THQ has announced plans to finally dip back into the well and complete the Red Faction trilogy of games. If you don’t feel that excited, don’t worry. No one is.

The original Red Faction was note-worthy for its destructible environments. At the time of its release it was a pretty innovative graphical technique and really showed off what made the PS2 superior to the PS1. However, in the years since the release of Red Factions 1 and 2, gamers have discovered that they really don’t want to blow up entire worlds.

The truth is that destructible environments within a game basically only work within a large-scale destruction game, such as Hulk: Ultimate Destruction. That sort of carnage set free into just about any other genre and at some point the game will break. First-person-shooters, such as Red Faction, especially need some sort of structure and guides through a level. Allow the gamer to break those entirely and you end up with someone shooting a wall for thirty minutes just to bust through and see there’s nothing on the other side. That’s not much fun for a game.

Instead, games like Red Faction tout destructible environments by allowing you to destroy strategically placed bits of the environment. This isn’t far removed from destroying barrels in Dooms. Destructible environments were once a great technical achievement in the past, and for the most part that’s where they should stay.

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