As you may have found out from the demo for Red Faction: Guerrilla, you can break a lot of stuff. Of course, it's a demo, so who knows how much the developers at Volition might be fudging. So how does the final game stack up? Or should I say "break down"?

Quite well. One of the first permanent locations in the game is a sort of Quonset hut where an NPC named Simone briefs you about spending your salvage to buy and upgrade weapons. There's a workbench in there where you press Y to look at your menu of options. Naturally, you will need this location to play the game, so Red Faction: Guerrilla isn't very well going to let you break it, right? After all, we gamers have been conditioned by years of carefully destructible terrain in Company of Heroes, Bad Company, and the original Red Faction. Not since X-Com has "fully destructible" really meant fully destructible.

As I use my hammer to knock out the walls of the hut, I wonder if maybe it's just going to let me take down the sides and somehow prop up the roof with beams made of, say, unobtanium, an element so rare it doesn't even appear on the Periodic Table of the Elements. Surely this Quonset hut is not going to collapse in on Simone. But once I take out all the supporting beams on one side, the roof drops down slantwise. Now Simone is pinned in there. She burbles away with her canned statements. "If you need upgrades, blah blah blah", "You're just like your brother blah blah blah", and "We're going to miss your brother blah blah blah". But that's okay. "Believable NPC behavior" isn't one of Red Faction: Guerilla's bullet points. However, to be fair, the random bystanders obligingly holler, note that I'm freaking out, and call for everyone to get out as the roof gives way.

Now I smash the supports on the far side of the hut and the concrete roof pancakes down on top of Simone while she tells me something about collecting salvage. In a brief concession to the impossibility of matching animation to this kind of free-form architectural havoc, Simone pops magically through the collapsed roof. She stands up there. I join her. We look at each other. She doesn't have much to say for now. I wonder how I'm going to get to the upgrade workstation under all this wreckage so I can buy increased det charge capacity or unlock the arc welder. Simone wanders off as I swing my hammer and break my way down to the first truly indestrutible structure I've found: the actual workbench where I upgrade my stuff. So this is what they use the unobtanium for!

UPDATE: I have just been informed by one of the developers that the woman's name is actually Samanya. Apologies for the confusion, but I obviously couldn't hear her introduce herself over the noise of my hammer smashing into the walls.