Be Excellent To Each Other

I got bored of Red Faction's demo. The one where you had a hammer and could smash your way through walls and demolish buildings. I remember walking around not doing much and then getting to some checkpoint and being funnelled into an on-rails vehicle shooting session for a few minutes. Boring stuff. And I remember the reviews were very average too so I never picked it up and couldn't even be arsed to get it when it was just a couple of quid; so I might not know what the tech was like...

..cause if it was anything like Red Faction: Armageddon's tech on show it might have been pretty special.

In the demo you're given a magnet gun, some black hole (which is actually purple, but let's not split hairs) gun thingy, a detonation mine gun, a powerful blast of "shove" and a machine gun. And you'll use the machine gun no more than once. Cause it's fucking boring. And you'll wonder why you ever played a game with a machine gun again because when you cause as much damage with the rest of the arsenal you'll probably wince at the lack of imagination shown by most developers shoving a pistol in your hands.

Actually that's not fair, cause the only reason the weapons are so much fun is that pretty much everything explodes satisfyingly. And not even 'explodes', some stuff just falls apart nicely. And it's aces. Monster pissing you off from a high platform? Stick a mine underneath the platform and blow him off. Being chased by crawly things? Slap them again with the force shove like a giant invisible pimp slap across the face taking crawly monster and scenery flying across the map.

I spent more time making stuff collapse than trying to finish the demo. At one point you get a mech suit with a lovely running charge and you'll wonder if you can charge through some scenery: then you'll charge through some scenery and smash it to pieces. Brill. The only thing that doesn't collapse is the cave wall that pens you in (something to do with being underground or some shit, but you'll not care about that when you're blowing stuff up). Oh and if you blow too much up and find you no longer have anywhere to walk, you can use this nifty shiny light thing to make it ‘grow’ back.

It’s lovely, it looks like it has some triple A quality visuals, sound is nice, and did I mention you make stuff go boom? Well it does, and convincingly too.

The only thing that troubled me about the demo was that there were are times too many monsters fluttering about, jumping from wall to wall, and flying past you. They’re nicely detailed and all, but they were the worse bit of the game. Plus, the demo takes place in the sewers so it’s all a bit linear, so I’ve no idea if they’re going the sandbox route again, but a couple of videos doing the rounds show there is more stuff above ground so all this lovely smashy smashy smashy smashing might be on a grander scale with actual buildings to destroy. I don’t know about you but I actually avoided downloading this but I’m glad I took a punt.

The tech is groovy and you owe it to yourself to download it just for a looky look.

Do it, Do it now.