Ahh, Spring. It's everyone's favorite of our Earth's four seasons, for obvious reasons: Flowers are blooming, birds are chirping, and underground revolutionaries use weapons of mass destruction to topple manmade structures onto the unexpecting, squishy crowns of extraterrestrial aggressors. Not familiar with that last bit? Oh, you probably haven't heard: THQ and Volition have announced a May 31 U.S. release date and June 3 international release for their upcoming, extremely explodable action title, Red Faction Armageddon.
That means we're just three short months from finding out what new methods of uncivil engineering the developer's thrown in this time around -- we've got our fingers crossed for some sort of double sledgehammer, which is, of course, a sledgehammer with another sledgehammer stuck on the bottom. Oh, man. Could you imagine?
#clips
I was a huge fan of Red Faction: Guerrilla and the freedom of destruction it delivered gamers at the blunt end of a hammer. But Red Faction Armageddon sounds like it's made reversing chaos just as much fun. More »
#preview
It is often more fun to destroy than it is to create. Many of us realized this when we were young, when we played with Lego sets or made sandcastles. Scores of video games endorse this philosophy. More »
There used to be a building here, I reflect as I put down the controller, ending my preview session of Red Faction Armageddon. I think back to what just happened: how the tower first collapsed after I disintegrated its base with my plasma rifle, before I pulled out my magnet gun and propelled a giant globe at the wrecked building, shattering the remains to pieces. For good measure, I aimed my singularity launcher at what was left and fired off a "black hole," ensuring that nothing would be left.
Like Guerrilla before it, Armageddon has been designed for emergent gameplay -- those uniquely entertaining scenarios that arise spontaneously out of a game's openness to the player's own creativity. It's the sort of fun that relies heavily on awareness of the entire gameworld, and thankfully Armageddon has the right toy box to inspire the level of engagement necessary to create the over-the-top destruction. When the "rocket launcher" is the most uninteresting weapon in a game, something's being done right.
Sure, Armageddon is, in many ways, the same game as its predecessor, but it appeared much more polished to me. The switch from Guerrilla's open-world design to a more linear one may seem regressive, putting greater limitation on the emergent gameplay, but, according to Roje Smith, of developer Volition, "It allows us to give the player much more focus in the experience -- not wander around and get lost in a huge environment."
"In order to really tell the story in Armageddon, it had to be much more linear," he added.
#tv
The Red Faction movie to air on SyFi will begin shooting in January and air in May, concurrent with the release of Red Faction: Armageddon, says the publisher. More »
Better re-mark those calendars. SyFy's Red Faction: Origins movie, originally slated for next March, isn't coming out until May. That's according to a tweet from THQ CEO Danny Bilson, who says that the company started prep work on the film this week, will be shooting in January and that the finished product "airs in May with game release."
"Game release," of course, means Red Faction: Armageddon, which recently got pushed back to May. Hopefully those ostriches they're using don't get too cold out there on the Martian landscape during filming.
Red Faction: Guerrilla's nano forge gun could disintegrate objects large and small, but did you know it could also rebuild them? Apparently in Red Faction: Armageddon, the nano forge will gain the ability to recreate structures out of thin air, allowing for the construction (and, likely, subsequent destruction) of buildings, walkways, and other such objects in the underground world of Mars. Finally, destruction with meaning!
THQ executive VP Danny Bilson and Volition creative director Jacques Hennequet spend the majority of two dev diaries explaining how this -- among many other new features -- will work in next March's release. Head past the break for both.
#thq
THQ, publisher of the Red Faction series, recently registered a domain for Red Faction Battlegrounds. That, plus word the publisher is working on a Red Faction game for Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network, equals a rumor. More »
THQ has a lot of Red Faction transmedia projects going on, so let's add another to the mix: RedFactionBattlegrounds.com. The RF: Battlegrounds domain registration, noticed by Superannuation, is either another non-gaming project or is more likely the name of THQ's Red Faction downloadable title for XBLA and PSN, which is supposed to come out before Red Faction: Armageddon's launch next March.
The publisher also currently has Red Faction: Origins, its SyFy original movie (which could turn into a television series), set to premiere next March. At this rate, it'll be fitting if THQ announces Red Faction: Overload for April -- but we doubt it.
THQ and Volition brought Red Faction: Armageddon to Comic-Con last weekend, and even though the demo on display was the same one we saw behind closed doors at E3, we threatened to collapse their headquarters with a Nano Forge if they didn't tell us something new about the game. Volition producer Dan Sutton and writer Drew Holmes gave us a little insight on what they're planning to do with the story of Darius Mason, Alec's grandson.
