It's hammer time! Every game has triple and double XP weekends these days. Volition wanted to take things a step further with its "Get Your Ass Back to Mars" event. From today through December 21st, logging in and blowing things and people up will net you five times the normal experience points, meaning that getting 50 achievement points or a gold trophy for hitting 100,000 XP will be easier than ever, not to mention unlocking the fabled ostrich hammer at 120,000 points.

During the event, be sure to follow the Red Faction Twitter for chances to score free downloadable content codes, which make great virtual stocking stuffers, possibly.

No fancy name for this one, it's just the "Multiplayer Pack", and includes two new game modes (Bagman & Team Bagman) along with eight new maps that are playable across all multiplayer modes.

It's 560 MSP on 360, and $6 on the PSN. The video gives you a decent run-down of some of the new stuff on offer.

Having seen and played Red Faction: Guerrilla on the PC, however, I no longer feel so bad for PC gamers. In fact, I think I envy them.

What Is It?
Red Faction: Guerrilla is a third person action game set in an open world version of Mars that might make NASA's collective head explode. A major draw of the game is just how much stuff you can blow up, knock down or otherwise wreck with various explosives and weapons.

What We Saw
I played through part of a mission in the Demons of the Badlands expansion before getting blown up. You'll be relieved (or possibly dismayed) to know the difficulty level hasn't been tweaked at all.

How Far Along Is It?
The game is out for PC September 15.

What Needs Improvement?
My Computer: The minimum specs for Guerrilla on PC aren't that scary – but seriously, you're going to want to play the game on the high-end specs. Windows Vista for DirectX 10 makes a world of difference in improving the way Mars looks. Lighting looks better, dust trails in the wind seem more realistic and the shadows look way sexier. Sadly, I wouldn't see any of this running the game on my machine. I guess I should be happy that I even can run Guerrilla on my machine – but still, I've been spoiled by seeing what I could have if I just upgraded my computer.

What Should Stay The Same?
The Price Is Right: Though PC gamers had to wait that much longer for the game to come out, they are getting a lot of the DLC plus the full game for much, much cheaper than their console counterparts. Guerrilla on PC includes at launch two exclusive multiplayer maps, six maps from the Wrecking Crew DLC that's not even out yet, plus the multiplayer modes from the Multiplayer DLC. That's approximately $70 worth of stuff for only $40.

It Looks Good and Plays Well: Producer Sean Kennedy says that developer Volition learned its lesson with the flaws in Saints Row 2 on PC. He says you've got to deliver a top-notch experience to them just as much as you need to for console owners – if not more so because PC gamers have to wait longer for the game to come to them. After observing the fabulous-looking graphics and feeling just how well the game plays on PC (and it does), I'd say they nailed it.

Final Thoughts
Depending on how you look at it, Red Faction Guerrilla for the PC is either a salve to PC gamers wounded by stuff like Saints Row 2 on PC, or a revolution in PC gamer expectations. Granted, PC gamers may never get their games first on account of publishers' piracy concerns – but if they get the game better than their console counterparts, who's to say it's not worth the wait?

I'm a little bit worried about playing a game over Xbox Live Arcade or the PlayStation network that requires players to keep hold of a bag. If the reasoning behind my trepidation isn't abundantly clear, then you obviously haven't spent enough time playing multiplayer console titles online with your headset activated.

The Red Faction Guerrilla Multiplayer Pack, due out on September 17th for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, introduces players to the new Bagman and Team Bagman game types, with the eight new maps included playable in any of the game's multiplayer modes. I'm not sure what Bagman and Team Bagman entails, but I'm sure there will at least be a bag, a man, and in at least one case, a team.

Look for the Red Faction Guerrilla Multiplayer Pack next month, when it goes on sale for $6.99 or 560 Microsoft points. In the meantime, here is a whole slew of screens to get the old Martian juices flowing.

We want to be nickel-and-dimed! We want to pay $5 for a new suit for Alex, or $10 for a new hammer and eXtreme paintjob for Martian dune buggies. Not…not this. $10 for an all-new area of the map with new campaign missions, a new stoyline and a range of new gear?

