We think Red Faction: Armageddon is fun, has good graphics, a great destruction engine, great rebuilding mechanic and infestation mode supports lan play. However we felt it did have a few problems, the weapons and enemies feel under powered, your character is practically invincible if you keep your distance, there’s lots of repetitive tasks that require you to walk, the game has a checkpoint save system, the controls can feel sticky or sluggish at times and we never were able to play a full infestation game online and the few people who did play disconnected often leaving us to play solo.
I played Red Faction: Armageddon on the PS3 and put in a little over 10 hours into the game, I completed the main story line in about 8 hours. It is an interesting game this is brought down by some bad gameplay and design choices. We hope they came from the top as they just seem thrown in for a bullet point on the box. While I didn’t know the whole history of the Red Faction story, I skipped RF2 but played some RF:Guerrilla, it has what I’ve come to expect from the series, a sci-fi storyline and destructible environments aplenty.
Upon boot-up Red Faction: Armageddon required a patch that was 23mb and a mandatory install that took about 5 minutes to complete. During the install you just get an animated please wait screen, couldn’t we have been watching something like an intro? After that you have the ability to set the brightness within the game instead of messing with my TV settings which is always good to see. There’s 3 controller presets along with a separate ability to swap the shoulder and trigger buttons. Developers really need to start allowing us to map any action to any key already and eschew this preset nonsense. One annoying thing is any change you make in the options menu greets you with a “processing” screen for a few seconds. There’s also a tab for DLC with some costume and weapon purchases, don’t care, didn’t buy it.
So the story of Red Faction: Armageddon is easy. You are Darius Mason, the latest in a long line of Mason’s, and you go along with your Red Faction buddies to kill Adam Hale who is the leader of the Marauder cultists. Hale wants to blow up the Mars Terraformer which if you’ve seen most sci-fi movies you know that makes oxygen out of bad stuff so this would be bad for everyone. You go in there to stop him, get duped by Hale and when the terraformer blows up everyone kinda blames you for having to now live underground Mars.
The graphics are good, though I did notice some pop-in of items, especially item markers and light sources on the PS3 version. The destructible environment is cool but not everything is destructible which makes it hard during combat sometimes to find out that no you cannot bring down that stalactite but yes you can grab that pile of boulders. I’ve redubed the Maul Hammer as The Hammer of Awesome because you just swing for the fences like Casey Jones and wreck shop all day. All the objects that can be destroyed act in a semi-realistic way, sometimes taking out the supports of the building would yield nothing until you moved another very small piece but these were few and far between.
You’ll find yourself doing that a lot, just walking around admiring the environment and then lobbing grenades or crashing the party with The Hammer of Awesome just to see what happens. The next thing you’ll do is use your magnet gun to attach one magnet to the side of a building and the other magnet to the side of an aliens face and WHAM! alien guts everywhere. Finally you’ll put everything back together with the Nano Forge, destroy, create and repeat. And this is where you’ll start to notice those weird small problems that keeps the game from greatness.
The weapons just don’t seem that powerful and the aliens don’t seem strong enough to hurt you, I mean look at them, they have spikes, claws and eyes everywhere yet you just take damage like it’s no big thing. I call this the Far Cry 2 Problem, guys with no body armor who take a half a clip to the chest and show no ill effects only to take the rest of the clip to drop. So there you are, Darius Mason, surrounded by aliens and you can just stomp, Awesome Hammer and magnet your way through them with ease, with no real fear at all. Which is very different from say Dead Space where every enemy scared the living crap out of you and you had to ride that edge where you weren’t sure if you would survive or die during every battle. There are upgrades for your abilities, I stuck with health and upgrading my Nano Forge’s ability to stun, do damage and just be more powerful. That’s really all you need and the only times I died were falling off a cliff or by just running into the fray and seeing how much damage I could do without trying to retreat.
Going back to the damage you can cause, it’s great and probably the highlight of the game, see that structure, bring it down on enemies and laugh. Giant bad guy crossing the bridge over lava, blow the supports out and watch it fall. Magnet gun a large enemy through a group of smaller enemies to take them out as he careens by. Cause a bunch of mayhem because none of those rock walls can be effected, which is a shame, and structures that fall on you usually only leave you with some minor scratches. Also the controls while good at times felt sticky or sluggish and had not enough feedback at times, if you can’t fire your weapon why not give an audible click to the player, don’t just let me mash the buttons without giving me any warning.
The two major problems with the game that go hand in hand are the save system and the missions. First the save system is just check points, you can save where ever you want but you will restart at the last check point. A minor problem that adds to this annoyance is any cut scenes will play again after you load a game, and if you skip the cut scene you come to a second loading screen. What the hell… didn’t you just load something… what the hell did you load…. you loaded the cut scene? Load the damn game! Frustrating as that is it’s not as bad as problem two and that is the repetitive missions that add to the length of the game. Look I get it, upper management likes to say “we have a 15 hour game, no wait we have a 20 hour game, no wait…” and so on and so on. But when it’s kill or destroy this, now walk, kill baddies, destroy the same thing only further away, now here’s a crap load of baddies with giant ones too, oh you died sorry you start aright after you destroyed the first one, even though you saved before the big fight. It gets old and repetitive fast and not in a good I wanna kill more dudes repetitive way either
That really adds to the downfall of this game, which is why I think few people are on the multiplayer Infestation mode of the game. Everyone probably bought it and flipped it at GameStop for cash. The nagging problems this game has adds up, you just don’t want to do it all over again after you’ve beaten it, even if you do get Mr. Toot’s, you’ve done the same repetitive things for 8 hours, are you going to do it again? Becoming more common is the fact that the full Ruin mode is locked out without a one use code so if you buy the game used you need to pony up more money to compete against the clock. The demo stage you are allowed to play, I feel like we are in school here with this allowed and not allowed crap, in Ruin mode is fine, just blast away and wreck shop, no bad guys, just you, the weapons and some buildings. If you really like it and you bought Red Faction: Armageddon used at least you know what your cash will buy you.
