E3 surprises are often leaked by retailer databases or blurry photographs, but it's not every day that a new game is leaked by a screenshot tool. But that may have happened with Red Faction Evolution, which users on the Metacouncil forum spotted on Nvidia's Ansel compatibility page. Ansel is Nvidia's tech for taking 360 degree screenshots in games, adjusting post-processing, resolution, and so on. It's a high-powered photo mode that quite a few PC games support these days, including, supposedly, Red Faction Evolution.

There hasn't been a new Red Faction game since 2011's Red Faction Armageddon, but the series has shown signs of life recently, with Red Faction Guerilla Re-Mars-tered, released in July 2018. THQ Nordic published that re-release, and at the time we said we hoped they would bring back Red Faction for another shot. And just this week, the publisher said that it had 48 unannounced games in development.

Knowing that, a game called Red Faction Evolution being announced at this E3 doesn't sound so crazy at all. You can check out the listing on the Nvidia Ansel page here. It's still there on the US page, as of this writing.

(For reference, the asterisk next to some of the games, including Red Faction Evolution, means the following:  "*Select Beta Ansel features can include: screenshot, filters, and super resolution (AI). Additional features not available.")

It's a damn crime that no game ripped off Red Faction: Guerrilla's Geo-mod destruction feature. You take a hammer, and you use it to smash out a panel of a wall and break through a pillar. Smash out a few more walls, and maybe the building creaks. A few more whacks of the hammer later, and the whole thing comes down, perhaps with you inside. And hey, maybe it knocks through another building on the way down. It's still amazing to watch.

Guerrilla does this one thing really well. It's an otherwise uninspired open world game, with okay driving, unimpressive shooting and a boring story. Hell, Mars doesn't even look that nice, because it's Mars. But knocking down buildings in an open world is more than enough to carry this game. You'll crash a jeep through a base. You'll detonate mines and blow up a bridge, which will then collapse on top of an enemy settlement. You'll melt the beams of a tower and watch it fall over. This destruction felt great in 2009, and it still feels good now. 

That's partly because no big studio or publisher has really imitated what it does in the same way. Which, to be clear, is this:

In this Re-Mars-tered edition, which is free for owners of the Steam version as of today, THQ Nordic touts heavily reworked textures among other visual improvements, along with better shadows, lighting, a shader and postprocessing rework and native 4K support. The new version is a 24.3GB download, while the existing Steam edition is 6.7GB. For a freebie, it seems pretty good after four hours or so. I can't say I really notice vast visual improvements on my strange 1050p work monitor, but environmental textures like rocks and the ground look a little sharper up close. The lighting is nice by today's standards, too, but it's not a vast upgrade.

With my work PC (Intel I5 3570K@3.40GHz, 8GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce GTX 970), I'm getting around 90-120FPS depending on how busy the situation is, which is fine for a new version of an almost decade-old game. This edition may just give you a reason to play it again, which is fine by me. It costs $20. If it's not in your Steam library already after years of deep discounting and bundling, you should probably wait for a future sale. 

Tower fall

To anyone picking this up for the first time, I recommend focusing on the campaign. That's where the biggest destructive opportunities are, like a huge bridge and a massive tower, which take meticulous use of the object-melting nano rifle and rocket launcher to bring down. You'll wait a while to unlock all the really good toys, but the singleplayer will give you plenty to blow up along the way, as well as a dull story about miners rebelling against an army that's a bit like a boring version of Firefly. The big destructive opportunities in this campaign need to be seen, though—I still talk about them with friends years later. 

I'm not really in the mood for finishing the campaign these days after doing it twice before, but that's where the game's Wrecking Crew mode comes in. It's basically a score attack that gives you a quick dose of the game's destructive physics in a variety of settings. You pick a loadout, set the parameters like time limits and how easily the buildings fall, then knock them down as quickly as possible. It makes a great pass-the-pad party game, and there's a challenge mode with leaderboards, too. I have played this mode every year for nine years, and I will never stop.  

Sadly for me, all of the leaderboards have been reset from the Steam version, meaning I'm no longer 12th best in the world on the Abandoned map. Oh well. Wrecking Crew is where it's at: it's all the good bits of Guerrilla with none of the waiting around for the best weapons or opportunities. Over the years, I've probably played it more than the campaign. 

No imitators 

It's weird that no one else made a game like Guerrilla after its release. Destruction features in everything from Battlefield to Minecraft to Just Cause, but Volition's game still offers something that no other game does. It's the idea of blowing each building up like it's a physics puzzle, efficiently using your arsenal so it collapses in the most satisfying way possible. 