It's outrageous.

LOVED
Bang for Buck – This isn't just a random collection of new missions, it's a mini-campaign. You're controlling a new character (Sam), fighting for a new faction (the Marauders) in a new area of the map (Mariner valley), all the while unlocking a little of the backstory of the main game.

Aerodynamic – While in many ways this is just a snapshot of Red Faction, in another key area it actually improves upon the original by doing away with the "currency" of salvage. Now instead of having to pick through the ruins of every building you destroy, new weapons and upgrades are awarded automatically for completing missions, which is a lot less taxing on your patience.

HATED
Disconnect – There are only three "campaign" missions in DotB. Three. There are a ton of side-missions to compensate, but those who were hoping for something with a little more meat will be disappointed. It's also a bit of a shame that the new DLC takes place in a small, isolated area of Mars, meaning you can't access any of the regions featured in the main game.

Saints Row 2 fans will already be aware of this, but Volition are definitely on the right track with their DLC. Demons of the Badlands gets the balance between affordability and depth just right, giving fans of Red Faction a (mostly) new experience that should keep them busy for a week or so.

Red Faction: Demons of the Badland was developed by Volition, and published by THQ. Released on Xbox Live (reviewed) and the PlayStation Network on August 13. Retails for 800MSP/$10. Played story campaign to conclusion and around 2/3 of side-missions.

Confused by our reviews? Read our review FAQ.

Demons of the Badlands, the first of three planned DLC packs for Red Faction: Guerrilla, is a new story arc that takes place three years before the start of the main game. It follows the story of Samanya, your in-game source for tech upgrades, during her time with the savage Marauders. I find it extremely refreshing that Volition are actually expanding the lore for the game, rather than tossing us a few new multiplayer maps and calling it quits.

Demons of the Badlands will be available on August 13th for 800 Microsoft Points and $9.99 on the PlayStation Network.

But that long wait will soon be over, as THQ have finally gotten around to announcing a release date for the PC version of their Martian open-worlder. And that day is September 15 for Americans, and September 11 for "international" customers, which we'll imagine means Europe and Australasia.

The game will be available both in stores and digitally, though THQ are "still finalizing the digital distribution partners for each region".

To go with the release are the game's specs, which are:

Minimum:
# OS: Windows XP / Vista
# CPU: 2.0 GHz Dual-Core Processor (Intel Core 2 Duo or AMD Athlon X2)
# Memory: 1GB RAM / 15GB of Hard Drive space
# Video Card: 128MB 3D Video Card with Shader Model 3.0 Support (Nvidia GeForce 7600/ATI Radeon X1300)

Recommended:
# OS: Windows Vista for DirectX 10
# CPU: 3.2 GHz Dual-Core Processor (Intel Core 2 Duo or AMD Athlon X2)
# Memory: 2GB RAM / 15GB of Hard Drive space
# Video Card: 256MB 3D Video Card with Shader Model 3.0 Support (Nvidia GeForce 8800/ATI Radeon HD3850)

"I like an open world where it feels like stuff is going on around you," James Hague, Red Faction Guerilla's lead designer at development studio Volition told me in a phone interview earlier this week.

Red Faction Guerilla is a sprawling open-world action-adventure for PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 set on a Mars ruled under the tight grip of the heartless Earth Defense Force. The player is a miner-turned-revolutionary who shoots and batters enemies and buildings to help the just overthrow the bad.

What Hague was discussing a game that is loaded with opportunity and charged with the energy of an insurgent's rebellion against a military authority – the kind that, not intentionally, has parallels to those seen fighting on the news these days.

Let's start with the game design rebellion. The game Hague and his team made, the game that technical designer Luke Schneider maintains was not intended to be a "GTA on Mars," was made to feel like a more open open-world game than the average one. It was a game designed to enable rampant destruction and handle all of the gameplay consequences. Volition built their game, Hague and Schneider told Kotaku, on the premise that giving the player an axe and guns that can destroy every structure on the map is also a game that should open the player's options to do as much as they can imagine.

