Stunningly Average. Worth: $5
based on 360 retail
On Mars, no one can hear you yawning.
Knocking down buildings with a sledghammer.
Minuses: The difficulty balance is all over the place, and the feature-set (no co-op?) is circa 2003.
So I finished the main story of RF:G. Lots of mangling and exploding, and yet somehow it was all a little tedious. I can't quite put my finger on how I feel about this game. The lack of co-op definitely buries this game, but there's more to it than that.
For one thing, the balance is wildly all over the place. Some of the Transporter jobs are nearly impossible. On one of them I nailed every corner and had good traffic luck and only made it by 12-hundredths of a second. That's 0.12 seconds. And that was a great run! I was like "You've got to kidding me." even thought I completed the mission. Other jobs I found to be really easy, like Heavy Metal, and the Guerrilla Raid jobs. Within one type of job, Destruction Master, I found them to be either a one-shot easy-peasy walk-over, or an incredibly obtuse, luck-reliant, controller-crushing nightmare.
The driving is a pain because the vehix all float around so much. Half the time the front wheels aren't on the ground and so I can't steer. But then knocking down buildings is totally awesome. The buildings really behave like architectural structures. Half the guns are from Yawnzalot Gun Co., and the other half are kick-ass beasts from Lion Ballistics.
Here's the dichotomy in a sigle element: the MOAB. Of course, action-junkies like you and me are all, "MOAB, oh yeah baby, yeah, MOAB oh yeah." But the way you use the MOAB is retarded. You drive a vehicle over it, which equips the MOAB to that vehicle. Then you drive to a target and plow your vehicle into it. You hop out, move a safe distance away, and shoot the vehicle until it's destroyed. Boom! It's a good boom, but you have to find three of those hidden radio beacons to make the MOAB available. The MOAB appears in some remote location on the map. You haul your ass there, pick up the MOAB, and then haul your ass to the target. We're talking fifteen to twenty minutes, at least. If it doesn't work, you're out of luck. You have to find three more beacons...
Wow. Really? Who the fuck is going to bother with that?
This game also suffers terribly in comparison to SR2 (which is a whole year older, btw). The RF:G characters look pretty Meh, there's no customization, there's no sense of humor, and the setting of Mars is incredibly boring. The whole time I was in RF:G I was aware that I was pushing buttons to get through a developed interactive product, as opposed to SR2 (and Halo, and Gears, and AC, and RDR), where I was immersed in the story and the character. It's almost like RF:G is a colorful proof of technical concepts from 2003, and not a real, fleshed-out game from 2009.
Now, with all this said, I may still rummage around in RF:G for some low-hanging Achievements. It's not that bad. It's just not that great either.
