When we’re lucky enough to visit an important developer in the games industry, we’re used to visiting capitals, or at least a major city: EA Redwood Shores, GSC Kiev, Bioware Edmonton, Ubisoft Montreal… you get the jist. Generally we don’t expect to find the studios inconspicuously stashed away in the centre of a relatively small town. But this is where we discovered Volition, inside a smart office block with no grand façade to speak of, in a backwater town an internal flight away from Chicago. But having visited, it seems appropriate for the Red Faction developer to be situated here. Champaign might sound like it was named by Hyacinth Bucket, but it has no delusions of grandeur; the majority of the town’s residents are Illinois University students who wreak carnage down town on a weekend.

Champaign plays host to regular monster truck shows that feature a fire-breathing, car-munching Megasaurus, and Volition’s offices very nearly became subject to the kind of destruction that its most popular series has become famous for. Red Faction: Guerrilla associate producer Sean Kennedy showed us the site just two office blocks away, where a few months previously a burning building had collapsed and taken out the store next door. The heat from the inferno had melted street lamps in every direction and the flaming wreckage collapsed and threatened to take Volition with it before it was brought under control.

The development of its latest title might nearly have come to a premature end, but in the last six months it’s almost as if the Volition team has derived inspiration from what could have been an apocalyptic event. Red Faction: Guerrilla is set on a terraformed, Paul Verhoeven-inspired Mars mining colony and the colonists are split into three main groups: the miners, the Red Faction resistance and the oppressive military regime of the euphemistically named Earth Defense Force, or the EDF. The protagonist from the original Red Faction, Parker, can be found in RFG as a hoary OAP who hurls insults at you for not being a ‘real’ freedom fighter, so you play the role of Alec Mason, a new miner on Mars who’s reluctantly drawn into Red Faction when his brother is killed in cold blood by the EDF. We could tell you a lot more about the background and plot, but that’s not what this game is about.

RFG is all about absolute destruction, mindless carnage and wanton vandalism, the likes of which we haven’t experienced since we anxiously rammed a fistful of old ten-pence pieces into the slot of a Rampage arcade cabinet, before our shrunken Lizzy avatar could get snatched up and devoured by wolfman Ralph. The GeoMod 2.0 engine has been in development by Volition for the best part of the last five years, and it gives RFG not just a massively destructible, but a completely destructible environment. Bar blowing a mountain to pieces, anything you see can be rent asunder using the many weapons at your disposal. The fragmentation of every object is dealt with dynamically by Volition’s proprietary technology, while smaller particles that separate from the main body, such as chunks of masonry from falling buildings, are handled by the Havok Physics engine.

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