Most gamers like drama in their games, right? Some suspenseful music...quality voice acting...a scare here, a laugh there... I’m pretty sure everyone would have passed on my experience with the Red Faction: Armageddon single-player campaign.
My one-year-old son - Donovan - enthralled with the little green lights on the front of my floor-standing Xbox 360, decided to give said device a hug. He knocked it over, effectively aborting my mission...which was about three hours into the campaign. Upon rebooting the game, some sound effects were omitted and the game wouldn’t recognize when an objective was completed. I was literally stuck. Add to this that the menu doesn’t feature the ability level select, so one manual save slot and a corrupted auto-save were my two options...and apparently the weird glitch carried over to my manual save.
After clearing the console’s cache and deleting all associated content, I finally discovered that the disc itself had been scratched by the lens. Apparently the sectors that were affected were for ambient music, the shotgun’s sound effect, and Black Market (the first Infection mode map). So Nick and I fired up some co-op Infection to see if I could live without those.
Turns out I can. Because, you see, this game is really fun. In fact, Infestation made the game for me. The single-player campaign (about half of which I played) has some interesting sights to see, but aside from a really cool wreck-and-rebuild Geo Mod function it isn’t anything all that unique. Travel here...get ambushed...survive. The horror themes that Volition tried to push several months back are present, but they’re nothing to write home about. The campaign is about as scary and predictable as another entry in the Halo series.
Which is why throwing up to four people into a map with waves of increasingly aggressive aliens is the wild card, and for me it makes Red Faction: Armageddon a package worth looking into. It’s as fun an insane as you can remember a co-op game being. The controls are familiar, character movement speed is spot-on, and each player can choose their own options - such as sticky reticule, toggle/hold options, and even mapping different weapons to their d-pad.