Red Faction: Armageddon (Xbox 360) review "Red Faction: Armageddon gives us the Magnet Gun, which may be the most fun I’ve had with any one weapon since I first took a tour of Ravenholm with the Zero Point Energy Field Manipulator in hand."

Is it flimsy evidence to cite a single weapon as being my entire reason for enjoying a game? I don’t think so. There are multitude of reasons for Half-Life 2 being as highly regarded as it is (to the point that I’ve reviewed it on three separate occasions and I still can’t adequately convey why I love it so much), but if any fan were asked to pinpoint one thing that absolutely sold them on the game, I’ll bet four times out of five you’d be given one simple answer: the Gravity Gun. Only a few chapters in and Valve completely evolved gunplay beyond basic pointing-and-shooting, morphing it into a nonstop physics puzzle as you scour your surroundings for the best possible makeshift weapons. Other developers, from 2K to Visceral, have implemented similar mechanics into their own games, but all have failed to replicate the open-ended glee we experienced when Alyx Vance first put the Gravity Gun in our hands.

Until now, of course. Nearly seven years later, Red Faction: Armageddon gives us the Magnet Gun, which may be the most fun I’ve had with any one weapon since I first took a tour of Ravenholm with the Zero Point Energy Field Manipulator in hand.

This is my first foray into the Red Faction universe. I understand that the series’ draw has always been the destructibility of its levels, but I’m not sure how thoroughly the series has explored the concept of using the environment as a weapon. The Magnet Gun is all about that. Here’s how it works. You fire at one target, then you fire at another, and then the first object flies at shearing velocity toward the second. It’s a fun concept that, when paired with Red Faction’s emphasis on wanton demolition, introduces a brilliant mechanic. Bring a radio tower down on top of an enemy, or pull a bridge out from under his feet. Rip crystals off the walls; rip tiles off the floor. Slam one foe into another, or smear one across the ceiling. Is a tentacle throwing debris at you? Fling it right back! I am told that this is the Magnet Gun’s debut, and it works so well in this context that I can’t believe no one thought of it before.

And it’s exactly the boost of energy that Armageddon needs to propel itself beyond the checklist of contemporary action game clichés that it otherwise so rigidly abides by: brown-and-grey corridors, sticky alien infestation, audio logs, upgrade stations, vehicle sections, on-rails turret sequences, the whole shebang. All it needs is a cover system and Armageddon is the walking embodiment of every shooter released in the last four years. Without this one weapon, the game would not be worth your time. But the Magnet Gun makes it work.

I mentioned an alien infestation. This plays heavily into the game’s plot, which I can describe most charitably as “inoffensive.” Armageddon is set on Mars after the destruction of a terraformer has forced civilization underground, where all of the men shave their heads and wear goggles and, yeah, pretty much look exactly like Riddick. One of the Riddicks, a guy named Darius Mason, is tricked into entering an ancient temple with some mining equipment (read: MAGNET GUN) and unleashing a horde of icky monsters on the planet, because apparently he never got to the sixth level in the original Halo.

The twist of throwing Flood lookalikes into a Red Faction game was not met well with fans, but make no mistake: These aliens are very fun to kill. They move incredibly fast and spend a good portion of the time scaling walls, to the point that the game’s HUD has a familiar motion tracker and it’s still often incredibly difficult to locate enemies. It translates to action sequences that are disorientingly vertical at times. Maybe that doesn’t sound fun, but your means of disposing of the aliens is just as chaotic as the encounters themselves, with shootouts turning into whirlwinds of debris as entire levels collapse onto themselves and you’re struggling to stay alive, not just against enemy attacks, but amidst the destruction and disarray that you’re causing. It’s messy in an enjoyable way. Mason can even instantaneously rebuild structures he’s torn down with a device that, like all unfathomable sci-fi technology, runs on nanites.

The game’s occasional and far more grounded confrontations against other humans are far less exciting in comparison to the more hectic alien battles, enough to make me glad that so much of the game's time is devoted to warding off the Plague, as it's called. I will say, however, that Armageddon short-changes itself a bit by being set almost entirely in claustrophobic caves. There’s rarely any dearth of potential devastation to be caused, but the few moments spent above the surface hint at a level of open-ended destruction that the tunnels of Mars rarely duplicate. Even the game’s opening sequence – before you get the Magnet Gun – is fun for the simple reason that you can wreck an entire barracks full of soldiers with nothing but melee attacks. These dweebs are shooting at me and I’m wearing a cape and smashing stuff with a hammer! I am Thor. It is my understanding that the previous title, Guerrilla, was a sandbox game, which sounds like a great fit for this series.



But where the game really fails to live up to itself is during its finale, during which developer Volition fell into the common trap of believing that the only way to make a game’s ending feel climactic is to overwhelm the player. There’s so much going on in the later levels that it’s nearly impossible to use the Magnet Gun in any calculated manner, reducing Armageddon to the sort of generic gunplay it spent nearly its entirety defying. Having said that, returning to these sections as an overpowered monstrosity with New Game + is a bit of a treat. Armageddon has a gun that fires singularities, and it’s got an unlockable cheat for unlimited ammo. You can see where I’m going with this.

Armageddon has no competitive multiplayer, which is a shame, because that sounds like it could’ve been cool. To my surprise, though, the game’s requisite cooperative endurance mode – another cliché Volition embraced – is quite entertaining, if only because Armageddon’s brand of anything-could-come-from-anywhere mayhem translates into a rather intense multiplayer scenario compared to, say, Horde or Firefight. I went into Infestation mode expecting to only get a taste of it, but wound up pounding through a full 30 waves and willingly resorting to getting only two hours of sleep before work the next day.

So yeah, I like what I’ve played here, enough to wonder how Guerrilla (which I’ve heard good things about) managed to slip under my radar. I’m making it a top priority to track down a cheap copy, and I’m expecting it to be a great game, probably better (and certainly less generic) than this one. But it’s got one major thing going against it: The Magnet Gun works so perfectly for this series that no game will ever truly feel like Red Faction again without it.

Community review by Suskie (June 18, 2011) Mike Suskie is a freelance writer who has contributed to GamesRadar and has a blog. He can usually be found on Twitter at @MikeSuskie.