Red Faction: Armageddon

In Red Faction: Armageddon we are on Mars with a shaven-headed Mason once again: Darius Mason this time, grandson of Alec, hero of 2009's Red Faction: Guerrilla. But where Guerrilla had us rove around on the Martian surface, Armageddon takes us underground. Terraforming has failed since the events of the last game, making Mars uninhabitable aboveground, forcing the human population to relocate into deep networks of rocky caverns. And where Guerrilla was open-world, Armageddon is basically linear, though with some larger, open areas suitable for sandbox-style play linked by the game's subterranean roads and corridors.

Life on Mars.

The game's producer, Jim Boone, tells us Armageddon's linearity comes from player feedback. Though fans of the previous game enjoyed the vehicles and free-form destruction, he says, they were less keen on trundling long distances through an open environment. He also tells us that some 20 percent of the third-person action still takes place topside, though we didn't see any sky for the few-hour duration of our hands-on demo, which was taken from early in the game.

As the demo began, the humans were already besieged by huge and vicious insectile beasties. Since these came from deep within the planet Mars and the humans from planet Earth, they are technically the natives. For the purposes of this preview, however, and because they are huge and vicious insectile beasties, we shall call them aliens. Our hero Darius is somehow to blame for the alien uprising--but inadvertently, mind you, and doing his best to make up for it. In the course of the demo, he escorts a convoy through hostile territory, fetches power cells and fixes water pumps for beleaguered civilians, and demolishes all manner of alien-infested structures.

Among the enemies are various brightly coloured red and green creatures, accessorised with organic blades and spikes and ranged bioweapon fire--glowing green globs that explode just after impact. We encountered plenty of ravagers: fast-moving, wall-climbing aliens with bone-bladed arms. Another alien creature, a stealthy variant, is invisible except when attacking but signals its proximity with a blurring effect on Darius' vision. Others are less subtle and less buglike: one creature was a hulking, horned biped, like a Martian minotaur.

We weren't short of hardware to see off the alien hordes, with Armageddon forever dropping new weapons in our path, but chief among them was the tremendously fun magnet gun. With this, the game's signature weapon, you shoot item A (say, the side of a building) and then shoot item B (say, a spiky ravager) to fling the one into the other, as if by magnetic attraction. The quick two-shot operation works a bit like Dead Space's kinesis module, letting you smash large chunks of the level furniture--girders, walkways, shacks, and the like--into your squishable foes, but also letting you launch enemies up and away, by firing at them and then at the distant cavern ceiling.

The magnet gun is also useful for demolition purposes. Alien-infected buildings can be destroyed by "magnetising" the roof and the floor, or one wall and the other, making it crumple up with zero ammo expenditure. Another demolition option is the powerful, no-mess nano-rifle: a gun that simply dissolves objects and enemies, with none of the gooey splatter of swatting an alien with a corrugated iron shack.

The extensive destruction will be familiar to players of Red Faction: Guerrilla. (Once again, terrain can't be deformed, except for the odd rocky crystal structure, though most man-made structures are fair game.) But Armageddon balances the large-scale demolition with the addition of a repair ability. Darius is equipped with a nano-forge, which is a kind of multi-tool with a number of unlockable and upgradeable abilities, such as shockwave, which freezes and levitates foes close to you; berserk, a double-damage buff; shield; and repair. This last ability is the inverse of the nano-rifle's disintegrating ray. Like an all-powerful undo button, the repair ability conjures anything you've annihilated back into being; you can rebuild walls around you when you're short on cover or reform a stairway while you climb it. Watching buildings rematerialise in a shimmery nano-glow is an unexpected treat.

For remote rather than up-close repairs, Darius has repair grenades, which can be tossed at distant ruined targets to remake them. These are also found in Infestation mode, the game's Horde-style multiplayer mode, in which four players fend of waves of aliens. In Infestation mode, the repair grenades are especially useful for salvaging cover out of the destruction wrought by four magnet guns.



This will take a lot of repair grenades to clear up.


For anyone who played Guerrilla and did enjoy the open-world roaming, there's no escaping the linearity of Armageddon. There was even a disheartening bit of backtracking through tunnels in the stretch we played. The largest caverns, though, do provide arenas for sandbox-style play. Hopefully, as vehicles are introduced--we saw little of these in our hands-on--the arenas grow too, with more room to manoeuvre and more sandbox opportunities to exploit. Fingers crossed also that the jittery frame rate on screens crowded by extravagant use of the magnet gun turns out to be a rarity.

