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RipTen Review: Red Faction: Armageddon (Xbox 360)

Murray Hibble — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 03:06:07 +0000

Ten years ago, with the Descent series and Summoner under their belt, Volition Inc. unearthed Red Faction, a story of corporate brutality on Mars and the people’s fight for freedom. Showcasing their Geo-Mod tech, the player was able to create their own path through each level by blasting holes and leveling terrain. Now, the fight for Mars is more spectacular than ever as Mason-descendant Darius takes on crazed cultists and a buried Martian menace in the finest Red Faction title to date.

Armageddon doesn’t refer to prior events in the Red Faction continuum and it doesn’t really need to as gameplay innovation is the primary focus. Understanding the pedigree, however, is essential to developing an emotional connection to the struggles of Mason’s people. In 2070, fifty years before the events of Armageddon, a man named Parker comes to Mars seeking a better life than on Earth, but instead finds an enslaved populace, forced to work in the mines and suffering from a mysterious plague. After witnessing a guard killing a fellow prisoner, Parker takes up arms with the Red Faction against the Ultor Mining Corporation and ultimately welcomes the arrival of the Earth Defense Force (EDF). In the subsequent sequels, the EDF becomes the main protagonist and in Guerilla, Alec Mason becomes our hero as he scours the EDF from the face of Mars. This time around Volition have chosen to develop beyond the EDF/Red Faction history and introduce strange cultists and a menacing, long-buried alien horde that Darius unwittingly unleashes on the colony. Armageddon tells the story of how the cultists are defeated, the horde suppressed and the colony repatriated to a newly terraformed Martian surface.

Destruction has been the central tenet to Volition Inc.’s series, from rocket-blasting holes in the first game to Alec’s sledgehammer in Guerilla and Volition clearly understand the reason for their success. The tools and the playgrounds you can ruin them with are nothing short of spectacular. Your greatest tool will be the Magnet Gun, it’s a physics-fucker and works with two presses of the trigger. The first press is your magnet, the second shot is the attractor and whatever you shot first will immediately pull towards the second. You can smash aliens with other aliens, fuel tanks to aliens, aliens to walls, rubble to aliens… I could draw this out for hours and not get bored because getting shit to hit other shit and having an unlimited amount of shots means you can focus on the carnage without watching a cool-down or ammo counter. If you run out of fuel-tanks and walls you can employ your second new-toy, the nano-forge. Created from the artifact found in Guerilla, the nano-forge lets you re-create the entire environment around you. Broken pillars, moving engines, walls and more are drawn dramatically and speedily back into being, allowing you to magnet-gun them straight back into a creature’s face again. These two items represent the sum total of everything that is awesome about Armageddon. While the adventure itself is highly linear, Volition complicates the environment with a profusion of structures. Being able to tear these down, nano-forge them up and then tear them down again is a core facet of the gameplay and one that makes for a frenetic pace as you recreate cover while fending off hordes of glowing horrors.

You’ll have plenty of other weapons to wield throughout the 6 or 7 hours that the main storyline presents. The Black Hole weapon is particularly impressive with its deadly suction and expulsion mechanic and, aside from your standard weaponry, you’ll also have bio-grenades that leave structures intact and disintegration rays that destroy everything they hit. Adding to your arsenal are the upgraded nano-forge powers that allow you to blast through walls, stun nearby enemies and help generate the wonderful visual confusion that accompanies most battles. The ability to upgrade your abilities by spending salvage at upgrade stations adds some different flavors to existing powers and, by the end of the game, the adroit salvager will be heavily powered up, just in time to meet the end-game behemoths. The ability to start a ‘New Game Plus’ with your existing powers is a welcome one that again adds to replayability.

At first it can seem that your character is over-powered, but the underground fauna of Mars are varied and deadly. Shambling tanks that hurl explosive matter, wall-hugging electrical creatures and warping laser-beam crawlers are among the masses of creatures thrown at you during the campaign. Apart from a distressingly easy and anti-climactic boss battle, the sheer weight of creatures is extremely well balanced against the player’s destructive capability and the intended outcome of such battles seems to be more about the coruscating insanity of color and effect. While the gameplay is challenging, I found that even on Insane mode, death rarely came.

