In 10 years, no one has reused Red Faction: Guerrilla’s destruction technology, except for those making its horribly off-the-mark sequel, and the people re-releasing Red Faction: Guerrilla. That is a disgrace.

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Red Faction Guerrilla Re-Mars-tered Screenshots 9 IMAGES

I started playing the Switch version of the game (I refuse to type its horrible subtitle ) this weekend and, approximately 12 minutes in, I’d already remembered why it was one of my favourite games of the last generation, despite having dull combat, dull missions, a uniformly brown world, and a protagonist with the personality of bread. The moment I remembered why I loved it so much back in 2009 was when I made a chimney fall over with a sledgehammer.I think it’s in the resistance of it. Plenty of games give you the feeling of being able to blow something up with little effort - the Red Barrel Effect, if you will - and some of those push that to the next level, allowing you to destroy walls, buildings, or statues of dictators. But something about Guerrilla feels different; the things you’re trying to make fall over feel like they’re pushing back, just slightly. Sure, you can knock down that wall, but girders inside will keep it standing, if slightly more crumblingly, asking you to knock again. Yeah, that whole chimney can fall down, but it’ll stand, creaking like a scream of defiance, until you’ve done the work to bring it falling on top of that militia running to stop you from breaking all their stuff for no real reason.That’s down to Geo-Mod 2.0, an engine built precisely to create that resistive effect, working with a concept of “stress” at its heart. Buildings don’t just fall apart because you deigned to touch them, they tear themselves to pieces if you take enough of their support away. It’s a triumph of virtual physics, with the system first inventing weights for every destructible object in the world, then working out what it would take for those weights to let gravity have its wicked way with them. It’s why Guerrilla’s bridges buckle and slacken before snapping apart like kid-made Lego. It’s tied into an audio system, too, detecting when there’s too much strain and kicking off the gentle “tk-tk-tk” of metal under duress. It’s basically the sound from The Grudge, except it makes me incredibly happy instead of worried for Sarah Michelle Gellar’s wellbeing.The most confident expression of developer Volition showing off its work comes in Guerrilla’s Demolition Master challenges, which offer a few scant resources and a structural target, then ask you to take it down as efficiently as possible, like some demonic Fred Dibnah . There’s something almost orgasmically pleasing about seeing the words “Building Structure: Critical” appear at the bottom of the screen and watching the loud, graceful sweep of a building falling down, probably on Alec Mason’s boring head. I would buy a game made up entirely of these challenges, if someone would just license Geo-Mod to make it. And Switch would be the ideal home - even with a full open world to explore, I keep finding myself spending a spare 15 minutes jumping onto the surface of Mars, picking a building, knocking it over, and then getting on with life. It's perfect.But I also find myself hoping that licensing Geo-Mod is impossible, or that it’s somehow been accidentally deleted, because the alternative - that no one, for 10 years, has wanted to use it - is too horrible to bear. In fact, it’s actually been longer than 10 years because, per this excellent Digital Foundry interview , Geo-Mod 2.0 was in the works before last-gen console devkits were even available to developers. We were still playing on PS2s while an unsurpassed open-world technology was being planned. It’s enough to make you weep.We’re living in an age where Crackdown 3 can use entire banks of servers to make skyscrapers fall over realistically and still feel somehow cardboard-y, like the world isn’t solid all the way through. There are games - primarily PC-based - that make complex destruction their be-all-and-end-all, but they tend to abstract away the human element, and lose something for it. No matter how boring he might have been, there's something about being Alec Mason, making him do the work, that makes Guerrilla's silliness feel more well-earned.I’m not sure if Geo-Mod was well ahead of its time, is too difficult or costly to replicate, if it’s something else I haven’t thought of, or all of the above, but it seems an oddly foreshortened history for tech that was more or less universally praised. If you think of the strides other innovations have taken since - open world design, procedural generation, reactive audio - you can imagine a timeline where we’re on Geo-Mod 5.0 by now, all talking about how cool it was when we made the Eiffel Tower fall over, rivet-by-rivet, or something.But we’re not in that timeline. We’re cursed. We can hope that Volition is working on a Guerrilla follow-up right now, that it’s one of the 35 unannounced games new owner THQ Nordic was talking about last year, but it remains just that - a hope. For now, you can do far worse than bashing your way through Guerrilla again on a Switch. Don’t make me wait 10 more years to do it again, please.

Joe Skrebels is IGN's UK Deputy Editor, and his Switch has recently become a machine for 10 year old games he remembers loving. Play Dragon's Dogma too. Follow him on Twitter