Red Faction Armageddon

Red Faction: Guerilla was one of my favourite games of 2009. A great sandbox game on a sandy planet. The open world idea has been ditched for its successor, Armageddon. In a sense, I can understand this; unlike GTA who can just go to another city, Red Faction would have been another game involving long drives across the same red landscape.
So, we have a third person shooter instead.
In recent months I have played a few sci-fi oriented games. Unfortunately for RF:Armageddon, these included Mass Effect 2 and Dead Space 2, both of which show this game up for what it is; a rather by-the-numbers shoot em up. The first 50% of this game is spent running a very pre-ordained path through bland (and annoyingly dark) looking caves shooting aliens, the variety of which barely changes. (It is worth a mention that Visceral Games' Dead Space series uses light and shade to a terrifyingly skillful degree. Here, its just sort of brown and more brown.) That is essentially half the game gone. In that time, we don't see any characters we care remotely about, or indeed much of a story line. When we finally reach the surface, there's a sandstorm, and you can't see all that much up there either. And then we're back down in the caves again until the end. Graphically, this ain't a stunner. What happened to the crystal clear visuals of Guerilla? Why do I feel like I've played through this game with cateracts?
The whole breaking up bits of scenery with a hammer is no longer a justifiably wonderful gimick to sustain the series if all that is left besides is a bog standard bug hunt.Perhaps the next installment should spread its wings and move away from the red planet once and for all, maybe take a leaf out of Mass Effect's book.
Having said all that, it is fairly enjoyable for what it is. Its just that what it is, is such a retrograde step. I really wanted to love this because I've always loved Red Faction since the beginning, but this is nothing worth writing home about. Certainly not from Mars anyway.

Having recently completed this little chestnut of a game, I have to admit that I did enjoy it. Repetative yes, but enjoyable none the less.

I haven't played the previous game but this one is set 25 years on. You are the saviour of Mars as you get sent underground to the mines to sort out the beasties. This is a bug hunt and you are the bug hunter baby!

Graphics I thought were excellent and the sound good although the score only kicks in when the bugs are about. There are a lot of them and they can even shoot? Controls are easy to get to grips with and weapons can be upgraded as you go along by collecting tins of salvage. This is one of the few games where the melee weapons are pretty useful. I liked the vehicles, they added a bit of variety to what is a pretty repetative game. You do have to complete objectives but they do involve shooting bugs to complete them. They game is quite long as well.

Negatives? Well, as well as being samey it is also bug ridden itself. There is a lot of slowdown when things get frantic on screen particularly at the end where is slows to a crawl. The ending is also a bit severe and lasts too long.

You get a couple of mini-game modes as well. Infestation is just horde with bugs and Ruin which promotes destruction of the environment for points. Good for a blast but boring after a while.

Overall, an enjoyable game for someone who has a passion for exterminating creepy crawlies. I bought it on sale and its worth a punt if the price is low.

Here's a list of things that shouldn't be put in caves: parrots, solar panels, ex-girlfriends, formerly successful open-world games set on Mars. Because this time Red Faction isn't set on Mars exactly, it's set in it, which is more of a problem than you might think.

The last Red Faction was an open world smash-fest, a sort of red planet GTA with plenty of missions, a range of challenges, and big space vehicles to drive around. Here, all that's been cut in favour of an entirely linear action game that spends 90% of its running time underground in a series of identical caves. Playing as Darius Mason, a man who unwittingly unleashed a race of killer bugs on the underground colonists (um, woops), you must try to find out what happened and, inevitably, how to stop it. Here's a clue: it has a lot to do with killing bugs.

It's third-person action, and as in Guerilla, the hook is your ability to destroy things with a big hammer and then repair them with a sort of magic glove - taking apart a whole bridge, say, then rebuilding it when you need it again. In the open-world setting of the previous game, this introduced a strategic edge and a lot of fun: why waste your ammo trying to kill all the enemies inside a building when you can just tear the whole structure down on top of them? That doesn't really work in the claustrophobic nooks and crannies of Armageddon's caves though, so you're left half-heartedly smashing things for salvage that lets you buy upgrades. That is, until you realise how uninspiring these upgrades are. Extra health, you say? What a game changer.

Also uninspiring is Darius himself. The grandson of Red Faction: Guerilla's Alec Mason, he's inherited all of his ancestor's genetic code: he's bald, he's loud, he's toting a massive hammer, and he's outstandingly bland. The main characters are only distinguishable because one's white, one wears a hood, and one's got boobs. Otherwise they all look like boiled eggs with faces drawn on them, and have the personalities to match. It's a mercy that you can skip the cut-scenes; sadly, skipping the banal in-game banter isn't an option.

Like a pest-control worker mad on his own poison supplies, you spend most of your time just shooting bugs. So many bugs. Bugs that occasionally look like necromorphs, sometimes look like the result of unprotected sex between a gibbon and a hedgehog, and frequently put up more tentacles than you'd find in a Japanese porno stash. You go into an area, get an instruction to break or repair something, and then you're guaranteed a deluge of enemies to kill. Don't even think about legging it, either: you won't be allowed to leave that section until you've cleared it. Sometimes you do it in a mech suit, sometimes in a giant spidery walker thing, but however you clear the critters out, it gets old real fast - especially as there are only five or six main types.

Even that wouldn't be so bad if there was a bit more oomph in the armoury. You get the standard stuff (pistols, assault rifle, shotgun, rocket launcher) plus futuristic nano-weapons that disintegrate solid objects and enemies alike, and a magnet gun that enables you to yank bits of scenery from one point to another. Sounds like a blast, but they just don't feel as powerful as they should, especially against bigger enemies, while dissolving stuff with the nano beam and nano blaster turns out to be a big yawn.

Even the rare set-pieces are tedious. One has you riding a big vehicle called an excavator through a tunnel, while continuously rebuilding cover and shooting enemies. Great, except you can only do one of those things at a time. Strategy goes out the window: you just have to press R1 to fire, and pray. The samey environments add to the feeling of anti-climax. Whether you're being chased by a big walker (through a tunnel) or manning a gun on a slow-moving barge (in a tunnel), only the red rock and lava make it obvious that you're not playing a spelunking sim set in the Lake District. The showdowns with the two main bosses hold no surprises, and the final battle is basically a slightly more exciting version of a loading bar.

Survive that and finish the game (which takes about eight hours), and you're rewarded with the best thing about Armageddon: an unlockable treat in the form of Mr. Toots, the rainbow-farting killer unicorn. Yes, really. He adds a touch of personality that's woefully absent from the rest of the game, but the problem is that, having slogged through once, you won't want to do it again, even with a magical horsey alongside you.

It's a shame because the series' PS3 debut was so strong, with ingenious competitive multiplayer and a huge open playground. Maybe the linear route was cheaper, but the lesson is if you want to go to Mars, don't do it on a budget.