Red Faction: Guerrilla is the explodiest game I have ever played.

It's a sci-fi third person action game in which you play a terrorist on Mars.  The evil Earth Defense Force is oppressing the worker population  and it's up to you to force them off the planet by removing their control, building by building.

That's the entire story basically.  The characters are one-dimensional with average voice acting.  The music is forgettable.  The controls are not exactly fluid.

And yet the best part of Red Faction: Guerrilla, the one thing it does better than any game i've played, is the damage modelling.  You start the game equipped only with your trusty sledgehammer and from the moment you strike a building you will understand what makes this game so good.  The wall will break where you hit it, chunks of concrete and metal scattering away.

Do enough damage and the building will crash to the ground, all based on where the damage was dealt.  Maybe it will teeter over or maybe it will fall down like a pack of cards.  Sometimes on top of you, although the game is usually forgiving with the damage you take from that.

Unfortunately that's the only part of the game that is forgiving, after a few missions of terror it becomes very difficult to survive at all.  Maybe that's the point, or maybe that's just bad design.  In any case, I eventually switched the difficulty down from "Normal"  to "Casual" (I hate that word...) and the game opened up to me.  I could appreciate the sheer mayhem that the game has to offer without getting frustrated.

And what mayhem there is...  Here are my favourite things to do.

1. Covering a building in remote mines then walking away while detonating them, like Joker in the Dark Knight.

2. Knocking down a tower so that it falls onto another building.  I need a lot more practise with this, but it's so cool when a long tower practically slices a lower building in half.

3. Doing just enough damage to a building so that it falls down by itself after ten seconds.

4. Hitting a soldier with my sledgehammer so hard that the same swing smashes through a concrete wall.  BAM!

5. Charging directly towards a soldier that's ineffectively firing at me and then punting him to the side with my hammer. BAM!

6. Reaching max speed with a truck just before driving it through the wall of a military outpost, circling around like a madman knocking down as much of it as possible before the truck catches fire, then escaping through the outer wall with my sledgehammer just as the truck explodes behind me. BAM!

7. Trying the same thing on a building that's on the edge of a quarry, the whole thing coming crashing down the cliff face onto the floor below, my truck landing on its roof.  BAM!

That's enough.