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.

I'm so glad that I managed to grab this game for the bargain price of 97p, because without such a price I do fear I would have been put off getting it due to the reviews which stretched from the 'alright' to the 'awful'.

After an hour of playing it, I began to suspect that most of the reviewers were either too harsh or just plain wrong because the gameplay mechanics I had experienced thus far seemed perfectly up to scratch with other shooters out there. And after completing it, I must say that I actually prefered this over Guerilla. I never though that would happen. I thought, if the reviews were correct, I would play it for a minute and then throw the disc out of my window. That definitely hasn't happened, and I'll be keeping this game for quite some time to come.

Instead of giving you a spoilerific walkthrough, I'll instead give you my top three 'strengths' and 'weaknesses', which I think will serve to create a relevant and succinct review.

Strengths:

1) Linearity - not often you hear that word being used as a good thing, is it? For me Guerilla was a lot of fun, but it suffered because it was incredibly shattergun like, there was no real focus and the fact you had to travel for such a lengthy period of time in a vehicle that was probably going minus five miles per hour (exaggeration, but it was rather slow) did take away the sense of urgency. Armageddon, by being linear, is better because every mission has you knee-deep in all sorts of danger, which is a fantastic thing indeed.

2) Story - Armageddon, by being linear, allows itself to focus 100% on the story and I must say that it was a rather good one in that you could relate to the characters and laugh at the main character's quips.

3) Shooting - the game's greatest strength, it feels really immediate and powerful and you'll enjoy going through wave after wave of enemies as you do so. And then you have some vehicles which add to the calamity.

Weaknesses:

1) Length - it is a blast, ableit a short one. I beat it in five hours which is around half the time it took me to beat Ghost of Sparta. Maybe if the single player had been lengthened a bit, the game would be better overall? There is dlc to download that fills in a gap around the start of the game, but that is payable and not in this box!

2) Trophies - some are quite vague in terms of how you achieve them unless, of course, you refer to youtube.

3) Not as good a shooter as an Uncharted - but then again, what is?

Overall, a surprisingly good game which will keep you entertained from start to finish. There is 'Ruin' mode that I still haven't played and that sounds like a lot of fun, and then there is a Zombies-style mode for multiplayer, which I have also got to try out.

Recommended game - just ignore the negative reviews! I've a feeling that they slate it because it isn't open world, but I'd wager that if Guerilla was linear too that Armageddon would have done better in the reviews department.

I didn't expect much from it ! But ... I really like everything about it. Story line, graphics, it does copy Dead Space a little bit but for that price, it really is one to play. Enjoy it !!!