There’s something entrancing about knocking things down. From the
time we’re babies until the day we die, destruction seems to be
engrained in our psyche. Setting up a room full of dominos or building a
sand castle will never be as entertaining as watching them succumb to
the force of gravity after a light poke or an overzealous stomp. The Red
Faction franchise has built its legacy on that very fact; destruction
is fun.
My first encounter with the Red Faction games was Red Faction Guerrilla,
an open world, go-anywhere, destroy everything any way you want kind of
game. Although flawed in many ways; the story, graphics, or
presentation for example, the gameplay was solid and was a blast to
experiment with. Two years later, Volition Inc., the minds behind Red
Faction, released the next installment to the franchise, Red Faction Armageddon.
Made from the same engine as Guerrilla, Armageddon has stripped much of
what its predecessor is known for, in light of a more streamlined
linear venture with little variability or adaptability in gameplay. Do
all the new changes enhance a previously flawed game? Or do they ruin
the fun for everyone?
Red Faction Guerrilla left off with a newly freed Mars. For
years Earth and military group the Earth Defense Force (EDF)
tyrannically ruled over the lives of all who inhabited the red planet.
Alec Mason, the game’s protagonist, was forced into serving the Red
Faction after his brother was killed by the EDF. Mason led the
pseudo-terrorist militia into many guerrilla warfare style battles with
the EDF, eventually ridding the planet of its fascist overseers.
Fifty years later Red Faction Armageddon begins with the
grandchild of Alec Mason, Darius, and his Red Faction allies attempting
to protect a terraformer that controls the weather on the inhabited part
of the Martian surface. The facility is under attack for an unknown
reason by a group of cultists led by Adam Hale. Upon leaving the
facility, Darius learns that Hale has tricked him and succeeds in
destroying the terraformer. The Martian surface, now unprotected, is
uninhabitable due to the storms that now ravage the surface. Humans are
forced underground and try futilely to resume life as usual.
Years later, Darius works as a mercenary/contractor and is hired to work at a dig site. He is tasked with removing an odd looking alien seal, only to realize, after breaking the seal and freeing an insect-like alien horde, that once again he has been tricked by Adam Hale, whose cult worships the creatures. Thus begins the extremely contrived quest of Darius Mason to destroy the bugs, bring down Hale’s cult, and restore life on the surface of Mars. As you can most likely perceive from this mish-mash of a plot, the Red Faction games aren’t known for their stories. Armageddon’s plot is overly complex, confusing and barely serves to explain what’s happening on screen. At one point we’re introduced to a fourth faction, Marauders (the first three being humans, the cultists, and aliens). To anyone new to the series, Marauders are humans that separated from the rest of the colonists during colonization. They have since become a tribal, spiritual, and technologically savvy race of Martians that the cult have originated from, but remain friendly to humanity. Does Red Faction Armageddon explain any of this? Nope, in fact, you have to have played a previous game to understand most of what’s going on.
The characters are basically cardboard cutouts from other games and
movies. Darius is a bald, tattooed veteran with a bad reputation. His
love interest is the girl from the other side of town, and, like all
sci-fi game femmes, wears a ridiculously complex and revealing suit.
Darius even has a black stereotype ex-military pal that provides a few
cheesy one-liners during combat. Mason isn’t above throwing out a few
bad one-liners himself like, “That’s gonna’ hurt in the morning,” and
“He’s not getting up from that.” The bland forgettable characters seem
to even hinder your experience with their cliché dialogue, and that’s
saying a lot in a game where your main goal is to knock things down. In
the end, you have a throw away story that only serves to give the
gameplay context. Luckily, in a game that’s solely about gameplay and
the sheer enjoyment of creating chaos, putting such little effort into
the story isn’t something to worry about.
Story 6/10
Story 6/10
Gameplay
Now we’re getting to the meat of Armageddon. Gameplay is the
bread and butter of Red Faction, and Volition Inc. knows it. No game
can compare with the utter destruction you wield in Armageddon.
An arsenal is at your fingertips, ready to demolish everything in your
sight, and boy is it fun! Want to knock a building down in the blink of
an eye? Launch a black hole into it with the singularity gun and watch
as it vaporizes everything in sight. Prefer a more drawn-out demolition?
Use the sledgehammer and knock out individual load baring supports, one
by one, until the building gives way to gravity.
When it comes to weapons, Armageddon has the best arsenal yet in the franchise, my personal favorite being the magnet gun. Place an anchor on any object, then place a second anchor on another, then watch the first object rocket towards the second eventually crashing together with kinetic force. This is especially fun when done to an enemy, a short “yelp!” is uttered by your foe before being hurdled into the nearest building. You are also gifted with the nano forge-- think of it as an anti-weapon. Anything destroyed by the player can be undone with the nano forge, just point and shoot; it even has a ranged version that is unlocked midway through the game. This is especially useful when something like a bridge is destroyed and still needs to be crossed. Innovations like this were obviously inspired by Guerrilla’s mistakes; a major one being that any building destroyed can never be fixed and will remain destroyed unless you restarted the game.
In any game there is the short term experience happening now, and the
long term overall experience that encompasses all gameplay for that
particular game. Armageddon nailed the short term gameplay but its overall experience suffers from its major design flaws.
Red Faction Guerrilla embraced an open world design. If you
wanted to bring down an enemy base you had countless ways to do so,
running in guns blazing being the most simple, all the way to a strategy
like planting remote detonation mines all over a vehicle, then driving
the vehicle off of a nearby cliff landing right on top the enemy base,
quickly jumping out and placing singularity mines all over the
surrounding structures and finally finishing it off by detonating the
mines that cover the vehicle reducing the base to smoldering debris.