Let's get the important stuff out of the way first: The sledgehammer is coming back, so don't worry about that. As for the Ostrich, I didn't get confirmation so much as laughter from the developers, but they said that there would probably be something silly in the game this time around, depending on what the community came up with. "It's up to NeoGAF," joked Holmes. "Someone will photoshop something, and then we'll be stuck."
THQ's Core Games VP Danny Bilson contributed to a panel with a few Syfy execs this past weekend at Comic-Con, along with Andrew Kreisberg, writer for the upcoming Red Faction: Origins movie. The panel was about "transmedia" in general and Red Faction specifically, with THQ being a prime example of a company trying to tell (and sell) a universe's stories across multiple platforms and media. The way it's all going to work is that Red Faction Guerilla starred Alex Mason, Red Faction: Origins will star his son and daughter Jake and Myra, and then Red Faction Armageddon will star Darius Mason, Alex's grandson.
Kriesberg revealed that the movie will feature "three sort of main factions," and that "they're all sort of right. Everyone thinks this is their planet, and that's what makes the drama." Kriesberg shared one line from the movie that he believes wraps up a major theme: "It's hard to win a war, because the winners have to clean up."
Bilson also mentioned the upcoming downloadable game, and said that one of the factions from the movie, the White Faction, will have "elements" in the XBLA and PSN title. Bilson said that THQ's got "two more of these" transmedia properties "in the hopper" -- we presume he means Saints Row and de Blob, both previously revealed to be in progress.
Under the veil of Comic-Con, THQ and Volition just released some assets for the upcoming, underground destruct-em-up, Red Faction Armageddon ... though with the impressive Nano Forge, we suppose you could also call it a construct-em-up.
In addition to a new cinematic trailer, found after the break, some artwork has also been released, highlighting several of the game's features: the Magnet Gun promises hours of physics-based fun; the "shockwave" attack will immobilize enemies in midair for followup with, say, the Magnet Gun; and the Creepers are alien baddies who, once knocked onto the ground, can have their heads stomped in. If you're still getting a decidedly Dead Space vibe from this game, you're not alone.
Also not alone: Armageddon's Darius Mason, who finds himself battling martian critters in the trailer. If you like your voiceover cheesy ("They say you can't battle a nightmare") and lots of one-second shots of gameplay (nice Aliens-esque exoskeleton!), then make your way past the break.
#comiccon2010
The latest game in the Red Faction franchise will be taking over THQ's booth at the San Diego Comic-Con this weekend, with bloody new screens and a suspenseful new trailer heralding the impending Martian invasion. More »
This March -- for the first time ever -- you may have a non-ironic interest in watching a SyFy original movie. That's because the live-action Red Faction movie, now called Red Faction: Origins, will be airing on the network during that month, coinciding with the release of Red Faction: Armageddon. So that's what that other domain registration was about!
The two-hour "pilot" movie (meaning it'll be a series if it does well) takes place between the Guerrilla and Armageddon games, focusing on Alec Mason's last surviving son Jake, who fights against a new human army dedicated to destroying the Red Faction. Somehow, Jake's sister has gotten involved with this group. We can assume because it's a SyFy movie that she's also been cursed to turn into a weresnake at night, or that she arrives on a train filled with spiders who have been snacking on nitroglycerin during the journey.
Along with the announcement of the movie, THQ sent out a new screenshot of Red Faction: Armageddon. Find it in the gallery below.
THQ is going to deliver some emergency Red Faction to those fans unable to hold out until the March 2011 release of Armageddon. Danny Bilson, THQ's VP of core games, told CVG to expect a downloadable Red Faction game to hit Xbox Live Arcade and PSN in the interim between Guerrilla and Armageddon.
"There's going to be a Red Faction Arcade game that ships about three or four months before Armageddon," Bilson said. "What's interesting is that we will sell it to the fans, it will have content you can download that is TV show-related, it will build up to the new game and also we can use it to drive pre-orders, too; we can give codes and aspects of it, we can give the whole thing away." The TV show to which the game will relate is likely Syfy's Red Faction program, produced as part of a larger multi-franchise partnership between the cable network and THQ.
Bilson said that the supplementary downloadable game strategy will be in place for other games.
"You'll see it on Red Faction, you'll see it on Saint's Row and a couple of others," he said, adding that a Red Faction comic book was also in the works. Bilson also announced plans to reveal plans this December for "the biggest trans-media play anyone has ever done" related to the Saints Row franchise.
