Kranku_
2009
What if Tobey Maguire turned his swag off?
This is the third in a series of reviews on the 3d era of the Grand Theft Auto games and it reference my previous 2 reviews on GTA 3 and Vice City. San Andreas is a fan favourite in the GTA franchise and was a cultural blockbuster on release. The game was a chart topper for the PlayStation 2 beating out both previous games and even Sony's first party releases in sales to become the best selling PlayStation 2 game of all time. What I’m trying to get across is that this game was a big deal and it set the course for Rockstar's future. I want to state up front that I think this game is a monumental achievement, it’s setting and story was a huge step up from previous games, it made meaningful changes to the GTA formula and I had a great time playing it, yet I also felt a sense of disappointment as all too often the game strayed from the intoxicating hands off mission structure that the previous two titles had. San Andreas will often lead the player by the nose and not only does the game reduce the amount of creative expression the player can do but it even goes so far as to actively destroy any chance the player might make in preparing for missions or engaging in creative problem-solving instead choosing a serious of linear scripted sequences which are lacking in a satisfying payoff.
Let’s start at the beginning; its the 1990s and Carl ‘CJ’ Johnson has been away in Liberty City for a while but at hearing the death of his mother he has come back to San Andreas for the funeral. Whilst visiting the his old neighbourhood and gang he becomes dedicated to building the gang back up and its here we meet the cast of characters and establish the setting. San Andreas is set on the West Coast in the 90s and it is reminiscent of gangsta films of the era like Boyz n the Hood or Menace II Society. Unlike Vice City, which was a straight rip off off one particular movie, San Andreas doesn’t really follow beat for beat exactly what happens in it’s filmic influences and instead chooses to take elements from their setting and portrayal of hood life to create a very dry and drab looking aesthetic, one that’s romanticised by the influence of west coast hip-hop where the streets are mean and crime is a way of life. Corrupt police stalk citizens and enable gang violence, different gangs not only beef with each other but there’s also conflict within families. This is a more thoughtful approach to building a setting and it’s fantastic. In the previous games I talked about the ‘rags to riches’ catharsis that comes from building up the protagonist to a very glorified kingpin and whilst San Andreas starts the player on the bottom rung in a neighbourhood of poverty and systemic violence it doesn’t glorify the crime life, tragedy, downfall and consequences strike the characters. San Andreas retains the feeling of progression from older titles but chooses to make a conscious effort to depict its setting and characters with a more tempered approach.
CJ is the best protagonist of the 3 games hands-down because he isn’t an unfeeling, reckless gangster but rather he is a person who at times displays sadness and amusement and anger and despair, he speaks to different characters in different tones. CJ might show respect to his family members and people who treat him well but he also has a playful side where he makes fun of his homies, he speaks coldly and impatiently to Tenpenny and the police officers who keep him on a leash. CJ is successfully established not just as an avatar of player chaos but deep down, a decent guy with a complex thought process, he sometimes comes across as very trepidatious and whiny and like he feels pressured into doing something to appear strong even when he knows it’s the wrong thing to do. This is praise that you cannot say about Claude or Tommy. I think a lot of credit should go to the brilliant performances of the voice actors who deliver a fun and enthusiastic performance from start to finish.
The starting area of the game, Grove Street is a triumphant expression of game design and makes you feel like you’re back in the swing of GTA. San Andreas has better movement mechanics this time around, CJ can crouch, climb, roll and swim and the starting area shows this off by placing a few weapons on rooftops, encouraging players to reach tangible and useful early game rewards by exploring and interacting with these new mechanics. One of the first things I would do upon returning to Grove was pick up a pistol, SMG and body armour, the golden combo of early game GTA. The game also improves on shooting mechanics, the controls are more like what you would expect from a third person shooter with a reticle and finer movement controls, the lock on is very powerful and in fact its almost too powerful, you can snap onto enemies very quickly with very little effort combined with the improved aiming you can absolutely blast enemies away or snipe them before they even notice you, but its an overall good change, it feels like a robust system that encourages you to use movement and cover intelligently.
It sounds good so far right? Good story, good setting and meaningful gameplay improvements aside the shortcomings of the mission design appear very early in the game when Big Smoke takes you on a mission to kill some Russian Mafia. By this point in the game I had done laps of weapon pickups and equipped myself with an MP5 and a lot of ammo for it, what happens next is a sequence where a mac-10 is forced on my character replacing the powerful SMG and all the ammo I had collected so that the mission could perform an extended turret sequence. Needless to say this was where I knew this game and I would start to clash. After the mission all the effort and progress I had put into preparation had been undone and I was left with a shit gun with one magazine, I felt betrayed by this and it was made worse by the scripted mission wasn’t even very impressive in its delivery, considering it resembled a climatic chase scene on a motorbike in a storm drain being shot at by black sedans and a semi truck (A la Terminator 2) it was decidedly flat with no music or impactful sound effects and marked by invulnerable vehicles that had to reach an area to blow up cinematically.