It might've been Red Faction's sparse Mars setting that made Guerrilla work in the first place. It's noticeable that all the biggest and best buildings are far away from each other, and it probably wouldn't have been possible for Volition to replicate the Geo-mod system in the vast cities of Saints Row. But that is the type of open world game I've always wanted to play, where you can manipulate the environment and feel like you've left a mark on it. We're instead in an age of open world games packed with busywork and towers to climb. I like those too, but Guerrilla shows open worlds and destructible buildings are a perfect match. 

Even old THQ didn't seem to know why Guerrilla was good. Volition followed this up with Armageddon in 2011, a bad sequel that kept the destruction, but took us away from big open set pieces to the tedious, more linear underground. It just squandered everything this game was good at—and seemingly killed the series. What a waste. It was the most disappointed I've ever been by a sequel, and was once described to me ahead of release as being like Dead Space, which couldn't have been less accurate.

Still, if THQ Nordic is bringing Darksiders back for another shot, perhaps Red Faction will get its chance again too. I just wish its influence, and its collapsing buildings, had carried a little further. 

What's the most underrated game on PC? This is the subject of the PCG Q&A, where each Saturday (and sometimes on Wednesdays too), we ask the global PC Gamer team for their answers to a burning question. We then encourage you to drop your answers to the same question in the comments thread below.

There's no comprehensive answer to this one, obviously, and it's just a bit of fun. We've picked games that either sold badly, were ignored despite having something to offer, or got an unfair kicking at launch by critics or players. 

Evan Lahti: LawBreakers

OK, I'll jump on this grenade: it's LawBreakers. Corners of the gaming community were fixated on making it a punching bag for their amusement, and the "dead game" Reddit groupthink that ultimately suffocated LawBreakers had nothing to do with how good it actually is. Its character movement styles are inventive—the Wraith kick-slides along the ground to accelerate, jabbing the air with a knife to swim forward in low-grav. They can also triple jump and wall jump, a moveset that gives them Wraith a darting, alien locomotion that's enjoyable to master. Gunslingers teleport in short bursts like Tracer from Overwatch, but the first shots from either of their dual pistols are buffed immediately after you blink. If you fly backwards as the Harrier, you shoot lasers from your feet. 

This is the only FPS I can think of that lets me shoot behind myself, never mind turning it into a way to physically propel myself forward. LawBreakers could've taken a much easier route and simply given everyone jetpacks and focused on unique guns, but instead it got ambitious and built weird, unfamiliar styles of aerial fencing, gunslinging, grenading, and more. It also sported some of the best netcode in years, backed up by expert testing.

Jarred Walton: Epistory: Typing Chronicles

I don't know that it's underrated, but I recently stumbled upon Epistory: Typing Chronicles, and it's great—and it was also a game I totally missed when it was new. I can thank Steam's Spring Cleaning event for recommending it as a game I should try, and I enjoyed the relatively short story, lovely aesthetic, and the crazy vocabulary. Anyway, I write for a living, so something that puts my typing skills to good use is a welcome diversion, and now I've inflicted my children with the game so that they can hopefully learn to type. My 15-year-old thinks it's great and my 8-year-old hates it (because it's too hard and frustrating).

Phil Savage: Dragon Age 2 (oh snap!)

It reviewed pretty well, but it would be fair to say that public reaction to BioWare's sequel was... unfavourable. That's fair: a game with only one cave layout shouldn't have so many missions set in a cave. In fact, many criticisms of Dragon Age II are entirely justified, but to write it off because of them would be to miss out on one of the most interesting RPGs BioWare has made. 

Instead of sending you out on a grand journey, Dragon Age II is about a single city and the people within it. As Hawke, you travel to this city, survive in this city and fight to save this city over the course of around ten years. You get to feel like a member of the community in the way few RPGs, with their huge maps and sweeping stories, can support. And you get to hang out with Varric in a dingy pub. I'd love for a developer to revisit this style of role-playing, but, until that happens, I'll keep propping up the bar in the The Hanged Man.

Tom Senior: The Sims: Hot Date

Sims DLC often takes criticism for being little more than overpriced packs of digital items. Some of the DLC is like that, but the major expansions add loads of ways for Sims to interact and grow inside your carefully manicured fishbowl. Hot Date could have been a frivolous expansion that added a few new romance-themed behavioural patterns and some nice clothes, but it ended up adding a rich strata of nightlife that gave the Sims themselves a more rounded and believable existence. 

Before Hot Date they hoovered, pooped, cleaned up mess and vanished off to work for hours at a time. Hot Date opened up huge new downtown areas where they could meet other Sims and, with a bit of luck, find a partner. The downtown area also froze time back home, which meant your Sims could have a career and hang out with friends and loved ones in the same life—they enjoyed a pretty grim domestic existence before this expansion came along. Dating sims are more prevalent now, but Hot Date brought the idea into the mainstream, and did a great job of making downtown a bustling social hub. For some reason Hot Date never seemed to receive the credit it deserved for its novelty and ambition at the time.

