The poor miners in Red Faction can’t catch a break. For years they were beaten down by the Ultor Corporation, whose ruthless oversight made life on Mars unbearable. Earth Defense Force troops stepped in…only to become the workers’ new oppressors. Finally, in 2120, the Red Faction drove the EDF off-world and claimed the planet for their own. A planet whose surface is now wrecked and uninhabitable…
You experience this calamity firsthand in Armageddon’s premiere mission, and how it happens is a welcome surprise. But for the most part, it’s backstory; what matters is, humanity’s been forced below Martian soil, where a new race of buglike creatures has begun hunting us down. Sound scary and claustrophobic? Think messy, exhilarating, and out-and-out bonkers instead…
DESTINED FOR VIOLENCE
As Darius Mason — grandson of Alec Mason and Samanya, the heroes of Red Faction: Guerrilla — stubbornness and valor are in your blood. So is a penchant for mayhem, as we’ll get to in a bit. But your lineage has a drawback, too: it’s attracted the attention of Adam Hale, a cult leader whose EDF father was killed by Alec. Hale’s rallied some of the Marauders (human colonists living a ragged life on the Martian plains) against Red Faction, and he may just be linked to the attacking bugs as well.
Unlike Guerrilla, Armageddon isn’t an open-world game. But its 15-hour campaign still covers a lot of ground — below-ground, that is, in mainly subterranean settings. Early missions have you helping the besieged colonists near a central camp: escorting a convoy, finding power cells, repairing desecrated water pumps. Once the story picks up, though, your search for Hale will take you far and wide into places like ice caves, volcanic tunnels, and a Marauder base. With most of the missions set underground, you might be worried about seeing too many brown, samey environments, but let’s allay that fear now: developer Volition’s done a commendable job of varying the look, feel, size, and architecture of these cavernous spaces. You probably won’t forget you’re indoors, but it won’t distract or annoy you, either. Most of the time, we were focused on how to kill the beasts in our midst.
SPLAT SO GOOD
Pretty much everywhere you go, even in those early camp missions, you’re attacked by legions of insect-like E.T.s — most emerging from shimmery (and luckily, destroyable) portals just when you think you’ve cleared an area. Razor-clawed Creepers, tank-like Behemoths, wall-hopping Wraiths — all nine kinds (except for stationary Monoliths) will stalk you relentlessly, but don’t expect much personality: as baddies go, they’re strictly one-dimensional, and it’s never clear whether they’re quietly intelligent or running on primal instinct. Ultimately, does it even matter? As you plow through the campaign and unlock more amazing weapons, it’s obvious: these guys are pure fodder, designed to go boom, splat, and crumble as satisfyingly as possible.
This destruction comes courtesy of the game’s No. 1 selling point — its terrific arsenal. Ass-kicking weapons are a Red Faction trademark: Red Faction II introduced the Rail Driver, a railgun that could shoot enemies (visible on an infrared screen) through walls, while Red Faction: Guerrilla debuted building-toppling sledgehammers and the object-disintegrating Nano Rifle. But the weapons in Armageddon bring devastation to a whole new level, taking better advantage of the Geo-Mod 2.0 engine’s ability to make most objects in an environment destructible. Naturally, the hammer and the Nano-Rifle — now called a Plasma Cannon — are back, but they’re joined by juggernauts like the Singularity Cannon, which creates a miniature black hole that sucks in nearby foes, then violently spits them out (accompanied by a startling whipcrack noise and pink explosion). The Plasma Beam, another great addition, basically fires a continuous energy stream that can slice through buildings, bugs, crates, and anything else in its path.
For consistent smiles, though, you can’t beat the Magnet Gun. Shoot a magnet onto one target, then shoot an anchor onto a second target, and the first target will go smashing into the second — softly if they’re close together, wicked-hard if they’re far apart. At first, we found ourselves employing this weapon in basic ways, like quickly flinging a bug at a wall. (If the wall’s reasonably high or far away, he’ll usually splat against it or fall to his death.) But when we first used it to bring a giant light fixture crashing down on an angry Berserker, we began to grasp its potential. Pretty soon, we were hurling crates, walls, and explosive barrels at the poor bugs, or better still, launching them at their cousins across the screen. It’s been a while since we’ve savored a weapon this much, and that it has limitless ammo just makes it that much better. Like Bulletstorm’s leash, the Magnet Gun feels utterly unique in the sea of current shooters.