This mission represents a problem with the entire game, the player is not encouraged to figure out a solution to a mission but rather follow a series of instructions and set pieces. If you’ve spent some time picking up grenades a mission will force you to replace them with Molotovs to complete an arson mission, if there's a warehouse full of enemies they won’t spawn from one entrance and you cannot scout the area because you have to hit a trigger at the front entrance and go through the mission on a set course, this linear approach to missions completely clashes with the open world design remnants like ammo and armour pickups and I wasn’t even particularly motivated to look for fast vehicles or use the new vehicle customisation options because the vehicles were either expected to be blown up as part of the mission or the player is just provided with a car and told to drive somewhere. Contextual health and armour spawn in the middle of missions and red barrels are placed everywhere. San Andreas doesn’t want you to prepare and it doesn’t want you to experiment and this is such a massive let down after the feeling of having Grove Street teach you to explore for goodies, any sense of reward or satisfaction is killed stone dead when a mission demands I complete it a certain way.
Nowhere is this focus on narrative-at-the-expense-of-gameplay shown more clearly than the in car conversations you can have with characters; these conversations are themselves really great and I want to listen to them but all too often they conflict with the games scripted timing, I shouldn’t have to stop before a mission checkpoint to hear the dialogue finish but it happens nearly every time CJ and Ryder start having a conversation across the dashboard, I have to park a few meters away from the mission trigger to hear character development happen, it’s like the game’s narrative is not just fighting the player but the nature of the open world itself. The missions also have some straight up awful mini games like the beat matching games where you have to dance or bounce a low rider to arrows like a really slow and clunky step-mania, quite frankly I would not choose to play these game if a couple weren’t required for progression, I decided to cheat engine myself 100,000 points and browsed my phone whilst they played themselves out, you might call this a ‘skill issue’ I assure you that I am capable of playing bad rhythm games, but I don’t actually want to, I would rather be, you know, stealing cars? Shooting people? Playing a bloody Grand Theft Auto game and not Project Diva Compton.
The game is festooned with half-baked mechanics that often feel like the game is trying to be too ambitious, there are terrible stealth missions where you have to crouch walk everywhere for example and whilst I do appreciate that the developers wanted to introduce new scenarios and new mechanics for players to experience I would much rather they took the approach of letting me create my own experiences. When I was playing Vice City and I found a way to sneak weapons into the golf course to snipe an assassination target at range that was ME creating MY OWN stealth mission, I didn’t need a visibility meter or noise meter or a new suite of mechanics that only work in a certain area, instead I built my own gameplay story and expressed myself without the game’s overbearing hand guiding me through it.
San Andreas is filled with ambitious mechanics that aren’t developed enough, the game has life-sim elements where you can increase your fatness, athleticism, muscle and lung capacity, these all effect the on foot gameplay and they add a really awesome element of flavour, I love that you can eat a ton of chicken buckets from fast food places and CJ will start to make wise cracks about his weight, characters will even call you up and tell you to go to the gym. This system is such a brilliant thing to add to this huge world but it’s fucked up by making the gym sections where you gain stamina and muscle these awful button mashing mini games that are a serious concern for people with RSI, its like the game can’t stop switching out the mechanics before fully exploring them. Another life-sim element that annoys the shit out of me is the mechanic of dating women, this ties into the rags to riches power fantasy as you begin to date sexier and more classy women who expect you to dress better and have a nice car but again it’s not thought out properly, you will be hit with random notifications that your ‘progress with Denise’ has dropped it’s like the game constantly demands attention from you as if it were a real relationship but all that it accomplishes is making the player go and do things that they may not want to do. My relationship with a girl should not decrease like a meter 10 minutes after I had already met with her and completed a series of very obtuse and boring date objectives like going to a bar wearing an appropriate amount of swag clothing and a $300 flat top.
I’m sure I could say more about the fact that you’re expected to cheat on multiple women who are largely portrayed as shallow gold diggers that you fuck for like, power ups and car spawns but its a 2004 GTA game, I wasn’t expecting much.
