The Red Faction franchise is on sale on Steam. 80% off., Good damn deal if you don't own Red Faction or Guerilla. Options

[ShadowDragon8685]

So, Red Faction's entire franchise is on sale, on Steam, at 80% off.


This is a good buy if you never owned Red Faction or Red Faction Guerilla.

Do not buy Red Faction II. It's Red Faction In Name Only, and has a few continuity nods to Red Faction being the only connection between them.

Guerilla, on the other hand, is a great game. It's a nice wide-open sandbox that you can sink hours and hours into, but fairly warned: it doesn't play well with more modern hardware. As in the graphics glitch up terribly awfully. I'm sure someone on the internet has figured out how to fix it, though.


Armageddon, on the other hand...

Well, for $6, if you really want another game at least set on Mars, it delivers that. However, the looked at the bar set by Guerilla and decided not to even try. Instead, they went and jumped under the bar set by the original Red Faction: it's a crushingly linear corridor shooting bug hunt that seems to be taking its visual cues from Dead Space. There's almost no breathers from combat that don't come as a result of you having killed everything or having not yet trigered everything to come and try to claw your face off, no puzzles to speak of what-so-ever. Guerrilla was a wide-open sandbox. Red Faction was a Half-Life style never-ending walk from beginning to end (except for when you drove, sailed, or flew,) where there were no discontinuity jumps. Red Faction Armageddon jumps under both bars in reverting to level-based shoot 'em up gameplay with jarring cuts between levels.

I will concede, there are some genuinely fun sections of the game - primarily every time you get to use a walker except the first time. The game is a straight-up bug hunt, aside from a rare few sections when you're shot at instead, but when you get a walker, all bets are off, and you can toss around boss-caliber bugs like ragdolls by charging into them, and unload with a minigun and a multi-rocket launcher that have infinite ammo. The sections where you have the big spider tanks are even more crushingly one-sided in your favor, to the point that to even challenge you at all for the second time you have the Mantis tank, they have to actually sabotage you by tacking off a quarter of your health bar from the get go and making your shields into crappy triggered ones instead of always-active-recharging models.


The plot, on the other hand, has holes that Alec Mason could drive the behemoth demolition walker through, they needlessly upgrade the badass action girl to love interest only to kill her off literally fifteen seconds later, in the span of one cutscene, and the lack of non-killing-things-based gameplay becomes downright tedious.

[ Spoiler ]

You kill the final boss like, 90% through the game, and the remaining 10% is basically an unending march through infinite bugs to repair the Terraformer that was destroyed in the opening level. Now, from the reactions of everybody, it seemed as if the damage was catastrophic, as if the entire thing had come crashing to the ground, but when you find it, even after a two years of neglect and the bug invasion, including the tentacles smashing into it, it's so intact that you just need to wave your reconstruction beam around, push some buttons, and wait like, two minutes for it to fire up. Why in fuck's name didn't you do this two years ago after Red Faction had run off the cultists?

So, yeah. It's actually a pretty bad game. The moments of awesome ARE moments of awesome, but you should never, ever, find yourself bored playing a video game, and the combat at the end was like "Can we just get on with it already? I just want to see the frigging end!"