Red Faction: Armageddon Demo & First Impressions

First off, for those of you who haven't heard, the demo for the next Red Faction game came out today on Xbox Live and will be on PSN when it's finally back up.  I highly recommend you pick it up, because above all else, it's fun!

The first let down I noticed is that the demo mostly takes place in tighter spaces, I know that the game is based a little bit more on that, but I would have like to try out the new destruction system a little more.  The demo starts off by throwing you into a passage after almost getting killed by a group of civilian militia (as far as I can tell).  Over the next 5 minutes you are introduced to 4 weapons and your enemies.

You first gun is a sticky grenade launcher, it reminds me of the bomb launcher from the Demoman in TF2.  You can place up to four charges and then detonate them using the X button.  2nd is the singularity launcher, which reminds me a lot of the Cerberus singularity gun from Mass Effect 2 (even the animation is familiar) and creates a compact black hole which sucks in enemies then explodes.  The third is your average assault rifle.  The fourth, being the most unique of the pack, it's the magnet launcher, it's as simple as point on a destructible thing, shoot somewhere else, and then watch the debris fly!  Definitely one of the most fun guns to play with.

The "reconstructor" apparatus has also returned, but this time is attached to your arm, and is blue!  The reconstructor allowed you to recreat any broken buildings, walk ways, or etc.  Compared to the first game, this one does take a few seconds before doing work, but afterwards it looks cool, covers a larger area fast, and is frankly just a lot more responsive than the one in Guerilla.  

The enemies are much better than the soldiers in Gurilla and actually use their surroundings.  The enemies showed off in the demo are mutants which jump from wall to wall and can be a bitch to hit sometimes.  There are a few different types of enemies that were showed of, the mobile ones jumping from wall to wall, which I found easiest to kill with the magnet gun, and the less mobile ones with more health, which I just unleashed all hell on.

One of the funnest parts of the demo was easily driving the mech.  The mech is an armored, bi-pedal robot.  It has a machine gun and a Tri-Rocket Launcher which can lock onto multiple enemies at a time, both of which had unlimited ammo.  The mech also has a melee and a devistating charge attack and is a great way to show off some of the new distruction, even if not on as large of a scale that I would have hoped.

Lastly a few other details; in the demo they also showed off a persistant upgrading system which allows you to get upgrades for your character and apparently bring them into multiplayer.  I didn't get to see much but it seemed like a pretty good concept.  Also, some of the randomly played voices can get repetative and annoying and ammo seemed way too easy to find.

Overall it is one of the better demos on Live and I recommend that everyone gives it a try!