Red Faction: Armageddon

and the title that sank the franchise it was such a disaster. Which as a follow on from Guerilla is no real surprise as THQ not only took the franchise away from open world to on rails shooter they got rid of the EDF and Mason, using a relative to take the title forward. Your opponents are now extremely dull bugs, confined to corridor style levels. Guns are OK but all you do is shoot them until they are empty as the bug horde is so prolific. Powerups are mediocre, with 2 playthroughs I haven't even tried some of them, not even to get the achievements. There is a powersuit section that has been added, but it is just the run of the mill vehicle FPS section added in as COD did. And gone are the destructible environments, just being able to rebuild destroyed structures. Overall - a total meh over Guerrilla, and the Path To War DLC doesn't have any redeeming qualities either. If you have Guerilla - go and replay it and forget this, if you don't go and buy it and forget this. Don't bother with this as it is as misguided a sequel as you could hope to get, not only abandoning the characters, locations and protagonists but also the whole game play mechanic that made the previous game critically acclaimed. It would have made more sense to rename the game and ditch the Red Faction branding it is so far from the previous game.

Buy on steam, after download right click on game in library, select properties, go to the betas page and change beta participation to the public beta. the patch fixes the cutscene back to menu problem popping up with windows 10. not availale in the GOG version

Red Faction: Armageddon is honestly a pretty fun game, and makes good use of the geomod 2.5 engine to spice up combat a little. The problem is, it tried to straddle a line between all the previous RF's environmental destruction, and Dead Space's erratic scurrying horror; and it fell short on both fronts. Just imagine how much fun the magnet gun would have been in a sandbox, dragging whole buildings on to swarms of EDF troops; or using it to trap some grotesque regenerating alien beneath rubble while you escape. As it is, it's still a fun game, and it's definitely worth buying, but if you haven't played either I'd recommend playing it before Guerrilla, so you don't get your hopes up too much!

Another entry in the red faction series with landmark real-time destructible environments. Unlike Guerilla, this is not an open-world adventure. It's mostly a 3rd person shooter in a mix of indoor and outdoor environments and with limited vehicle sections. Weapons are varied and fun, and are all viable. There's a few powers such as kinetic blast, a shield, etc. and they all share the same cooldown. The bad thing is that the game is held back by a file corruption bug on Windows 10. Your options and player progress (XP and ability upgrades) are stored in the same file, and it often gets corrupted. When this happens, all menu strings appear as IDs (e.g. pld_boot_screen instead of "Booting"", or MENU_OPTIONS_AUDIO instead of "Audio", etc.). It also causes cutscenes to have no audio. The fix is simply to delete the file and set your options again on launch...except that also resets all your XP and upgrades. Due to the aforementioned bug, I had to finish the game almost as a level 1 character with only a couple of abilities. This made a couple of end-game fights much, much harder than they had to be. I redid the last boss fight about 20 times. I only recommend this for diehard Red faction or Volition fans.

I got this game at release because of how much I enjoyed Guerilla, and this game has one of my most favorite weapons in any game, namely the magnet gun, it's still satisfying to bring down a building on top of an enemy alien. I think as it's own game, this isn't too bad, a run of the mill action game with intereting mechanics. But as a sequel to Red Faction Guerilla, it's a step down for sure.