It’s this explosion of effects that really sets Armageddon up to be a possible medical tool for weeding out latent epileptics. The hot blue of the nano-forge, the brilliant palette of alien colors and the scintillating particle effects make Armageddon a pretty as hell game. Unlike Guerilla, which arrived just as ‘next-gen brown’ was at its peak, this is an exciting game to watch. Whether the pulses of light were exciting my nerve centres or I was in a trance state, large battle scenes were amphetamine-like in their affect. And, like a drug, this had its own side-effect as some of the longer travel scenes between the set pieces were a bit of a drudge. The pacing is mostly excellent, however there were areas where the smaller number of creatures (or in later levels the sparse numbers of cultists) made proceedings a little too sedate. I would have liked to see Volition throw endless streams of hostiles and use the relatively easy vehicle sections to pace out the gameplay. On that, the vehicle sections (a lumbering mech, a platform ride and a ship that throws back to Volition’s Descent beginnings) were a thoroughly enjoyable change of pace with each bringing their own challenges and effects into play.

Once the main campaign has been completed there is a little more life left in the online co-operative play. There’s no multiplayer deathmatch for Armageddon, but given the lackluster representation in Guerilla, nobody’s going to miss it. Infestation mode is the now-standard Horde-style match. You’ll team up with three other players to fight off waves of increasingly stronger enemies. The difficulty increases exponentially past the tenth level and this will offer a real challenge to most gamers. A well-coordinated team is a must as some of the later-stage enemy combinations will encroach on defensive positions and split players up, leading to some seriously frantic action. Unfortunately my unlock key for Ruin mode has not worked so I was unable to try it out, but from what I’ve seen it’s an arena mode that is essentially there for the player to destroy. Connectivity with other players via Xbox LIVE was straightforward and lag-free. Co-op is good fun but I found that the crashing visual effects couldn’t make up for the lack of reason behind each battle. You are given only a bit of exposition at the start of Infestation and my engagement suffered because of this.

Aside from its somewhat un-engaging storyline and shallow characters, Red Faction: Armageddon delivers an injection of fun to the series that I haven’t felt since I first experimented with blowing shit up in Red Faction. While treading a linear path, the ride through it is a spectacle and, thanks to the excellent variety and combinations of weapons, it’s a path that you truly can take again and again. Volition has paved a new path for the series, stripping away the traditional shooter elements of past titles and focusing on maximizing the player’s ability to interact ruinously with the environment. I look forward to the next generation of the Mason family, but in the meantime, I’m heading back to get all Newtonian on some Martian ass.

Here’s the rundown:

+Visually stimulating

+Incredibly fast-paced gameplay

+Maniacally-fun arsenal

-Storyline and character development needs to be repaired with the nano-forge

-Some slow-paced moments needed more crash-bang

-Don’t purchase for Co-Op which, while fun, is under-done

Killzone 3 Split-Screen Co-Op Confirmed by Guerilla

Garrett Hartman — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 23:14:56 +0000

Often criticized for it’s lack of co-op play in Killzone 2, Guerrilla has confirmed that Killzone 3 will have co-op play – including split-screen co-op.

In an interview with 1UP, studio manager Herman Hulst pointed to split-screen co-op as an example of how much what could be done with the PlayStation 3:

“We found a lot of power after we completed Killzone 2. Just to give you an example on the graphics side: we pulled a level from Killzone 2 into the Killzone 3 engine and it ran at 50 percent. That’s how much power we’ve been able to find. You can see it in split-screen co-op. We had to do the double rendering anyway.”

50% is impressive no matter how you look at it. Could this explanation simply be a way to explain that the game will look just as with split-screen? The image provided looks pretty damn good albeit a bit washed out.

There has been no mention of co-op online multiplayer, but then again is it really necessary. Obviously the move to a co-op campaign, especially on with split-screen, is no doubt great news to any fan of the series.