"We wanted people to play pretty much however they wanted to," Hague said.

There are signs of success. For example, the developers has learned that players are doing things the creators didn't expect. Take the destruction of a canyon-spanning bridge in the game's Badlands district. Some might take it down with explosives. Others might use the game's disintegration gun to zap one strut away at a time. Volition discovered that one player decided to attract military attention and then shot helicopters so they crashed into – and tore down – the bridge. Another player filled the bridge's lanes with cars then made them detonate in a chain. "When that was put in there, the goal was to put in something very large and allow the player a lot of choices in how to take it down. We're not looking to dictate how you do it."

What they pushed was emergence, a value celebrated by players and makers of open-world games at least as far back as the launch of GTA III.

"We were trying to go a little further out there in terms of emergent gameplay on the high level," Schneider said. During development, they went too far: "Players would just be completely lost." The developers said they wanted to make an open-world game that felt more open than gamers have been playing. Things in the world were just supposed to… happen. Convoys would drive through the game world at set times each game-day. Players could attack them or not. But some players of pre-release versions of the game panicked and felt that they'd be letting their guerilla movement down if they saw a convoy and didn't attack. Missions like hostage rescues that are now triggered only when a player goes to an icon on the game world's map – the classic way of starting missions in open-world games – used to instead be sprung upon the player as alerts they could choose to respond to. "We were trying to get a balance between letting you choose what you want to do and making the world seem alive," Hague said. "We tried at both extremes and I think the balance is pretty good."

They found the right amount of insurgency to make their game work. And if it resembles any current real-life insurgency, that's not intended, the developers say. "We weren't looking at the modern day situation," Hague said. "We were looking at stuff like the past wars in Afghanistan and so on. How do react when you have a superior force against you and you can't attack them head on? We weren't trying to make an Iraq simulator."

Yes, this is a game about being part of an insurgent fighting force, a game that rewards players who can sneak up and undermine a more powerful military maybe with a disintegration ray or maybe by blowing up a car in front of a building. But civilians are never targets. The enemy is only military and always armed. Early in the game, the hero of Red Faction tells his brother, "I'm not a terrorist," only to see his brother gunned down by the evil military rulers, the Earth Defense Force. "We didn't want people to feel like they were on the wrong side of this war," said Schneider, who said that wars as far back as the American Revolutionary War were studied for tactics. "We just wanted people to have fun blowing stuff up."

With both the politics of the game as well as in the gameplay design, the developers don't think they took their rebellion too far. Almost.

One mission, which puts the player in the turret position of a vehicle while a fellow freedom fighter sharpens knives and begins to viciously interrogate a captured military man, did make Hague briefly uneasy. "The first time I actually played that mission once we got it in place I felt kind of bad," he said. He remembered thinking: "The Red Faction really crossed the line here. I don't know if I believe in the same stuff they believe in anymore, but I've got to keep continuing because it's a good cause overall… I remember we were going to go with an interrogation fairly early on. It just wasn't until we did the final writing pass and recording pass that we could really hear it in context. Honestly, it came out a little more over-the-top and intense than I expected to be."

A scene like that wouldn't have been unusual in 24 or out of context in an action movie. It's an ethical boundary, pushed.

The rebellions of Red Faction Guerilla are set to continue. Development of downloadable content is underway. The two developers would not share specifics.

Is this as open as it gets? Of course not. But as far as they've gone, the makers of Red Faction Guerilla are happy with the result.

Things have taken a turn for the worse since the ending of the first Red Faction game, which saw the Earth Defense Force arrive to aid Martian settlers escape the oppression of the villainous Ultor Corporation. As the saying goes, here's the new boss - same as the old boss. Now it's the Earth Defense Force themselves doing the oppressing, and it's up to Alec Mason and the Red Faction to restore freedom to the people of Mars, one sector at a time.

Taking full advantage of the latest console technology, Volition has taken the destructibility the first two Red Faction titles and amplified it exponentially. Have they crafted a smashing success?

