Heads up action heroes – a demo of THQ’s ace-looking Martian destruction-fest, Red Faction: Guerrilla, is now LIVE.

Interested parties – and we presume that’s all of you – need to sign up super-quick, though, as we’re warned that spaces for this closed Beta test of the single-player game are strictly limited. Just head to www.thq-games.com, create an account (no cost involved) provide a few details about your gaming preferences and you’ll be sent a key to unlock the demo for PS3 of Xbox 360. Thereafter the alpha-numeric key needs to be inserted at the ‘Redeem Code’ option on your console (i.e under the ‘Marketplace’ tab on the Xbox LIVE dashboard, or the PS3 equivalent) and, well, that’s it. Simples!

The demo itself takes in a whole mission from the singleplayer campaign and sounds like a riot, as players steal one of those humongous military walker devices, stride through the walls of buildings unscathed, blast the bejeepers out of anyone and anything foolish enough to be standing in your way and flip tanks with merry abandon.

The brand new “Geo-Mod 2.0” engine that powers the action looks like it’s worth seeing too. THQ reckons it’s about five years ahead of the competition with physics-based destructibility on scale hitherto unseen. Basically, in-game objects have real mass and inertia to the extent that if you were to blow a sizeable enough hole in the side of a building the whole thing would come tumbling down. Likewise a bridge could be weakened enough by repeated blasts that it’s strong enough to take your weight but not that of the enemy convoy giving chase. We’re told that rubble has the same mass and inertia too – meaning you’ll be damaged by flying debris if you’re standing in the wrong place at the wrong time.

That’s got to be worth a butcher’s, right? And it all looks pretty splendid too. So what are you waiting for...?