Red Faction Armageddon Review!

Red Faction: Armageddon is the fourth installment in the Red Faction series. The game follows Darius Mason (Alec Mason's grandson). Most of the game occurs underground which is a massive change from Red Faction: Guerrilla. Unfortunately this means that unlike Red Faction 3 the gameplay is linear and there isn't as much that can be destroyed.

The storyline is so-so. Darius starts out trying to defend a terraformer but does so to no avail (no matter how hard you try it is destroyed forcing Darius and the rest of civilization underground). Darius ends up on a mission to destroy an artifact that is covering a large opening in the ground. He learns shortly after destroying the artifact that he has been tricked by the cult leader Adam Hale. Chances are that you can guess exactly where this is going: Mars + strange artifact that you have to blow up = aliens. The aliens come at Darius in hordes after you fall through the hole and pretty much do so throughout the rest of the game (think Alien in physique, not Predator). Throughout there are various buildings that have been infested that Darius has to destroy because otherwise they'll continuously spawn more aliens. Darius makes his way through the caves helping out mining towns until he reaches Hale and his followers. Darius kills Hale and then realizes “Hey, we should probably get rid of this whole alien infestation thing...” And so Darius finds that the queen must be killed, etc, etc, spoilers. Simply put it reminded me much of Gears of War minus the outdoors.

The guns are quite entertaining. When destroying the artifact you use a magnet gun (fire one pole and then the other). I personally preferred the magnet gun over all others (mostly because you can attach it to living objects as well as buildings and because it has unlimited ammo). Most of the guns are traditional (nano rifle from the 3^rd, rail gun, sledge hammer, pistols, shotgun, rocket launcher, assault rifle, arc welder, remote charge launcher). New to the 4^th are the Singularity cannon (which you'll get to fire only a few times throughout the game due to lack of ammo), the plasma beam (great for taking down buildings), the plasma cannon (think miniature BFG), the XNG-5000 (fires nanite charges), plasma thrower (basically a flame thrower), laser pistols, pulse grenade launcher, and banshees (marauder pistols). My second favorite is the gun you receive after playing the game through (you may find yourself on the floor laughing after receiving and using it). Additionally they added the ability to rebuild the stuff you destroyed (so you don't fail the storyline by destroying everything). All around I would say the gun selection is excellent, I just wish there had been an open world in which I could break things aimlessly (as I did in the third as a stress reliever).

The Mech.

The mechs: they changed them. Rather than looking like they were conceived in the 80s they are fully actuating and basically function as a giant human would. Personally I enjoyed the old design, the new ones don't allow you to flip things (also: vehicles are slim to none, no GTA style roadkill-spree). They're nice, but I think they should have kept the flipping ability.

Multiplayer: If the only feature of call of duty was the zombie level but zombies were aliens and you were on mars, well...there you have it. Not particularly impressive.

Overall the only great point to the game was the gun selection. The story was mediocre and the change from open-world to linear gameplay made it much less desirable to play through (I kept playing hoping it would open up only to be disappointed at the end of the game, I have no intention of playing it through again). Aesthetically the game looks great, it is a notable improvement over the previous game. All in all I would say go ahead and play it but wait for the price to go down.

Red Faction Armageddon's Rating: 70/100


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