Eurogamer
The language and iconography is surely too specific to be an accident. This is Iraqi Insurgency: The Videogame, by any other name, and you're playing as the terrorists. Despite the fading influence of Dubya's era of flag-waving good-vs-evil jingoism, it's still an incredibly bold (some might say stupid) parallel to incorporate into a major videogame, even if the story never really develops this timely theme into anything deeper than the old truism that one man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist.

Xbox 360 Magazine UK
The beauty of Red Faction: Guerrilla is that every set piece is of your own making. The game has no linear structure because the goal in every area is the same: clear the region of EDF control. This is represented by a bar that drops every time you wipe out a key EDF building or complete a side mission. Here's the fun bit, though: you don't have to do any of the game's weak sub-missions, such as saving hostages – this is almost impossible, due to weak ally AI – or driving a vehicle from one side of the map to the other within a set time limit. Instead, Alec can just raid any area marked with red on the map, then blow it to kingdom come with a combination of stupidly overpowered tools.

CVG
The magic behind Guerrilla's bangs is a true physics-based destruction system, which sees individual bricks and support beams dynamically falling to the might of your weighty sledge hammer. It looks impressive and feels all the more satisfying; ploughing a truck through a load-bearing corner of a three-story building will send brick and mortar collapsing to the ground - and crushing whoever might be loitering underneath it. It's instantly gratifying and lots of fun. You'll probably spend the first few hours of Red Faction knocking things down just to watch them fall, which is a pretty good proof of concept if we've ever seen one.

VideoGamer
Whereas the single-player campaign is slightly flawed, but good fun, Guerrilla's multiplayer offering is really quite superb. Volition has taken advantage of the game's key asset, its destruction, and built the various multiplayer modes around it. The most basic is Wrecking Crew, a four-player local play game mode selectable from the main menu. Here you take turns trying to cause as much damage as possible within the constraints decided on at the outset. This might mean limiting the ammo supply and giving you three minutes to plan a careful assault, or simply being handed a mega-powerful explosive-rocket launcher and letting loose for one minute. It's great fun and results in some truly staggering moments of next-gen physics.

ZTGameDomain
Red Faction: Guerrilla is an in your face, balls to the wall, destroy everything in your path treat. With a ton of missions to complete, an entire planet to destroy, and online modes that will have you sitting in front of your television for hours upon hours, this game has it all. I know this has been said a ton of times before, but it holds true for this game; if Red Faction: Guerrilla doesn't get your blood pumping, check your pulse. Red Faction: Guerrilla should not be overlooked by anyone, period.

Kotaku
Red Faction: Guerrilla is a moment generator. The destruction, the physics, the teeming population all combine to create moments you're going to have to tell your friends about. For me, it was when I finally took down that six-lane bridge. It took quite a bit of effort and lots of planning. Once it collapsed, dust billowed into the air, clouding the entire screen. Seconds later, standing under the jagged remains of the bridge, I saw cars that had been moments ago speeding down a highway begin plummeting off into the wreckage, piling on one another until they all exploded. It was amazing.

As strong as a sledge-ostrich to the forehead

The two online retailers were both listing the title for $20 below its normal asking price, a surprising drop for a game less than two weeks old. It appears the market has responded to that price point, though, as NewEgg has since sold out of the Xbox 360 version and Amazon.com appears to have ratcheted up the price—though it's still selling it below MSRP.

The PlayStation 3 version seems to be unaffected, however.

It's not completely out of the ordinary for games to be hit with quick price drops. Sega and Ubisoft tend to be pretty hasty in marking down underperforming games. Whether Red Faction: Guerrilla is performing below THQ's expectations or the stars of savings have simply aligned today, we're not sure. But things are tough all over, so a reactionary mark down wouldn't surprise us.

With Red Faction: Guerrilla, players return to Mars to once more stir up trouble in an open-world game promising unheralded destruction from a third-person perspective. Can a third take on the same general concepts deliver a third great game?

