Games

Red Faction: Armageddon

A couple of years ago developer Volition was well on its way to taking the generic first-person shooter series Red Faction and turning it into something more. Somewhere along the line something went horribly wrong.

The fourth game in the series, Red Faction: Armageddon takes startling u-turn from the open-world revolutionary destruction of 2009’s Guerrilla and walks the series right back down the linear underground tunnels of earlier titles.

The campaign kicks off 50 years after the events of Guerrilla, where the dusty socialist paradise of Mars goes to hell care of a militant cultist blowing up the life-sustaining terraformer. With the people of mars forced back underground into the tunnels of their forebears we watch the previous protagonist’s grandson accidently release a bug-like race of indigenous creatures on the subterranean society.

It’s not a brilliant premise and it certainly lacks the insurgent spirit of previous titles but an epic yarn was never Red Faction’s strong suit. That would be the smashing. The good news is the full-destruction mechanics and fun array of menacing weapons make the transition. The bad news is you spend most of the game down a hole where there’s piss all to destroy.

Cool new weapons, like the magnet gun – with which you shoot two different targets that are then sent irresistibly careening towards each other – go almost completely wasted in an environment built of immovable rock and scattered with uninhabited shacks.

Before getting too rose-tinted it should be said that Guerrilla had its fair share of flaws and that the earlier titles managed a nicely moody atmosphere despite their unremarkable ambitions. Yet incredulously Armageddon marries the worst of both flavours into something leagues short of its promise.

Plodding story and dull environments aside the game is not a disaster, it’s just a baffling sidestep from the trajectory the series seemed to be on. Those that prefer their action maddeningly generic will likely find Armageddon a welcome return to form, but if you enjoyed even a hint of the variety offered in Guerrilla then it’s naught but disappointment.

One aspect in which the new title makes objectively positive steps forward is visually; the dim lighting and discordantly iridescent effects are a fair step up from the bland earth tones of the last outing.

Rounding out this inexplicable series of decisions comes the axing of Guerrilla’s multiplayer mode – a feature that even those who hated the open-world campaign couldn’t help but admit a grudging respect for. In it’s place we get an unremarkable co-op Horde-type mode and the brainless, goal-free Ruin mode. Not bad additions but no reason to kill the good thing the developers already had going.

Red Faction: Armageddon is an exercise in frustration, not a terribly bad game just one tainted by the absence of all the progress made up until this weird regression. It’s got the stink of Head Office interference all over it; hopefully it’s not the last word in the promising series’ legacy.

7/10

PlayStation 3 | Xbox 360