If you’re not already aware, Red Faction: Guerilla has gotten a stealthy new recent addition in the form of a remaster. And if you already own that game for PS4, Xbox One, or PC, you also already own this remaster.
For those unfamiliar, Red Faction: Guerrilla was an open-world third person adaptation of the first-person shooter title Red Faction, released in 2001 by THQ Nordic. The staple of the series is its high-fidelity destruction engine allowing players to collapse entire structures on their opponents.
Ever been frustrated that a video game is forcing you to find a key for a locked door – when the character you’re controlling is holding a nuclear-powered railgun that can tear through tanks? Red Faction: Guerrilla is for you.
It’s not a perfect experience by any means, but its take on full, realistic destruction is something that hasn’t even been attempted by any other game – at least, not to the degree of Guerrilla. Every structure can be torn down. Not just that grey flashing bridge or that flimsy-looking guardrail. Everything. It’s quite a freeing experience.
The remaster is fairly standard fare, as far as remasters go. It’s nothing super-transformative like the recent Shadow of The Colossus PS4 overhaul, but it’s got some nice graphical upgrades on display. Experience an all-new high-fidelity mars with new lighting and detail meshes, advanced 4k textures, enhanced post-processing effects, and improved shadow effects.
But the important question here is, why? Why would THQ Nordic put work into releasing this remaster to one of their franchises that hasn’t had a title update in several years?
There’s no information on it yet, but one reason stands out as clearly plausible: Something is coming.
The tactic of re-mastering a title to gauge interest or generate hype for a sequel has been seen many times before, and has met its fair share of both success and failure. For example, the release and re-mastering of Marvel Vs Capcom 1 and 2 as well as X-Men Vs. Street Fighter was a launch that seemingly came out of nowhere, only to be followed by the release of Marvel vs Capcom Infinite, the Marvel Vs Capcom series’s next-gen title, a few years later. There was also the remastered version of Prototype, which failed to meet its sales requirement and spark the production of a new Prototype game.
But the difference here is that the new Red Faction title isn’t being re-sold to those who already own the game… It’s just an upgrade. This might mean that there’s already something in the works for a revival of the Red Faction series, as a free upgrade wouldn’t allow THQ Nordic to get appropriate sales numbers to gauge interest for the title if it was not already in development.
Despite whatever bits of circumstantial evidence can be gathered by what has happened in the past, it is worth noting that this is all speculation at the moment. For now, it’s not clear why this re-master has been made, or whether it will end up leading to any bigger release at all. Only time will tell whether the Red Faction series gets another shot in the red sun, or if it will fail to touch the surface and remain buried under heaps of collapsed rubble.