Loved
Destruction: Plenty of other games have done destructible environments, but never to this degree. Not only is virtually every man-made item in the game breakable, it breaks in detail. When you take your sledgehammer to a wall you break away the outer shell first, then you start digging into the concrete, and finally you hit rebar. Not only is the game's destruction fun to deliver and watch, but it also has a pretty big impact on how you play the game. When tasked with an assassination, you can sneak in and shoot the target or just take down the whole building the person is in. Tired of enemies sending reinforcements over a bridge? Take down the whole bridge. The level of destruction in Red Faction: Guerrilla deepens gameplay in ways I never would have imagined.

Weapons: Besides the trusty sledgehammer, assault rifle and pistol, there are plenty of other fun weapons in the game. I made most use out of the timed charges which let me coat a building in explosives and then take it down with a button push. Another great weapon, the Nano rifle, disintegrates entire structures, cars and even people, one piece at a time. The coolest looking is the singularity bomb which sucks the surrounding area into a small gravity well.

Multiplayer: Multiplayer in Guerrilla involves plenty of running and gunning, but the many of the mode's chief focus is in taking down buildings or protecting them. The new focus, and inclusion of power packs that let you charge through walls, fly and speed, among other things, makes the multiplayer bits of Guerrilla some of my favorite in a shooter.

Surprising Major Mission Mix: While a bulk of the game is about roaming around the territories of Mars rabble-rousing, taking down buildings and killing people to incite revolution, the game ends each territory's campaign with a difficult and innovative mission. The missions can be anything from riding shotgun in a speeding vehicle, to using a space-based weapon on land targets, to piloting a monstrous tank. While frustratingly difficult at times, they all add a unique twist to the sometimes repetitive gameplay.

Physics: Having destructible environments is fine, but what really makes the game sing is how those environments topple once they take enough damage. It's not just about tearing down a building, it's about figuring out where you can attack to take down an enormous structure with the help of gravity and weight. Slap some charges in the right place on a tower and you can make it topple onto the roof of a nearby building, taking it down too. This could be the entire game for me, the shooting is just a fun addition.

Open World, Massive Scale: Mars is broken down into six sectors, all but the first of which have to be unlocked through play. As you unlock them, the areas you can roam expand. More interesting, though, is how the game makes use of all of that space. There are several moments in the game when the rolling landscapes and cities are teeming with warring factions, everywhere you go people are shooting at each other, buildings crumbling and you can stop, mission or no mission, to help out if you want. Even more impressive are the epic set pieces, things like towering six lane bridges that can be methodically picked apart until they collapse into a mushroom cloud of dust.

Hated
Load Times: The load times and poor save point planning for some of the bigger missions in the game can be a torturous combination. Why do I have to, after restarting, still drive for five minutes to start the mission every single time?

What Now?: I ended up spending way too much time trying to figure out what exactly I needed to do next to move the story forward. There were always plenty of things to do, but not every side mission you take on actually moves the plot forward. That can get really annoying after awhile.

Bland Backdrop: For all of its destructive glory and its vast landscapes, Mars' surface is a rather monotonous place filled with browns and way too many shades of pastel red.

Annoying NPCs: Enemies were, for the most, part relatively clever in dealing out death and avoiding my return fire. The non-combatant NPCs, though, were a real annoyance. They'd get in the way of battles, walk in front of hammer swings and clog up doorways with their non-scripted walking. Good thing it only takes a button push to knock them out of the way and create a second door in any building.

In many ways, Red Faction: Guerrilla reminds me of Crackdown. The thing I liked most about Crackdown was its ability to tear things up and create mayhem in a relatively open world. The missions and the campaign were at best distractions. For Guerrilla, it's the ability to neatly demolish entire towns. There is something cathartic about taking a big hammer to a wall, even a digital wall, and seeing it slowly crumble under the punishment. The key difference between Crackdown and Guerrilla is that while Crackdown's missions really didn't add much, Volition did an amazing job of allowing their destruction tech to play a chief role in how you complete Guerrilla's missions.