Another element that falls flat for me is the map layout, on the one hand its much much larger than previous games and the game continues the trend from Vice City of having cool interiors and little details, in terms of a variety in elevation and road complexity it still holds up today but it is much harder to navigate than most open world maps, very often I was met impassible geometry between me and an objective. Verticality is a big part of the San Andreas map but its supremely annoying to navigate because it results in the game putting a brick wall in your face and you need to drive an entire block around it. The areas outside the cities are expansive and devoid of any significant landmarks, Vice City and GTA 3 did a good job of getting players used to their environment by landmarking shops and points of interest with other areas to create a puzzle-like map that players could familiarise themselves with quickly. Highways in Vice City were dotted with interesting coloured buildings or a business or a unique bridge to cross to reach a new part of the city, compare this to San Andreas where you drive along featureless two lane highways between cities as if the game is attempting to recreate the mundane experience of driving in real life California. Areas are so generic that you can’t get used to them and you are forced to check a map to make sure the long, twisting road you’re driving on won’t just shit you out in a completely arbitrary direction. When I think about the West Coast of the US and the places there I don’t think too fondly of driving for hours on the i-15 and yet that's exactly what the San Andreas map feels like. Bad traversal of the map is mitigated somewhat by the new inclusion of really fun on foot options like parachutes and jetpacks but these aren’t always available, the bulk of a GTA game is always driving and having a map that feels boxed in whilst also being way too big is frankly upsetting.
It may sound dramatic to be upset with a game like this but I feel like I’m missing a trick with San Andreas, I feel like there's something not clicking for me here. I like the story, I like the characters, I like the driving model, I love the soundtrack which would’ve been a hard act to follow after Vice City and yet is still full of bangers and I love the new movement mechanics, I love the extensive amount of content and environments the game has, I appreciate that the game is ambitious even if it is too ambitious sometimes and I can see why it remains so popular amongst fans but there’s just something not right with it. I constantly felt like the game was wrestling away control from me and its the same feeling I get from contemporary Rockstar games. San Andreas exists in this weird space where the franchise hasn’t committed to its goal of a narrative experience and still has remnants of player choice and player expression like weapon pickups and collectibles so I get the impression that I’m supposed to be going out of my way to prepare for something when the game will just take all that away from me and give me a set of tools that I have to use. When the game lets go of the scripted linear focus it’s great and some of my favourite missions were the things like the heists with Catalina, the game lets off and tells you to choose a target and you play out a small heist with a dynamic shoot-out and tense getaways, these were exciting and unpredictable and were on par if not better than some of the best missions in Vice City and GTA 3. When the game rewarded me for increasing my lung capacity ahead of a mission that requires strong swimming that felt good, it felt like the game was acknowledging the choices I made. If San Andreas had a consistent mission structure that really let the player loose on the open world to build their own fun I think it would an incredible game, as it stands I can’t love it as much. Going forward Rockstar games would become increasingly railroaded in focus but also they became utterly immense in their popularity and cultural impact, its clear that even if this game didn’t click with me, millions more came to love this style of game, I think to understand San Andreas you have to appreciate a more authored approached to mission based open world games, but for me I will always prefer the freedom and unchained mayhem of GTA 3 and Vice City.
Let’s start at the beginning; its the 1990s and Carl ‘CJ’ Johnson has been away in Liberty City for a while but at hearing the death of his mother he has come back to San Andreas for the funeral. Whilst visiting the his old neighbourhood and gang he becomes dedicated to building the gang back up and its here we meet the cast of characters and establish the setting. San Andreas is set on the West Coast in the 90s and it is reminiscent of gangsta films of the era like Boyz n the Hood or Menace II Society. Unlike Vice City, which was a straight rip off off one particular movie, San Andreas doesn’t really follow beat for beat exactly what happens in it’s filmic influences and instead chooses to take elements from their setting and portrayal of hood life to create a very dry and drab looking aesthetic, one that’s romanticised by the influence of west coast hip-hop where the streets are mean and crime is a way of life. Corrupt police stalk citizens and enable gang violence, different gangs not only beef with each other but there’s also conflict within families. This is a more thoughtful approach to building a setting and it’s fantastic. In the previous games I talked about the ‘rags to riches’ catharsis that comes from building up the protagonist to a very glorified kingpin and whilst San Andreas starts the player on the bottom rung in a neighbourhood of poverty and systemic violence it doesn’t glorify the crime life, tragedy, downfall and consequences strike the characters. San Andreas retains the feeling of progression from older titles but chooses to make a conscious effort to depict its setting and characters with a more tempered approach.
CJ is the best protagonist of the 3 games hands-down because he isn’t an unfeeling, reckless gangster but rather he is a person who at times displays sadness and amusement and anger and despair, he speaks to different characters in different tones. CJ might show respect to his family members and people who treat him well but he also has a playful side where he makes fun of his homies, he speaks coldly and impatiently to Tenpenny and the police officers who keep him on a leash. CJ is successfully established not just as an avatar of player chaos but deep down, a decent guy with a complex thought process, he sometimes comes across as very trepidatious and whiny and like he feels pressured into doing something to appear strong even when he knows it’s the wrong thing to do. This is praise that you cannot say about Claude or Tommy. I think a lot of credit should go to the brilliant performances of the voice actors who deliver a fun and enthusiastic performance from start to finish.
