Red Faction: Guerrilla is part of Volition’s family of dizzyingly destructive open worlds, and remembered as one of the best sandbox games on PC – not least because there hasn’t been a decent Red Faction game since.
In recognition of that status, new series owners Nordic Games have ripped the game from the decaying architecture of Games for Windows Live and reinstalled Guerrilla’s systems in Steamworks.
Executive producer Reinhard Pollice asked fans on Red Faction’s Steam discussion board to join a public beta of the updated game – replete with full Steam support and stripped of GFWL’s apparatus.
The new Guerrilla will handle matchmaking and multiplayer via Steamworks, while leaderboards, voice chat, and achievements are also fully Steam-integrated. Save games will be automatically migrated from GFWL to the new system on start-up.
What’s more, Guerrilla now uses DirectX 9’s renderer by default. That’s technically a downgrade – but DirectX 10 was apparently at the root of a lot of performance problems. Anybody who’s struggled to run the game on Windows 8 in the past should find their issues resolved as a result.
To access the beta, you’ll want to right-click on Guerrilla in your Steam library, select the ‘Betas’ tab in ‘Properties’, and enter the password ‘nordicrfgbeta’. The branch you want is named ‘publicbeta’.
If you don’t think you own Red Faction: Guerrilla – double-check. It’s featured in a Humble Bundle or two over the years. Think you’ll return to the battered surface of Mars?