INSTRUMENTS OF DESTRUCTION

Red Faction’s tech lead brings the house down once more

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Developer Radiangames

Publisher TBA

Format PC, consoles TBA

Origin US Release Q4 2021

Luke Schneider has plenty of experience in building things up just to knock them down again. He spent five years as lead tech designer on Red Faction: Guerrilla, a game fondly remembered for its destructible scenery if not necessarily much else. Since striking out on his own under the banner of Radiangames, Schneider has spent the past decade releasing mostly arcade shooters and physics puzzlers. His most recent was Speed Demons, an Apple Arcade launch title that’s essentially Burnout seen from a Micro Machines perspective, and it seems all those motorway pile-ups reawakened Schneider’s appetite for destruction.

“That’s where the whole basic idea came from,” he says – an urge to return to his roots and do a bit of smashing. He started with the tech, toying with Unity’s physics systems to create structures that could be toppled dynamically. The question was: by what? His first idea was a robotic sphere – “BB-8 meets EVE from Wall-E” – that the player would roll around the levels. But for all the abilities he piled onto his wrecking ball hero, “I didn’t really see how that was going to be very replayable”.

The realisation that transformed those early prototypes into