Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Red Faction: Disappointment!

Red Faction: Guerilla had quite an impression on me. It was one of the few games that captivated me enough that it made me want to write a play by play journal of experiences. But when I heard tell of its sequel I couldn’t make myself get too excited for it. It looked like it was more or less set underground, and the setting itself was unclear. If not for a Steam sale, that most wonderful of occurrences, I probably wouldn’t have bought Red Faction: Armageddon at all. But it went on sale and, sure enough, I caved and picked it up.

It would be wrong to say that I’m sorry I did so, because I always would’ve wondered what Armageddon was like if I hadn’t. And I certainly enjoyed parts of Armageddon’s strange, scripted adventure. It captured elements of what made Red Faction: Guerilla such an incredible game. But it missed the core of it.

What I loved about Red Faction: Guerilla was the strange nature of the world, the way that everything everywhere could be destroyed and the way that the destruction you rendered would often, not always, endure. It was also more or less wide open. There were areas that were difficult to navigate, false barriers and all that, but more or less the entire world was accessible. And moreoever, things were constantly happening in it. Convoys were emerging to be ambushed, prisoners were being held. Bringing up morale and bringing down the EDF presence in each area was as much a free-form activity as it was a way to advance the plot.

The story was no great shakes, and the combat was actually kind of bad. But the open world destruction, the subtle pleasure of positioning all of your demolition charges in all the right spots to bring a building down in one blow, was so rewarding that it surpassed things that would normally have shaped the core of a game. Red Faction: Guerilla re-defined much of what it meant to make a video game, and it helped me understand how games without stories worth telling could still be great.

Enter Red Faction: Armageddon, a game with almost nothing in common with Red Faction: Guerilla spare its engine and the first two thirds of its name.

Red Faction: Armageddon isn’t the worst thing I’ve ever played by a long shot. It actually has quite a bit going for it. It uses Red Faction’s combat system, but it has been updated so that the system is a great deal more user friendly. Weapons have reasonable clip sizes for the damage they do now, and ammo isn’t quite so scarce now, in either your inventory or the world around you. You’ll all but trip over piles of bullets while exploring the world, and most of the time it’ll be a total fucking mystery who left all of this shit lying around.

And the writing is alright. There are the usual “huh?” plot moments that film, television and video games rely on all too often nowadays, but the characters, the core of writing, actually come through pretty strong. Mason isn’t too much of a douchebag, and his romance, Kara, actually develops in some interesting ways. A caveat: interesting for this sort of a game and for this series. She wouldn’t be at home in a Franzen novel, but she does just fine adding depth and context to the Marauder society that counterpoints the weird, pitchfork wielding villagers who make up the Martian colonists.

But all that lovely open world game play that made Red Faction: Guerilla so great? Gone, gone, gone. In place of an open world mechanic is a mission based series of maps which focus on destroying specific buildings, repairing others with your magic Nanoforge and generally involve killing a shitload of enemies with a number of weapons, four of which are actually useful.

It’s kind of heartbreaking to see the engine of Red Faction: Guerilla be adapted into a middling third person shooter, but that’s exactly what happened here. In place of all those clever destructo puzzles, side missions and enduring conflict waged across a landscape that you can impact with your actions directly, not just with scripted decisions hard coded into the game we’ve got a mechanic based around destroying and rebuilding various terrain items, but only items that have been designated as destructible and/or re-creatable. The line between these two categories is fuzzy at best until an item has been destroyed, and many of the items my nano-forge allows me to re-create are things I’d never want to re-make, like dozens of crates or walls that keep me from reaching collectibles.

Which wouldn’t be quite so bad if I had a flashlight I could control, but I don’t. If you want to be able to see in low light conditions you’ll either need to use your Nano-Forge’s repair function, which casts a nice blue glow that lets you see nearby items when it doesn’t repair nearby items that block your view, or wait for the game to bring up a scripted flashlight. Considering how dark most of the game is you don’t get nearly enough time that flashlight.

On a related note, the world of Red Faction: Armageddon has none of the spectacle that Red Faction: Guerilla had. Unless you’re really into reddish caves and gray gunmental cities you really won’t get to see anything interesting. There’s an interlude with a series of tunnels which apparently constitute some giant Marauder temple, but the lighting remains so poor, the entire setting so indecipherably planned that it feels less like a cultural document encapsulated in a location and more like a forced skin change that was thrown into the design doc at the eleventh hour.

On the upside, the shooting gameplay is more or less fun, and there are a group of special abilities tied to your nano-forge which impact combat in some interesting ways. Experimenting with them can really change the game, and while you can go throughout the entire experience without every really needing to use these special abilities they do add some much needed depth and diversity to the combat system, diversity not afforded in the enemies you’ll be fighting.

See, Armageddon is one of those unfortunate games that you’ll encounter only a handful of enemies, all of whom have the same basic attacks, in. Angry alien looking creatures in three sizes (small, medium and large) will attack you with occasional assistance from invisible aliens, giant worms and alien batteries. At least, I think they’re alien batteries. I wasn’t entirely sure what they were or how they came up by the end of the game, especially given the explanation for how the aliens emerged (some sort of virus affecting former colonists, I think?). But I’m getting into plot, and plot has never been Red Faction’s strong suit.

So I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised by how meh the entire experience once the greatest elements of it have been removed from the game. But it is more than a little disappointing to look at the sequel to one of my favorite games of yesteryear and see a rendering of the divine destruction that made Red Faction: Guerilla so amazing strapped on to the back of a middling third person shooter that never really finds its own legs.