Red Faction: Guerrilla is a moment generator. The destruction, the physics, the teeming population all combine to create moments you're going to have to tell your friends about. For me, it was when I finally took down that six-lane bridge. It took quite a bit of effort and lots of planning. Once it collapsed, dust billowed into the air, clouding the entire screen. Seconds later, standing under the jagged remains of the bridge, I saw cars that had been moments ago speeding down a highway begin plummeting off into the wreckage, piling on one another until they all exploded. It was amazing.

Guerrilla is a flawed but fun game, one that demands patience but rewards with cinematic destruction you design yourself.

Red Faction: Guerrilla was developed by Volition and published by THQ for the PlayStation 3, PC, and Xbox 360. Released on June 2. Retails for $59.99 PS3 and 360, $49.99 PC. Played the Xbox 360 version. Completed campaign on normal difficulty (though I used a cheat for the final section). Played multiple online matches.

Confused by our reviews? Read our review FAQ.

Due on May 28, it'll introduce a new set of missions where you have to take on the Ultor Corporation, along with other stuff like new weapons, multiplayer maps and vehicles.

360 owners will be paying 560 MS Points, PS3 owners will be paying 7 Real World Dollars.

Sadly, though, none of those modes include vehicles like the giant robot mech that you can use to stomp on buildings. This means no mech-to-mech combat; but fear not my communist-themed comrades. You can still wreck a ton of stuff in a short amount of time with only a sledgehammer and your proletariat will to bring down the glass and concrete towers of the capitalist pig Earth Defense Force.

What Is It?
Red Faction: Guerrilla is a third person/sandbox shooter that's a sequel to Red Faction and Red Faction II. In the multiplayer modes, players will not be using the game's main character but rather a set of special characters with their own names and distinguishing features. Multiplayer comes in two formats: one is a standard online mode with six traditional modes like capture the flag and death match (called Anarchy), and the other is a party mode for up to four players called Wrecking Crew, where the basic goal is to destroy as much of an area as possible under certain conditions.

What We Saw
I played one capture the flag match, one team anarchy match, one damage control match (which is like King of the Hill where you're building and rebuilding on set points in the map), and two rounds of Wrecking Crew's Rampage mode which is where you're trying to do more damage in dollars than the other three players.

How Far Along Is It?
The game is due out June 2 which should be enough time to address a few minor graphics issues spotted in the multiplayer modes.

What Should Change?
A Couples of Hiccups in Online Mode: Aside from a few graphics issues like lines appearing above a character's head, I noticed one or two hiccups that would complicate a match. For example, I was playing damage control where the idea is to find empty points to build structures on, or points occupied by an enemy structure so you can knock it down and build your own structure. I happened to be standing on a point where my teammates where going to build a power station and somehow, they wound up building me inside the geometry of the structure. The only way I could get out was by wrecking the whole damn thing, which cost my team points and manpower to come back and rebuild it. It's like… worse than team-killing and totally not my fault.

Stat Screen For Wrecking Crew: There's no breakdown of points awarded in Wrecking Crew, which can lead to confusion. For example, I thought I was doing pretty well in a match where all I had was a sledgehammer to do damage. I found out if I hit green fuel barrels on the tops of builds, it would cave in the roof and sometimes collapse the whole structure completely. Sure, I died doing it, but it seemed like the best way to rack up points and I spawned back at the beginning of the map anyway, so no biggie. However, the dev monitoring my gameplay told me stop getting myself killed because it'd cost me points. After careful experimentation, I'm pretty sure it didn't cost me points – but without a stat screen, there's no way to know if I had a winning strategy or the build had some kind of bug where it wasn't penalizing me for suicide.

Stealth Packs Don't Stealth Enough: With all the stuff blowing up and most of the environments I saw being bright red or orange, it was pretty useless to run around in Predator shield mode. Everybody could see me all of the time and holding still wasn't really the best strategy for capturing a flag or killing an enemy.

What Should Stay The Same?
Straightforward Multiplayer: All the basic modes you could ever want are there, plus the theme-specific demolition and damage control modes that urge you to blow up and wreck as much stuff as possible.