Otherwise, Armageddon promises a fun third-person action game with enough novelty to make it interesting. A rugged protagonist against aliens on Mars is hardly fresh new territory--even discounting Red Faction titles--but Red Faction: Armageddon has an edge in its powerful magnet gun, free-form destruction, and magical repair tool. Look out for it this summer.

Game F.E.A.R. 3 (PC)

F.E.A.R. 3 follows hot on the heels of F.E.A.R. 2's startling conclusion, but returns us to the protagonist of the original F.E.A.R., the genetically designed supersoldier known as Point Man. The events at the end of F.E.A.R. 2 have triggered a paranormal catastrophe of biblical proportions in the city of Fairport, and Point Man is eager to make his way there and help out a former squadmate caught up in the chaos. Point Man's not alone, though. His homicidal brother, Paxton Fettel, is along for the ride. Point Man may have put a bullet in his brother's brain in F.E.A.R., but Fettel isn't about to let a little thing like being dead keep him down. The brothers form an uneasy alliance, but despite the tension between them, the story progresses predictably. There's a pleasant sense of closure that goes with seeing the brothers confront the painful reality of their shared past, but there aren't any surprises or scares that will stay with you once the story has run its course. The visuals also won't work their way into your subconscious. F.E.A.R. 3's graphics are plain and lag behind current standards. As a result, the creepy living rooms, city streets, and food courts you fight your way through aren't quite as creepy as they should be; the environments lack the convincing level of detail to fully pull you in. The sounds are more effective; the loud blasts of gunfire heighten the intensity of firefights, and the ethereal wails that accompany ghostly visions may unsettle you a bit, even if the sight of them doesn't.

Point Man and Paxton Fettel are both playable, but when tackling the campaign alone, you must first play each stage as Point Man to unlock the option to play it as Fettel. Regardless of which character you're playing as, F.E.A.R. 3 is, at its core, a corridor shooter that shuttles you from one small area to another and sees you constantly beset by groups of enemies. Although the core action doesn't evolve much over the course of the game, the firefights remain exciting. The assortment of pistols, shotguns, assault rifles, and other weapons you can employ feel powerful, and the smooth controls make aiming and shooting a pleasure. And your melee attacks, which include a sliding kick that can send enemies flying like rag dolls, make it fun to sometimes forgo the use of guns and charge your enemies.

Most of your time is spent fighting soldiers in the private army of the evil Armacham corporation, and these enemies keep you on your toes by flanking your position, though they also occasionally do dumb things like get stuck while coming down stairs. All of the areas in which shoot-outs take place provide ample opportunities for cover, but a lot of cover is destructible, and it's a thrill to frantically dash from one position to another as your cover is blown to smithereens. F.E.A.R. 3 prevents the shoot-outs from growing tiresome by providing atmospheric periods between firefights. For instance, a few quiet minutes spent making your way through a defiled superstore build up the tension before the bullets start flying. And although Point Man and Paxton are figurative killing machines, the occasional opportunity to take control of a literal killing machine and make things very unpleasant for your adversaries is a lot of fun. At a few points during the campaign, you can commandeer two types of armored power suits. These powerful, lumbering contraptions make the assaults of Armacham soldiers laughable, and shooting helicopters out of the sky from inside one of these machines is a delicious taste of destructive power.



What's cooler than watching things blow up? Watching them blow up in slow motion.


As Point Man, you have an edge in battle courtesy of your unnaturally fast reflexes. These let you trigger slow motion for brief periods, making it much easier to line up that perfect headshot or deal with an overwhelming number of assailants. There's nothing novel about the ability to go into slow motion in shooters anymore, but it's still cool to see the air vibrate in the wake of a speeding bullet that whizzes past your head or to watch as what's left of an enemy explodes in a bloody mess. Paxton lacks his brother's heightened reflexes but makes up for it with other talents. As a specter, he can't pick up guns (though he's still vulnerable to bullets), but he can suspend enemies helplessly in the air and fire deadly blasts of energy from his hand. He can also take possession of soldiers even from significant distances, and it's liberating to zap into the body of an enemy from across the room. A meter drains while you inhabit a body, and if it runs out, you're returned to spectral form. But enemies you kill leave behind psychic energy that you can use to refill your meter and prolong your possession time, encouraging you to take risks and not hide behind cover for too long.

