I picked up the Red Faction Guerrilla Smasher Pack DLC yesterday which includes 8 new maps and a new game mode, Behemoth, for Wrecking Crew. I’ll admit right up front that I do have one complaint about the Smasher Pack.  It does not add support for playing Wrecking Crew over Xbox Live. I don’t want full matchmaking support or anything. Just an option to invite friends in to play it with me.  I understand that they made it to be played in a “pass the controller along the couch” style, but playing with friends over Live would have been nice.

However, for the $5 (400 Points) price you do get a lot of value. The eight new maps have a lot of variety with some being Marauder themed, some EDF, and others Red Faction.  They also have a wide variety of map sizes. Some are small with just a couple very tall buildings, but others are so large that even with thermoberic rockets I could not completely level all of the buildings in the time limit.

The new Behemoth mode allows you to play on any of the Wrecking Crew maps using a Walker.  They have all three Walker types (Combat, Heavy, and Light) from the single player campaign. You can choose either a specific Walker or set it to random.  when you set it to Random they added a nice option that if they Walker type that randomly comes up is not one you want you can hit Y and veto it.  It will then choose one of the other two Walker types.  You can veto as many times as you want until you get the Walker type you want for that map.  Since there are only three walker types is makes it easy to try all three Walkers on any given map without going back out to the menu to change Walker types.

Before I actually played the Behemoth mode I thought it would be the most fun to play with the Combat Walker because it has unlimited rocket ammo and it never overheats. So, you can just unload nonstop until the time limit is up.  While the Combat Walker is fun I actually found I could get much higher scores by using the Light Walker.  The Heavy Walker is so large that it pretty much destroys everything before it gets a chance to fall and give you that bonus damage score.  The Combat Walker’s explosions do not have much splash damage so it takes a lot of precise hits to take a building down.  With the Light Walker it is small enough to not completely destroy a building in one hit.  Plus, it moves much quicker than the the other two Walkers and has a jet pack to get you around the map.  Because of this you can quickly hit a building with the Light Walker a couple times and quickly move to the next one while gravity finishes off what you started. This leads to more buildings getting knocked down and a lot more bonus points. I was easily getting twice as many points with the light walker on the maps that have mostly buildings on them.

So, the final verdict, is it worth buying?  If you like Wrecking Crew mode then I would say that the Smasher Pack is well worth buying.  Even if you just play through all of the maps 2 or 3 times it will take you a few hours.  For $5 you’re getting more entertainment time than a typical movie ticket that cost twice as much. If you did not like Wrecking Crew then you may want to hold off but the Walkers are a lot of fun to use.