Source

Killzone 2 DLC releasing this month

Sam Naylor — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 13:19:35 +0000

Gametrailers TV reports that Killzone 2 will be receiving DLC, hitting this month. The “Steel & Titanium” pack will add two maps; ‘Wasteland Bullet’, with “fast-moving trains”, and ‘Vetka Cruiser’, with a big ISA battle cruiser (the ‘New Sun’). Another pack was mentioned, and hinted at having a retro theme, perhaps with maps from Killzone 1. I didn’t really connect with the maps in Killzone 1, since I found them rather generic, but perhaps Guerilla can make them a little more entertaining this time around.

Via Giant Bomb

PAX 08: Hands On With Red Faction: Guerilla

Wade Larson — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 19:50:41 +0000

PAX 08 is rocking gamers with plenty of hands-on demos on the show floor, as Fall’s big-name titles make the rounds for their adoring public. Gamers queued up to get their greedy claws on Gears 2, Left 4 Dead, StarCraft II, and many others.

But one of the surprising hits of the floor was Red Faction: Guerrilla. It doesn’t take long to realize why the game has been in development for four-and-a-half years: the destructibility of the environments is complete.

Not “Yea, you can break most stuff,” or “Blow up sections of walls” destructible. I mean, completely destructible. Some sniper camping you from the third floor of a building? Bring the whole thing down. Stuck in a corner? Make yourself a back door. Every piece of every structure is just waiting to be smashed. But how do you bring down a whole building?

With a hammer.

Right up there with Gordon Freeman’s crowbar, the RF:G hammer is destined for iconic status. A quick flick of the D-pad switches from a gun to the hammer, which can be used to smash pillars and skulls with equal efficiency. It’s not quite as satisfying as the chainsaw bayonet, but can a chainsaw drop the roof on an enemy?

“Everything is build around destruction,” said Sean Kennedy, associate producer with Volition Inc., the team that has been working away on the game for almost five years.

To make the physics for total destruction possible, the team at Volition had to build the game from the ground up, engine included. The game recalculates the physics of the buildings every second, and applies the damage effects to structures. It’s such a complex system, that buildings have to be constructed realistically, with metal supports and concrete frames.

“We had to train the whole team to be architects,” Kennedy said.

The physics makes for a chaotic multiplayer, with buildings crumbling and cover quickly disappearing. Kennedy promised that destruction would be even more impressive in the single player experience, and alternate multiplayer modes will feature destruction-– and reconstruction-– as key elements.

The other key feature that sets RF:G apart was the use of backpacks. No, not the kind you wear to school, but jetpacks. Jetpacks that can be switched in-game for bonuses. The playable demo featured a standard jet pack (for flying around), a Rhino pack for charging enemies, a concussion pack for creating a shockwave around the player, a pack that grants temporary unlimited ammo and a firepower bonus, and fleetfoot, which lets players sprint, and is useful for ninja hammer strikes to the back of the skull. Kennedy said there will be more than 10 packs available in the final build, including a thrust pack which shoots the player straight up for quick dodging.

The build is nearly complete, and Kennedy expects the game will drop sometime early 2009. If the game maintains the level of destructibility shown in the demo and adds some more variety in terms of guns and bonus backpacks, Red Faction: Guerrilla could smash out its own niche in the crowded world of shooters.

Killzone 2 Releasing February 2009

Patrick Steen — Tue, 06 May 2008 15:44:48 +0000

Though we will get juicy new info and possibly footage of Killzone 2 today, Sony’s Playstation Day also brings the sad news that Killzone 2′s release has been pushed forward into 2009.

David Reeves, who is currently presenting to a crowd of hungry journalists, has revealed that Killzone 2 will not release until February of next year. At least, that’s the release date for Europe.

The thought that Resistance 2 and Killzone 2 would compete was always worrying, but it’s now amusing to think that Insomniac will have put out three Playstation 3 games by the time Guerilla release their first.

Source: Gamespot

*Update* - 15 minutes of gameplay footage is on the way, so sit tight. For now, enjoy this new image posted by Gamersyde.

(Click the image to enlarge)