Game New

Gods & Heroes: Rome Rising ReviewA few great ideas aren't enough to make Gods & Heroes more than an unexciting, by-the-numbers online role-playing game.
The GoodHaving minions makes it feel like you're always in a party It's fun to watch your estate come together Lots and lots of quests means never having to grind. The BadBad animations and sound effects diminish the fun of combat A variety of annoying bugs and glitches You could go hours without encountering another player Dated visuals. There are so many virtual online worlds out there that choosing which one to inhabit can be daunting. Most massively multiplayer games try to stand out in some manner, perhaps with intriguing lands to explore, exciting player-versus-player matches, or just the promise of ever-more-powerful swords and sickles to wield. Gods & Heroes: Rome Rising's lures are threefold. First is the setting. Roman mythology is an excellent backdrop for a role-playing game and has gone curiously underexplored in the genre. Second is the estate, your personal domain that gradually improves as you fulfill quest objectives. Third is the minion feature. Depending on your level, you can travel with up to four AI-controlled teammates who assist you in battle, so it's like you have your very own personal adventuring party even when you are soloing. These are good ideas that give flavor to an otherwise mundane, dated, and boring online RPG in which the basics are about as basic as can be.



In these glades, you tackle stags, bears, and bad animations.

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Lure number one: the world. Gods & Heroes takes place on the Italian peninsula of antiquity, mixing historical elements (the Senate and the baths) with mythological ones (fauns, cyclopes, and the favor of the gods). This good-sized world covers a lot of ground, certainly as much as you would expect from a just-released massively multiplayer online game. And because your initial quests span two large regions, you get a good amount of environmental variety from the start. You come across centaurs early on, giving you a taste of the fantastical straight away, and while initial areas are bog-standard forest paths and beaches, later areas, such as the foggy Venatrix Glades, provide a bit more ambience. Such atmospheric locales are welcome, considering how dated Gods & Heroes looks. On the bright side, a modern PC should be able to run the game at its highest settings, and at a high resolution, and still maintain over 100 frames per second. (Except in areas where the game slows to an inexplicable crawl, such as in your personal estate.) The downside is that the game runs so well because it isn't rendering much worth admiring. Textures are plain, geometry is simple, and the lighting is flat. And lots of details simply don't look right, such as how rain might splash on an invisible surface above you rather than on the ground. Luckily, the soundtrack fills in where the visuals struggle. The calls of horns, exotic bassoon melodies, and string glissandos enrich your travels, as if you might stumble upon Bacchus himself, wallowing in drunken revelry.

Lure number two: your estate. The estate is your own instanced home base, where you can find an armor outfitter for your minions, personal storage, and a few other helpful features. When you first begin, your property is relatively bare, but as you complete estate-related quests, the area begins to take shape. Buildings and architectural features like statues appear as you progress, and there's pleasure in seeing this bare valley morph into a visual expression of your great might; it's as if your estate mirrors your own progress from zero to hero. But while the development team plans to give estates more meaning, for now they are just expansive personal spaces. You can't invite other players or members of your tribe (that is, guild) to join you there and admire your spires. You also can't decide where you want buildings or ornaments to go. (How great would an actual city-building mechanic have been?) It's appealing to watch your estate grow, but at this time, this feature has an enormous amount of untapped potential.

Lure number three: minions. These AI-controlled entities come in three flavors: spellcasters, defenders, and skirmishers. Before level 11 (out of a maximum of 30), you have only one such buddy at your side, though you gain an additional slot at specific levels, eventually taking up to four of them along on your travels. Minions are Gods & Heroes' finest asset, making you feel as if you have a full adventuring party with you even if you aren't grouped with others. This is just as well, as it turns out. The game's population is so small, you could explore for hours without encountering another player, and even the global chat channel goes for long stretches without anyone actually chatting. Gods & Heroes' players are the friendly sort, but it takes some extra effort to explore the game's instanced dungeons, given the community's size.



Minions make two-player parties like this one feel even bigger.


That effort is almost worth it, however, if only because small group battles seem a lot more hectic when each party member also brings two or three minions along. You add new minions to your available roster by hiring them or earning their loyalty as quest rewards, and eventually you can choose from more than a hundred of them. Some minions heal; others zap enemies with spells; while others poke away at attacking harpies with spears. So no matter which of the game's four classes you choose for your own character (gladiator, mystic, soldier, or priest), chances are you will gain plenty of minions that complement your chosen role. Collecting minions is addictive, in part because they are both more substantial and more tangible than typical MMOG rewards: usually, some experience, a bit of coin, and maybe a helmet that you eventually sell to a vendor a few hours later.