Wrecking Crew: Aside from the stat screen concern, I really did find party mode fun. Even if you kept losing the various modes to better-skilled players with faster fingers, it's still kind of like a puzzle or a scavenger hunt way where you're looking for all the load-bearing walls in an area.

Easy Controls: Everything worked like it was supposed to and it was never hard to change and use weapons or items.

Planning For The Future: Volition has stated that it's committed to supporting Guerrilla long after the launch date. Downloadable content is planned but not yet announced.

Final Thoughts
Just a heads-up: you cannot really use cover in this game. Everything blows up, everything can be caved in. So get used to jumping around in the air a lot to avoid enemy fire.

Overall I can say that Red Faction: Guerrilla is not my kind of game; but I had a lot of fun playing the multiplayer modes. The controls were simple, the modes were familiar and there was a savage appeal in tossing a singularity grenade into a glass-lined hallway just to watch all the windows shatter. If only they would add mechs, I would totally convert myself to a shooter fan just so I could have the privilege of plowing through buildings and enemies alike.

Seriously, all you have to do is get chased into a building, find the right load-bearing wall, shatter it with your hammer and then rocket out the nearest window before the whole thing caves in on your attackers. Genius, comrade!

Red Faction Guerrilla's multiplayer modes come in two flavors: the traditional online shoot-em up modes (capture the flag, death match, etc.) and a party mode called wrecking crew where you try to out-do other players by causing the most amount of damage under different sets of special conditions.

Keep it here for a full preview in about an hour and in the meantime, enjoy the new screens:

In a show of supreme confidence in their game, THQ releases the single player demo for the next game in the Red Faction series into the wild, letting PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 players sink their teeth into the experience far ahead of the title's June 2nd release.

"The press and consumer buzz for Red Faction: Guerrilla continues to build, as gamers prepare for a new standard in open-world, destruction-based game-play," said Kevin Kraff, vice president of worldwide marketing, THQ. "The single-player demo will give consumers an exciting taste of what the full game will offer on June 2nd."

Which is exactly what a demo is supposed to do. Go get it, and report back here with your findings.

In what some are calling the winning video game 'prank' of April Fool's Day 2009, Volition released a hilarious video on Wednesday revealing the Ostrich Hammer, a brilliant response to NeoGAF comments regarding an early batch of Red Faction: Guerrilla screenshots. Brimming with excellent comic timing and one of the best beards ever, the video caused many of our commentors to declare the game a day one buy, as long as the Ostrich Hammer was included. Volition is going to be holding you to that.

The team had already created the Ostrich Hammer for the game, and the April Fool's video was their way of announcing it to the world. The Ostrich Hammer will be one of many multiplayer hammer unlocks available when the game ships this June. Ladies and gentlemen, prepare to get birdf***ed.

"We're Giving Them The Bird!" [Red Faction: Guerrilla]

And you can look out for it in June, as that's when publishers THQ say the game will be out. June 9, to be a little more precise, and that's (at this stage anyways) for all three platforms: PS3, 360 & PC.

The first is called "Ultor Exposed", and will be out on April 16. It will include three new missions, a new co-op game mode where you score points for carnage, and a few new maps, vehicles and weapons.

As for the other two pieces of DLC, there's no details at this point.

Ultor will be 800 MS Points/USD$10. Which, in the wake of Lost & Damned's smorgasbord of content, seems awfully steep.

Saints Row getting three DLC packs [Eurogamer]

The first video deals with the more personal ways to hurt people, places, and things in Red Faction: Guerrilla, including the assault rifle and the powered sledgehammer - my personal favorite. The second clip deals with the more explosive ways to deal with enemy nouns in the game - proximity mines and the remote mining charge, which is essentially a sticky grenade with a remote. I'd imagine that would be great fun in multiplayer, sticking one to an enemy and then simply...waiting.

That's exactly why I suck at multiplayer shooters. I spend far too much time trying to show the other team a good time.