Red Faction: Armageddon Review
Red Faction: Armageddon continues the story of Red Faction: Guerrilla, but in a very different tone.
The beginning of the game is wonderful. You get pretty much the game stuff as Guerrilla - great destruction with the hammer, explosives everywhere and much more. And plenty of choices on how to kill your enemies.
The graphics feel improved and everything looks great. Destroying building seem to be a little bit better, too.
One of the first surprises is the nano forge. While you could use the nano rifle on Guerrilla to kill and destroy, this version of it magically restores man-made structures - such as stairs and floors. That is a big help for the level designers, as fully destructible levels can easily end up as levels that you cannot complete - something that happened quite a bit on Guerrilla when I damaged a building a little more than I intended.
You have plenty of extra weapons too, such as shockwave (stuns and damages nearby enemies), impact (can send enemies flying and destroy wall - aim it high, or it will destroy the floor from under you) and the magnet gun, which attaches one magnet to an enemy or level structure, and another elsewhere and hurls the first magnet to the other. Pretty cool.
In fact, I've played entire levels with just the magnet gun. It is just too much fun to hurl enemies around, into each other, or drop large pieces of a into them.
From the regular enemies of the start of the game, you soon go to an annoying, claustrophobic tunnel system while being attacked by big insect-like aliens. Really not as fun. I'm very thankful for the "GPS" (which displays where you should go to reach your new objective) - wondering around the tunnels would be even worse.
There are some nice sections with a heavy exoskeleton, which has a sweet homing missile launcher with fast refresh times.
A minor note - just as it starts, the game display skip [Esc] and pause [Space] for the cinematics - something I can't even remember the last time I saw, and which is very useful. I really hate when I get interrupted on a lengthy cutscene, and there is nothing that can be done.
There are some bits near the ending where the level design seems to fall short of the rest of the game, and you get very repetitive sections.
The ending is satisfying enough, except that if Mason could fix the terraformer in a few hours, why oh why didn't he just do it before???
The nicest bit about the end of the game is that you get a New Game Plus mode unlocked, where you start with all the nice upgrades and weapons you picked up on the way - including a couple of extras.
This makes it very likely that I will replay the game.
Very much recommended - 8.5/10
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| Taking down a tower |
The graphics feel improved and everything looks great. Destroying building seem to be a little bit better, too.
One of the first surprises is the nano forge. While you could use the nano rifle on Guerrilla to kill and destroy, this version of it magically restores man-made structures - such as stairs and floors. That is a big help for the level designers, as fully destructible levels can easily end up as levels that you cannot complete - something that happened quite a bit on Guerrilla when I damaged a building a little more than I intended.
You have plenty of extra weapons too, such as shockwave (stuns and damages nearby enemies), impact (can send enemies flying and destroy wall - aim it high, or it will destroy the floor from under you) and the magnet gun, which attaches one magnet to an enemy or level structure, and another elsewhere and hurls the first magnet to the other. Pretty cool.
In fact, I've played entire levels with just the magnet gun. It is just too much fun to hurl enemies around, into each other, or drop large pieces of a into them.
From the regular enemies of the start of the game, you soon go to an annoying, claustrophobic tunnel system while being attacked by big insect-like aliens. Really not as fun. I'm very thankful for the "GPS" (which displays where you should go to reach your new objective) - wondering around the tunnels would be even worse.
There are some nice sections with a heavy exoskeleton, which has a sweet homing missile launcher with fast refresh times.
A minor note - just as it starts, the game display skip [Esc] and pause [Space] for the cinematics - something I can't even remember the last time I saw, and which is very useful. I really hate when I get interrupted on a lengthy cutscene, and there is nothing that can be done.
There are some bits near the ending where the level design seems to fall short of the rest of the game, and you get very repetitive sections.
The ending is satisfying enough, except that if Mason could fix the terraformer in a few hours, why oh why didn't he just do it before???
The nicest bit about the end of the game is that you get a New Game Plus mode unlocked, where you start with all the nice upgrades and weapons you picked up on the way - including a couple of extras.
This makes it very likely that I will replay the game.
Very much recommended - 8.5/10
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