Red Faction: Guerrilla

• Play on the easiest difficulty level. The combat is solidly in the "chore" category and should be on easy so that it can be dealt with quickly and you can focus on the greatest building destruction simulator of all time. Really, once I got good at the game I only ever shot guys when I felt like it - the rest of the time I was hurling satchel charges like a madman, knocking down walls with a tank, and having about 2000 times more fun than I was when shooting guys.

• Smash up the starting area for salvage, there is more to get than from just the 2 marked buildings. Once you get past this area and are at the starting safehouse, go to the upgrade table and use that salvage to buy the upgrade that lets you pick up salvage in a vehicle.

• After your first 2 side missions you'll unlock an upgrade that increases the return from ore deposits, which are the black crystal formations you'll see randomly scattered around. Don't mine these until you have this upgrade, although it isn't a big deal if you do since there are so many of them. These give a good amount of salvage, so do stop to mine them when you see them. You need all the salvage you can get, you won't have enough to buy all the weapons and upgrades, unless you really go on a ore deposit hunting spree.

• The big grey hydrogen storage tank things that blow up with a green explosion leave a lot of salvage behind and generally don't attract too much attention when you blow them up. It's usually worth it to stop and blow them up, don't hit them with the sledge though or you'll blow yourself up.

• When you pick up a new weapon from a dead EDF soldier you will be able to get an infinite supply of it from your safehouse after picking it up once. After any firefight run around and look for new weapons, pick it up once and you can swap it back for your old weapon if you want.

• If you're dying, hop into a vehicle. If your vehicle is about to blow up, get out first or you will die with it. Your health will regenerate pretty damn fast if you can avoid taking any damage for like 5 seconds or so.

• Hit and run, generally the EDF outguns and outnumbers you and if you get stuck out in the open you'll get killed. EDF tends to send forces at you in waves. You'll get swarmed and think you're fucked, but if you can find a chokepoint to mow them down, you'll have some time before the next wave comes to get out of there, or continue wrecking things, or whatever you were doing. Don't forget if you blow up buildings from range and run away you'll miss out on the salvage from them.

• You can use the arc welder to kill the driver of a vehicle without damaging the vehicle, and then steal it.

• While you can melee with a gun out, it's generally better to quick swap(tapping R2 switches to your last equipped weapon) to the sledgehammer and hit them with that instead. Sledge hits are 1 hit kills, hitting them with a gun typically takes a few swings.

• The first upgrade you should buy with your salvage is the Extra Salvage From Ore upgrade. You get an extra 20% from mining nodes towards future upgrades. The next one(s) you should buy is everything for the arc welder. Chances are when you first take the arc welder out you will look at it and be like "Short range, indiscriminate, low damage wtf". So you pop in the One Extra Target upgrade, and then the Only Target Hostiles upgrade, and buy some extra ammo capacity, and all for relatively cheap I might add. Then you become an unstoppable vehicle-frying, stunned EDF-punching killing machine.

• Everything explodes. Don't forget to leave yourself some cover when you blow up important buildings.

• Remember to pick up enemy guns, because they then go into your weapon store (especially useful for guns like the sniper rifle which can go through tanks to their pilots)

• If you're having trouble liberating Oasis, there is a rocket mech in roughly the middle of the area, so you can use that.