Previews// Red Faction: Armageddon

Humans are naturally curious creatures. We want to explore the world, the universe, colonise planets and extend our knowledge beyond the realms of current possibility. Sometimes, that can lead to our undoing. Take, for example, the fair people of Mars, who are currently engaged in a gruesome war with the indigenous alien folk. And it’s all Darius Mason’s fault.

Red Faction: Armageddon takes places 50 years after the planet was freed from slavery by the titular rebellion group - the surface is no longer habitable and colonists have to make do with living in dingy underground mines. Unfortunately for protagonist Darius, being the grandson of Red Faction: Guerrilla’s Alec Mason doesn’t really count for much when you unwittingly awaken an evil that’s been sitting dormant for centuries.

Of course, the only person who can stop the unleashed hell that’s happily bestowing itself upon the human populace is Darius and the Red Faction crew. You are humanity’s last hope for survival, blah blah blah. Volition has stuck to the third-person action adventure genre that served it quite well in 2009, and thrown in a couple of new features that make traipsing around darkened underground caverns that little bit more fun.

The first is a new weapon called the Magnet Gun, which allows you to gravitate a huge chunk of debris from one point to another at high speed. Simply aim at a pile of junk and shoot to create a starting line, shoot at wherever you want it all to go and watch the huge ball of crap fly.

The Magnet Gun can also be used as a weapon, unsurprisingly enough. In fact, I was playing in a level that seemed to be severely lacking in ammunition - and I get the feeling that will be the case throughout the game - so there will definitely be encouragement to use this ‘signature weapon’ to its full potential.

The only thing is that you can die if you get caught in your own line of sight, and at one point in the level I actually managed to take out my escape route by flinging the walkways around. Something to consider when playing - or for Volition to consider looking at. Either/or.

The second thing that will spice up the usual corridor-based shooting antics is the Exo suit. This is a massive machine that Darius can clamber into and walk around in - sort of like those huge mechs in Avatar, only a bit smaller and not so blue and stuff. With one of these babies, you can shoot the hell out of all kinds of alien critters using the rocket launcher turret, or melee with the right thumbstick.

And you’ll need all that firepower because in this particular stage, a rebellion force is chasing Darius and trying to hunt him down for his part in unleashing the alien chaos that surrounds them. As you progress through the stage, eggs and strange portals will spawn spider-like creatures that will be more than happy to tear you apart. The game seems to work on a basis of holding you in a particular area until the portals are closed and all enemies are defeated.

The rest of the controls will be familiar to anyone who’s used to recent third-person run-and-gunners like Dead Space 2. The face buttons help you jump, dodge, crouch and allow for context-sensitive activity, while upgrade posts offer the ability to build your stats using Salvage found around the map. Ultimately, the underground cities you roam in are quite claustrophobic, making the action ever so slightly intense.

It all comes to a head with a battle against a rather large and ugly boss - but to do this you'll have to get through a section where you need to repair a ladder. Unfortunately, this simple task was never really explained - no hints or dialogue suggesting anything. So what should have taken a button press really took me ten minutes. But it’s something I’m sure Volition will correct by the time the game comes out.

The campaign will really be pinned on the quality of the sci-fi story attached to it, but some of the multiplayer modes offer a breath of fresh air. Infestation is your now obligatory ‘Horde’ mode for Red Faction: Armageddon, pitting you and some friends against waves of increasingly-difficult enemies. The awesome part? Grabbing a hammer-esque weapon called the Maul and swinging it about like a Viking warrior. The crunch is makes is bloody brutal.

Ruin is perhaps the most interesting mode the game has to offer. It’s a score attack-based game where you must destroy as much landscape in a map as possible in a given time limit, using a selection of weapons and limited ammo.

The stage I played was on the surface of Mars, outside an industrial plant with plenty of fuel tanks and weak cement buildings to bring down with rockets. It’s very replayable, and may be the thing that will keep you coming back to Red Faction: Armageddon when it arrives this June.