Backlog Barbecue: Red Faction Armageddon

As part of my “get all these old games off my system” initiative, I told myself I was going to buckle down and push through Red Faction Armageddon after a few months of playing it off and on. Little did I know that what started out as a cool, fun game would literally turn into a corridor shooter with the exact same enemies throughout the entire duration of the game.

The main draw to Red Faction has always been the destruction. It’s a pretty cool hook and at first I was having fun blowing out walls and rebuilding them again. But the tactics of the original Red Faction games, i.e. the taking of cover by enemies and the destruction of said cover by the player, is all completely thrown out the window less than halfway through the game. Not only are you reduced to running down tunnel after tunnel, but you’re constantly (and I mean constantly) fighting an alien race of “bugs” that can teleport and zip around and hang from the walls and ceilings. They’re constantly all around you, and they don’t give a rat’s ass about taking cover behind anything. They’ll teleport or fly right in front of you so you can blast them in the face with a shotgun. There’s no strategy to the destruction anymore. It doesn’t serve a purpose, and most of the time, the structures are being destroyed by the aliens and it’s up to you to repair them, since most of the time it’s a staircase or bridge you need to use to get through the map.

The game was actually fun for the most part, but damn, those last few missions were a chore. This game commits one of my cardinal sins in game development; Instead of ramping up the difficulty organically or by introducing a new mechanic, their solution was to just throw more enemies at you at a time. Used to fighting one of the more powerful aliens? Well, now you get to fight three of them!

The “more is more” mechanic is further exacerbated by the fact that these enemies can literally go anywhere they want. Be prepared to be getting shot at from all directions at once. Front, back, below, above, from the left, from the right, all of these directions are fair game for the enemy, and it’s your job to keep track of them and take them out before they do enough damage to kill you. This constant state of turning around and looking everywhere wears thin even early in the game, and by the end, when the game is throwing everything it has at you (times five) it just gets downright exhausting. Then it proceeds to continue long after you think it’s over.

The penultimate mission in the game tasks the player with running through a tunnel for far too long, fighting countless numbers of aliens, only to be met with what appears to be a final boss battle. Beat the giant alien queen and you can sit back and enjoy the credits, right?

Not so fast! After setting down the controller to enjoy an end to your hard work, you have to pick it right back up again because there is one last thing that needs taken care of. This also tasks the player with running through yet another long set of corridors, fighting wave after wave (after wave) of aliens, and then finally defending against an alien attack while the machine boots up.

By this point, I already had the “are we there yet?” voice playing in the back of my mind. Every time I rounded a corner and was confronted with yet another horde of aliens, I’d drop my shoulders and resist the urge to just collapse on the floor and kick my feet. It’s a shame too, because Red Faction is a solid IP that has some cool technology to work with, and to find out it was practically a Gears of War clone without the cover mechanic was a disappointment.