Armageddon a good sequel?
Red Faction Guerilla was a good reinvention of the Red Faction franchise, despite being risky for switching the focus from an FPS to a third-person shooter. Armageddon looks set to improve things even further with a better story and modes that will keep gamers playing. Last week, I got to try out a few and here’s what I found…
The demo of the single player campaign was brief, but ultimately enjoyable. You play as Darius Mason on Mars as he’s set up and hunted by the colonists, but also the aliens that inhabit the underground. The level design was ultimately linear, but well thought out and damage detail is still superb as it was in the last game. At a first glance, the alien enemies look quite similar to the Necromorphs from Dead Space and are just as deadly to defeat.
Half-way through the level, I got into a Mech suit and finally began to show those aliens who’s boss as I tore them apart with my rockets and bullets. Almost everything in my path could be destroyed, which sometimes actually inhibited me from continuing through the level until I used my Nano-Forge gun to repair broken pathways, which looks pretty cool. My time with the campaign came to an end after I defeated a rather huge boss, but it didn’t pose much of a challenge. All in all, I was impressed with the opening of Armageddon and I hope the rest of the game is just as strong.
The second mode that I’m now allowed to talk about is Ruin, which is essentially mayhem in small doses. You get 1 minute to destroy everything in sight with your arsenal of weapons and you can literally make everything from towers to bridges crumble away. The quicker and bigger the destruction, the higher the multiplier and final score and if you are really good, you’ll get a time bonus to try and do some more damage. There was only one stage available to play, but there will be others when the game ships.
The scale of destruction I was able to cause was unlike anything I’ve seen before and was truly amazing. With upgrades and different loadouts, multiple strategies are possible for utter devastation during these stages and I can’t wait to try and get a seriously high score. The highest I got was 20.5 million points, just about 500k short of the highest on the leaderboard.
All in all, I was really impressed with how Red Faction: Armageddon is shaping up after Guerilla. Later in April, I will be able to tell you about another mode I got to play that was also highly enjoyable…