One of the most iconic videogame catch phrases of the last decade would like us to believe that war never changes. And while that may be true for the Fallout universe, the entire war is changing in Red Faction.
Red Faction: Armageddon, which was revealed in trailer form on Friday, takes place 50 years after the events featured in last year's surprisingly good open-world action title, Red Faction: Guerrilla. During this stretch, people rocked peace. They partied. They got real. But new enemies have emerged in Armageddon; the places of battle have changed, and new powers will be thy weapons.
In Guerrilla, reticent freedom fighter Alec Mason led a revolution against the brutal Earth Defense Force, eventually defeating it through a mix of quasi-spy junk, leadership, and wholesale destruction (mostly the latter). In Armageddon, it's Alec's grandson Darius' turn to unite and conquer against a new and spookier group of foes: mutants, baby.
The enemies in Armageddon will undoubtedly change the nature of the battle in the Red Faction series, perhaps taking it in a more action-shooter focused direction if the promised four-player co-op Horde-like mode is rooted in the single-player component (multiplayer co-op was confirmed by official release today). But even the environments, and perhaps the rules we became familiar with in Guerrilla, will be different.
The Martian peace comes to an end in Armageddon, as the story goes according to press materials (via Kotaku), because the Terraformer that gave the salsa-colored planet its precious Earth-like atmosphere is obliterated--just as a cult moves in on the surface.
Vicious storms swirl and environmental hazards force the once-free people into a Martian underground--mining tunnels built by ancestors gone. As the trailer explains, the people soon find a new enemy to fight against. Darius, a poor man's Riddick--tattooed and pierced, muscled and grim--unleashes the mutants unknowingly.
The details are sparse before E3, but as Kotaku notes, we'll be saving civilians from cocoons, and taking over fortifications both above and below ground--no doubt with explodey things...and probably jet packs.
One way we'll be putting the hurt on the mutants is via the Nano Forge nanorifle, the deconstructor weapon from Red Faction: Guerrilla. The Mason family passed it down to Darius, and while it may seem like a familiar weapon, it has changed--it's evolving somehow, imbuing Darius with supernatural abilities. One of these appears to be "Repair." As you'll note from the trailer, Darius has some sort of machine tacked onto his arm, giving him the power to rebuild what is destroyed in a flurry of blue neon and nanites. In a chicken and egg kind of deal, I'm totally unsure if the power or the arm-thing came first. Regardless, Repair is a thing, as well as a weapon dubbed the "Magnet Gun."
No offense or anything, Ron Perlman.
UPDATE: The Magnet Gun is not tied to Repair.