BOTH SIDES OF THE EQUATION
Demolition has been Red Faction’s trademark since the very first game, where your rocket launcher could pierce holes in walls and wreck a bridge supporting an enemy vehicle. So it’s neat how Volition employed the opposite effect here, too, with Darius’ Nanoforge. By holding down LB, you can quickly rebuild any man-made structure that’s fallen down or been disintegrated. Guerrilla had a similar device in multiplayer (the Reconstructor), but Armageddon’s campaign lets you use it more frequently and inventively — to, say, insta-fix a wall used for cover, insta-build a collapsed bridge as you run across it, or repair a much-needed upgrade machine. In one early level — a three-story structure of ramps and fragile walkways — we had a blast shooting a hole in a floor, jumping through, then repairing the gap from below so enemies couldn’t follow.
This clever content-balancing extends to other aspects of the game, too. As we alluded to earlier, not all of the missions are in subterranean settings — you go above-ground on several occasions. Each time you do, it seems like the developers deliberately tried to make the experience feel different by putting you in a unique vehicle or pitting you against adversaries other than bugs. In one scenario, you’re no longer alone, but fighting alongside a few Red Faction soldiers; even better, you can hop into a L.E.O., a mighty mech-type suit that lets you ram into enemies or frag ’em with rockets and machineguns. Another time, you’re sneaking through a cultist encampment at night, sniping with the Rail Driver as an electrical storm thunders around you. And in yet another surface mission, you’re piloting a spider-like Scout Walker through a Marauder village, with cultists shooting at you from all sides. When our lasers weren’t snuffing these pests quickly enough, we just steered our vehicle right into the supports of every bridge and building, sending the enemies atop them plummeting into the dirt. How cool is that?
MEANT MAINLY FOR ONE
Unfortunately, in terms of balance, the developers did skimp in a key area: multiplayer. The game offers just one mode, a Horde-like cooperative game (Infestation) where one to four players battle 30 waves of bugs on any of eight maps. We had a lot of fun here — particularly on maps that have you simply trying to survive, as opposed to ones where you must also defend a structure and continually repair it during the fight. And when small maps fill up with enemies, the chaos can be downright hilarious. Given that Guerrilla featured several really solid multiplayer modes, though, its fans are bound to be disappointed by the sparse options here.
Armageddon’s other play mode, Ruins, plops you on one of five maps to cause a certain amount of damage during a fixed span of time. Spazzing out with quick-firing weapons like the Rocket Launcher and the Charge Launcher does deliver some laughs — brief ones — but we would’ve probably stuck with this mode longer if it allowed multiple players, the way Guerrilla’s similar Wrecking Crew mode did.
SORTING THE DEBRIS
Red Faction fans will definitely appreciate Armageddon’s strong continuity with the other games, but even if you’re new to the series, the story takes you for a good ride. Darius’ quiet confidence and modest banter (“I could do this all day,” he tells A.I. sidekick S.A.M. in mid-firefight) make him an appealing, relatable hero, too.
The action does start to drag in the last couple of hours as you wade through a couple of false endings, then a few bug battles too many, before the big finish. If you’re excited by even the slightest hint of carnage, though, the rubble-licious Armageddon delivers. We absolutely got what we came for: an exciting sci-fi shooter with carnage galore and some of the most crazy-powerful guns we’ve seen in ages.
+ Balls-to-the-wall action; wonderful weapons; a carnage lover’s delight.
+ Pretty good story; smart content-balancing in a number of ways.
- Short on multiplayer options; campaign drags toward the end.
? Will the series ever return to Earth (where it went in Red Faction II)?
