Red Faction: Guerilla

Red Faction had me excited from the moment I heard about it. Fully destructable enviroments? Fantastic! It would make for extremely dramatic shootouts with big chunks of your cover system being slowly whittled away as you desperately reload your gun to return fire. The makings of a solid, fun game I'd say. And that's just from one feature. I had some worries about the singleplayer, however. I had a terrible feeling it was going to be an awful string of "blow this up, blow that up" with no particular storyline guiding you through. However what I encountered was a pretty deep storyline, convincing if not very deep characters and a gorgeous free-roaming enviroment. Not all of the mission involve blowing something up. A lot of the missions instruct you to save some hostages or get a vehicle to a safehouse or defend/attack the enemy. Blowing stuff up is purely optional but I assure you you will be blowing stuff up aplenty. The GeoMod 2.0 mechanic works fantastically, with buildings falling down pretty realistically about 90% of the time. Getting them to fall down is where the engine stumbles, however. More than once have I had an entire building held up by nothing but half a door frame. Then again, who knows? Maybe the laws of physics are different on Mars.
Multiplayer is great fun aswell, with the addition of 'packs', backpacks that grant you abilities such as temporary invisiblity, flight, seeing people through walls and charging face first through walls and leaving nothing but dust. These packs lend themselves quite well to the already quite tatical gameplay, although I think the omission of the cover system from multiplayer was a godawful choice that someone should get sacked for. Each pack has a strength and a weakness, rather like some horribly complicated game of rock paper scissors. Stealth can be countered with a pack that lets you see people regardless of where they are. The speed pack can be counted by the concussion pack, blasting them backwards before than can close the distance and hit you. The battle is always changing, and there's no one overpowered pack so you're never prepared for everything.
All in all, it's a great game, and I highly recommend it to any fans of action games.

Oh, and there's building rolling; Mars' favourite pass time, soon to become an international sport enjoyed by all, I'm sure.