Austin Wood: Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams 

There's no shortage of good 2D platformers on Steam. Most everyone is familiar with the big ones—the likes of Fez, Shovel Knight, Super Meat Boy, Celeste and Cave Story—but for some reason nobody ever talks about Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams. It came out nearly six years ago, and it's still one of the best 2D platformers on PC—and the Rise of the Owlverlord level pack released in 2013 only made it better. (You can get the full package for under five bucks in the Steam Summer Sale, by the way.) 

The art has aged well and the difficulty curve is spot-on, but what I love most about Giana Sisters is the music. You can swap between the titular sisters at any time, and while the happy blonde sister gets bright fantasy levels and bubbly electronic tunes, playing as the punk pink-haired sister drenches levels in horror themes set to fantastic original rock songs. I like my Ori and the Blind Forest orchestral swells as much as the next gamer, but you just don't hear rock music like this in 2D platformers anymore. I absolutely love it, so I played as the punk sister whenever possible. The boss themes are especially great. Giana Sisters looks, plays and sounds great, so if you've played all the best-known 2D platformers, or even if you haven't, you have got to give it a try. 

Andy Chalk: The Long Journey Home

The Long Journey Home is a sort of Starflight/Star Control/Lunar Lander hybrid exploration-adventure about a small spaceship that's flung, Voyager-style, to the wrong side of the universe. It's weird, it's funny, it's occasionally frustrating as hell, and it's really good. It didn't catch fire, though, with critics or gamers: Our 68/100 review was actually one of the more positive takes, and it's still languishing under the weight of "mixed" user reviews on Steam.

A big reason for that was the game's utterly unforgiving nature at launch: it was quite happy to swat players down for the slightest transgression, to the extent that one bad landing, for instance, could signal the abrupt end of an otherwise very successful mission. A "Story Mode" option was added later that made survival (and thus the ability to actually get out there and explore) much easier, but by that point the damage of those initial review scores was done. But it's good! (I thought it was good right from the start, but the increased accessibility is definitely a plus.) And it deserves far better than it got. (If you're curious, it's half-price in the Steam Summer Sale.)

It's also not nearly as dramatic as the launch trailer above makes it out to be.

Samuel Roberts: Red Faction Guerrilla

Alright, this sold well enough to get a (bad) sequel and it was acclaimed by critics, so 'underrated' is a bit of a weird label. Thing is, though, why wasn't this the most influential game of its generation? Why did open world games become about ticking off icons, climbing boring towers and dull counter-based combat systems? Why didn't they become about knocking shit down and hitting NPCs with hammers? In that sense, I believe Red Faction Guerrilla is underrated. 

The games industry didn't see the opportunity here, and it ended up having no imitators. And yet, it so clearly demonstrated how much fun it was to see things topple over because you detonated remote charges in all the right places. Is it too late for someone to make a proper open world sequel?

I also agree with Phil that Dragon Age 2 is underrated. I wouldn't want every RPG to be set in one location, but it was a neat experiment despite a weaker third act and a thin combat system. In some ways, I guess I never really left that one cave.

Some other runners up for me that spring to mind: decent Sonic-like Freedom Planet, D4, Star Wars: Battle For Naboo, Everyday Shooter, Ephemerid: A Musical Adventure, Darkside Detective, The Flame in the Flood, Mad Max, The Magic Circle and...Mirror's Edge Catalyst, which is several mandatory, terrible combat sequences away from being a great game. I should mention Alpha Protocol too, right?

Let us know your suggestions below.

"Space Asshole" is a song about a man who tries to get away from the pressures and travails of his life by signing up for a job working in the mines of Mars. He foresees quiet, solitude, and an opportunity to reflect on the past and contemplate the future, all while earning honest pay for honest work. But it all goes awry when a guy with a giant hammer charges onto the scene (in a truck), smashing and killing everything for no apparent reason except that he is, as the title denotes, a Space Asshole. 

The song was released in 2009 by Chris Remo as a tribute of sorts to Red Faction: Guerrilla, and now, in a tremendously fitting twist, it's been adopted by THQ Nordic for the Red Faction: Guerrilla Re-Mars-tered Edition launch date trailer. It's a remix, a little more rocking than the languid, defeated tone of the original, but still a great track—and a brilliant choice as promotional music. 

The remastered release of Red Faction: Guerrilla will feature "fully reworked graphics" and graphical effects, improved lighting and shadow rendering, updated shaders and post-processing, and native 4K support. The game itself sounds unchanged, however, with "open world guerrilla warfare" that enables players to fight where, when, and who they want, even if that means just running around on Mars bashing things into pieces, because you're not so much a revolutionary hero as a... well, you know. 

Pricing for Red Faction: Guerrilla Re-Mars-tered hasn't been announced, but owners of the original on Steam will be given the updated version for free.