This was the main draw to Guerrilla; you had options. It wasn’t
solely about destroying structures, it was the trial and error of the
ways you went about completing tasks, destruction was just the icing on
the cake, or the reward for a job well done.
With Armageddon taking on a linear underground style
gameplay you have really only one option, the Neanderthal-like
run-in-shoot-everything-run-out philosophy. There is only one way in and
one way out, and you’re not even given a choice of vehicle; the game
decides for you. In certain levels you have to pilot a mech and in
others you have no other option then roughing it on foot. Armageddon is
best described as a dungeon crawler when compared to its prequel. Your
only real goal is to survive.
Next up is your enemies, bugs -- bugs that look suspiciously like Predator. These creatures have three modes of transportation: crawling on the ground, jumping from wall to wall, and teleporting/flanking; most of the time all three will be occurring at the same time, so planning accordingly goes out the window. If your main draw for a game is demolishing buildings, why make enemies that don’t use them? I have to once again stress how well Guerrilla handled this. In Guerrilla, your enemies would hold up in heavily fortified bases. Luckily for you, you had just the tools for bringing the buildings crashing down on them. There was a big emphasis on taking down enemy strongholds, and they weren’t vacant. So why in the sequel do we have a game that wants you to tear down buildings that are completely unoccupied? The bugs run along the ground or jump from cave wall to wall. Only if you run into a structure will they really ever enter one. Lastly, nine hours of shooting the same bugs over and over again gets very old, very fast. The developers tried to fix this by including a few boss battles and on-rails sections, but it does little to snap you out of being a glorified exterminator.
Overall, your incentive to perform the main game mechanic --
demolishing buildings -- is impeded by having no real motive to do so. Red Faction Guerrilla
isn’t this perfect game I have made it out to be. Its open world design
got old and boring by the end and could have used a few dungeon
crawling sections or a few bug type enemies to break up the expansive
environment and never ending stream of human enemies. When it comes to
weapons and your ability to wreck the scenery, Armageddon clearly shines and definitely is the better game when it comes to the short term gameplay, but Guerrilla
overall has better long term satisfaction. Actually, I think that the
two games should have been combined from the start, an open world game
with some linear sections throughout to break up the monotonous.
Gameplay 7/10
Presentation
Even though Armageddon uses the same engine Guerilla
used, there is a quite large jump in graphical detail, most likely due
to the fact that it isn’t an open world game and rather has loadable
levels instead. Another great improvement from its prequel is
Armageddon’s color palate. The much more varied environments and scenery
help Mars from seeming utterly void of any color other than red. A few
buildings here, a couple crystals there, and you have a level that is
pleasing to the eye, not to mention all the weapons that bring huge
splashes of color to the screen every time one of their explosions go
off. After all that is said and done, you are left with a refreshingly
colorful game, for a game based on Mars.
A game that deals with massive amounts of debris flying everywhere, explosions going off constantly, and a virtual torrent of projectiles getting shot at the player would seem like a game that would inevitably be plagued with frame rate issues. But surprisingly this is not the case. The game moves so fluidly that I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that my TV’s smooth motion effect was turned on the whole time.
There’s not much to say about the audio other than that. The
soundtrack is the same as any other sci-fi game or movie with
‘Armageddon’ as a subtitle, and the surround sound does its job. But
with so many enemies all bouncing from wall to wall around you, surround
sound won’t help you pin point any oncoming threats as well as the
radar ever did.
Re-experiencing the carnage in the campaign should be a big incentive
to pop Armageddon back into your game console. Volition has included
hidden audio logs throughout the game that should warrant at least a
second play-through for collectable seekers. Also after completing the
campaign, the player is rewarded with a new weapon, Mr. Toots, a rainbow
farting unicorn, (similar to the Dead Space 2 hand cannon), as well as
the ability to play through the game with all items and unlockables
collected in the first go around.
There are also two different multiplayer types; Infestation and Ruin Mode. Infestation is similar to Horde mode in Gears of War,
where the players must survive wave after wave of increasingly
difficult enemies. But this time the enemies aren’t just after the
players, they’re also after a building in the center of the map. If the
building is destroyed, then the players lose. Luckily the Nano Forge is
still functional in multiplayer and the building can be repaired at
will. The other multiplayer game is Ruin Mode, where the players take
turns destroying everything in sight to rack up the cost of destruction,
the player who damaged the most wins (think Burnout’s crash mode.)
Presentation 7/10
Presentation 7/10
Overall
When all is said and done, Armageddon is fun, but doesn’t have
the lasting appeal its predecessor does. After you accomplish the
campaign you have experienced all each level has to offer seeing as how
the level of experimentation has been severely cut back in this
iteration. It’s worth taking a look at, and I recommend it. I would also
recommend that you play Armageddon as well as Guerrilla to get the full
Red Faction experience.
Red Faction: Armageddon 6.6/10
Game Info
Platform: Xbox 360, Playstation , PC
ESRB: M
PEGI: 18
Publisher: 2K Games
Developer: Volition Inc.
Release Date: June 07, 2011
Red Faction: Armageddon 6.6/10
Game Info
Platform: Xbox 360, Playstation , PC
ESRB: M
PEGI: 18
Publisher: 2K Games
Developer: Volition Inc.
Release Date: June 07, 2011
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