Review by: William Abner

Expectation is a funny thing. Case in point: one of my favorite games from the slow, hot summer of 2009 was THQ and Volition’s open world destruct-a-thon Red Faction: Guerrilla. I’ll grant you, it had its issues – a weak storyline, not a lot of personality, and the landscape of Mars was admittedly drab. However, no open world game allowed for such pure unabashed joy of destroying stuff than Red Faction: Guerrilla. So when THQ first announced Red Faction: Armageddon the immediate thought was “more of the same, only better!” which was perfectly fine with me. I assumed Volition would take the design, fix it up, make it prettier and slap a shiny bow on it and off we’d go – blowing stuff up at our leisure.

Volition had other plans, though.

It’s rare in the videogame industry to see a popular game earn a sequel and for that sequel to take the series in a completely new direction (I freely admit I never played the 2001 original Red Faction.) Armageddon eschews the “go where you want” format of Guerrilla for a linear, Gears of War style third person action design. It’s a risky move because a lot of people loved Guerrilla and to take away that open world freedom for a more structured, almost by the numbers mission to mission design is a bit jarring. It’s not entirely fair to judge Armageddon based on what it’s not, but it’s an unavoidable discussion point – this is not a sequel to Guerrilla in gameplay terms; it’s a completely different game set in the same world. And that world is totally different.

The vast majority of the game is played underground. There are a few missions where you’re on the surface and a few that allow you to fly a hovercraft and thunder about in a scout mech or large walker but for the most part this is an on foot dungeon crawl. You play Darius Mason, grandson of Alec, the hero from Red Faction: Guerrilla. It’s 50 years later and…honestly I have no idea what the hell is going on. There’s a brief intro to catch you up but if you really want to bridge the story between Guerrilla and Armageddon tune in to the SyFy Channel to watch the movie! Wonderful. I’m supposed to have some sort of attachment to these people—the good guys, the bad guys, the plot, but only if I watch the Red Faction movie?

Anyway, I have no interest in watching the movie as ”story” was never something that grabbed me about Red Faction to begin with but apparently there’s a new bad guy who formed the White Faction and he’s insane and tricks you into opening up something that unleashes a swarm of killer alien bugs that infest the planet and you have to kill them. That’s basically what the game is about.

But the story isn’t why you are playing Red Faction: Armageddon, which is a good thing because the story here is shockingly stale.