Red Faction: Armageddon Review

"Welcome Back to Mars! "

Campaign

You immediately jump right into action from the get go as cultists are trying to destroy the terraformer which creates the stable atmosphere for living on Mars. So basically you get shot out of your vehicle taking you to the terraformer and this is where you learn basic controls. From there you get familiarized with your repair abilities and different weapons available. Some stuff goes down and basically the terraformer gets blown up and everyone is forced underground. The game then picks up later on and you are sent to do a job in a exo suit which is really neat. Only to be tricked and well unleash the bugs upon everyone! After these sequences that have many close cutscenes it moves towards gameplay where you are venturing through vast maps, that have a clear way of movement, but give you options in how you maneuver through them, remember that in Red Faction you can pretty much destroy everything. The campaign really keeps you in action and suspense with a creepy atmosphere of bugs attacking.

Infestation

This game mode is similar to Horde modes, where you basically either survive waves of the bug martians or protect objects, on the objective maps there are two locations you switch between. There are 30 waves in all, but I actually found that instead of getting harder they were quicker and even more of a blast the higher you got. As you go through the levels you earn salvage to upgrade your wheel of power I shall call it!, basically different rings around that give you different in game powers. This is actually usable in campaign too and basically after all these waves I felt pretty godlike and it was awesome. Infestation itself is a really fun game mode that will give you many hours of playtime, even playing through the entire 30 waves at once, I didn't even find it repetitive and it just kept getting better as leveled.

Gameplay

The third person view is a lot tighter in comparison to Guerilla, which then again isn't so bad as most of the time you are in smaller spaces of the caves. The controller scheme is a lot smoother in Armageddon compared to Guerilla again taking advantage of the d-pad like Gears for switching between your weapons. The graphics are really good and every single map looks nice and plays well.

The Conclusion

Red Faction Armageddon is a really good experience that has a great campaign and insanely fun extra Infestation mode. Although it would have been nice to have a more player vs player online similar to Guerilla, the game still has quite a bit to offer. Unlike many games I didn't even find gameplay repetitive or boring, the differing environments no matter what section of the game you played were awesome and it was even better having a all across game skill wheel. I understand that because of the cave areas there was less destruction, but I still felt it could have been more prominently displayed. Armageddon is a great play and will give you great experience in all its modes.

Red Faction: Armageddon for Xbox 360

Rating Overall: 8.3