Stulaw's Blog

It's Armageddon!! Red Faction Style

Last month C3 sent me to Central London to go and test the upcoming PC/360/PS3 3rd person shooter, Red Faction: Armageddon, yes, you read it right, a game not on a Nintendo platform, and this blog is sort of like a preview for it.

First things first, after getting into the Hotel, I met one of the reps who let me into the room where I got a load of free food, and it was nice, a free day down London (since my train ticket runs from zone 1-6) and free Lunch, all was going well as I talked to a man from Eurogamer and a few other journalists that I can't remember the names of.

Afterwords, Eric Barker, Manager of Volition, invited us all in to play the game on the Xbox 360, and the first thing I got my hands on was the single player and here are my thoughts:

The game controls very much like Gears of War, as you'd expect from a TPS on the 360, only, there's no immediately obvious cover button, and there's a Jump button instead, which does come in handy. The rest of the layout is pretty much GOW.

The main focus about this game is the destructibility, as you move through the levels from A to B, almost everything (especially if it's metal) is destructible, and as well as being destructible, it's repairable, with little Nano bots being able to repair almost anything you feel necessary, and both of these are needed to complete the game.

In terms of weapons, there are quite a few to choose from with most of them being guns. The main weapon you'll be given is the Magnet gun, with this you can pull objects towards you (including enemies) and fire them back, or you can even bring a whole building down by pulling its foundations apart (yes, it's that powerful) and it's all great fun, but it can sometimes get in the way. Enemies, especially bosses can be tough to defeat, and may not have an obvious way of beating them. In fact, the boss I played against just needed to be shot down with no remorse, and it took quite a long time to do it.

Next up was the all new ruin mode, where you are taken to a map with one objective, destroy everything. You have every weapon to choose from before you start, these include the Magnet gun, as well as a Gun that fires a black hole and sucks everything in around it, and a Nano bot gun in which the Nano bots eat everything they're fired at( to an extent) that's metal (Think G.I Joe the film). I opted for the Magnet gun in the end, since that seemed the most helpful.

As well as your objective to destroy everything, you also have to rack up points to go onto an online leader-board. You collect more points as you combine the destruction of objects, this is where the Magnet gun is useful as you can pull things, like buildings and explosive barrels, and make them destroy eachother, which is all very fun and sometimes extremely random with the result that you get, so it may lead to some frustrating times as well.

I did get to play the Multiplayer, but at the time of writing this it's unclear whether I'm still under embargo to talk about it. But all in all, the whole game is a good bit of fun.

After I'd had my fun I set off home, I was going to make a vlog for the lack of pictures, but this pretty much says what I would have anyway, and all you need to know is that it's a very good, if slightly typical TPS.