction: Guerrilla on Casual."
"Crap," I thought, in the manner of someone who'd just been scooped. Writer Russ Frushtick had experienced the same thing I had.
"Knocking buildings down ... never once got old," he wrote. "What did get old was getting shot and dying ... when all I want to do is rush forward and bash the world in the face with my large hammer."
"If the difficulty impedes access to the greatest part of a game, just toss the difficulty," he concluded.
Frushtick's point is well taken. But when nothing more than a simple tweak to the difficulty level can completely change a game, is it smart for developers to let players choose a difficulty level for themselves, before they've even played it? How many gamers would unknowingly trade in the joy of Guerrilla's wanton, sledgehammer-powered destruction for the frustration of generic firefights out of a misplaced sense of machismo?
Actually, a poster on the GameFAQs message board had already scooped us both with regards to this quirk of Guerrilla's playability.
"I bought this game to use the hammer," wrote Twilight_Titan. "The simple fact is that only on Casual mode can you charge up to seven (enemies) with a hammer and take them out.... On any other mode, it becomes yet another (third-person shooter)."
After discovering the simple secret to unlocking Guerrilla's hammer-time mayhem, I got on Twitter and asked fans of the game what level they were playing. Turns out, many of them started on Normal (because who doesn't consider themselves normal?), but ratcheted down the difficulty to Casual after dying (and reloading) one too many times.
"I spent more time shooting soldiers and running away than I did blowing up buildings" on Normal mode, wrote one respondent. "Ultimately, it just got too frustrating with everything standing in my way, keeping me from doing what I wanted to."
Developer Volition's canny use of the word "casual" — which sounds a lot less wimpy than "easy" — for the least-difficult level probably swayed some folks into the easier setting from the beginning.
"Casual lets you do 10 times the experimentation," said a friend who raved about the game and the Casual setting. "Last night I jet-packed over a mountain into the back of a facility, used the nano-rifle to make my own entrance, set a ton of charges in the building ... then jet-packed out and set off the charges."
While I haven't gotten my guerrilla to jet-pack status just yet, I've been driving around in massive trucks and slamming them into buildings, then jumping out and methodically taking out every support beam with my sledgehammer while gunfire blazes around me. It's a truly unique experience, and one I would have missed if I hadn't tried the Casual setting.
The truth is, I wouldn't have given Red Faction: Guerrilla a second look on Normal; on Casual, it sets itself apart from other games.
I've got no problem being labeled "casual" as long as I've got my sledgehammer.
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