The starting area of the game, Grove Street is a triumphant expression of game design and makes you feel like you’re back in the swing of GTA. San Andreas has better movement mechanics this time around, CJ can crouch, climb, roll and swim and the starting area shows this off by placing a few weapons on rooftops, encouraging players to reach tangible and useful early game rewards by exploring and interacting with these new mechanics. One of the first things I would do upon returning to Grove was pick up a pistol, SMG and body armour, the golden combo of early game GTA. The game also improves on shooting mechanics, the controls are more like what you would expect from a third person shooter with a reticle and finer movement controls, the lock on is very powerful and in fact its almost too powerful, you can snap onto enemies very quickly with very little effort combined with the improved aiming you can absolutely blast enemies away or snipe them before they even notice you, but its an overall good change, it feels like a robust system that encourages you to use movement and cover intelligently.
It sounds good so far right? Good story, good setting and meaningful gameplay improvements aside the shortcomings of the mission design appear very early in the game when Big Smoke takes you on a mission to kill some Russian Mafia. By this point in the game I had done laps of weapon pickups and equipped myself with an MP5 and a lot of ammo for it, what happens next is a sequence where a mac-10 is forced on my character replacing the powerful SMG and all the ammo I had collected so that the mission could perform an extended turret sequence. Needless to say this was where I knew this game and I would start to clash. After the mission all the effort and progress I had put into preparation had been undone and I was left with a shit gun with one magazine, I felt betrayed by this and it was made worse by the scripted mission wasn’t even very impressive in its delivery, considering it resembled a climatic chase scene on a motorbike in a storm drain being shot at by black sedans and a semi truck (A la Terminator 2) it was decidedly flat with no music or impactful sound effects and marked by invulnerable vehicles that had to reach an area to blow up cinematically.
This mission represents a problem with the entire game, the player is not encouraged to figure out a solution to a mission but rather follow a series of instructions and set pieces. If you’ve spent some time picking up grenades a mission will force you to replace them with Molotovs to complete an arson mission, if there's a warehouse full of enemies they won’t spawn from one entrance and you cannot scout the area because you have to hit a trigger at the front entrance and go through the mission on a set course, this linear approach to missions completely clashes with the open world design remnants like ammo and armour pickups and I wasn’t even particularly motivated to look for fast vehicles or use the new vehicle customisation options because the vehicles were either expected to be blown up as part of the mission or the player is just provided with a car and told to drive somewhere. Contextual health and armour spawn in the middle of missions and red barrels are placed everywhere. San Andreas doesn’t want you to prepare and it doesn’t want you to experiment and this is such a massive let down after the feeling of having Grove Street teach you to explore for goodies, any sense of reward or satisfaction is killed stone dead when a mission demands I complete it a certain way.
Nowhere is this focus on narrative-at-the-expense-of-gameplay shown more clearly than the in car conversations you can have with characters; these conversations are themselves really great and I want to listen to them but all too often they conflict with the games scripted timing, I shouldn’t have to stop before a mission checkpoint to hear the dialogue finish but it happens nearly every time CJ and Ryder start having a conversation across the dashboard, I have to park a few meters away from the mission trigger to hear character development happen, it’s like the game’s narrative is not just fighting the player but the nature of the open world itself. The missions also have some straight up awful mini games like the beat matching games where you have to dance or bounce a low rider to arrows like a really slow and clunky step-mania, quite frankly I would not choose to play these game if a couple weren’t required for progression, I decided to cheat engine myself 100,000 points and browsed my phone whilst they played themselves out, you might call this a ‘skill issue’ I assure you that I am capable of playing bad rhythm games, but I don’t actually want to, I would rather be, you know, stealing cars? Shooting people? Playing a bloody Grand Theft Auto game and not Project Diva Compton.
The game is festooned with half-baked mechanics that often feel like the game is trying to be too ambitious, there are terrible stealth missions where you have to crouch walk everywhere for example and whilst I do appreciate that the developers wanted to introduce new scenarios and new mechanics for players to experience I would much rather they took the approach of letting me create my own experiences. When I was playing Vice City and I found a way to sneak weapons into the golf course to snipe an assassination target at range that was ME creating MY OWN stealth mission, I didn’t need a visibility meter or noise meter or a new suite of mechanics that only work in a certain area, instead I built my own gameplay story and expressed myself without the game’s overbearing hand guiding me through it.
San Andreas is filled with ambitious mechanics that aren’t developed enough, the game has life-sim elements where you can increase your fatness, athleticism, muscle and lung capacity, these all effect the on foot gameplay and they add a really awesome element of flavour, I love that you can eat a ton of chicken buckets from fast food places and CJ will start to make wise cracks about his weight, characters will even call you up and tell you to go to the gym. This system is such a brilliant thing to add to this huge world but it’s fucked up by making the gym sections where you gain stamina and muscle these awful button mashing mini games that are a serious concern for people with RSI, its like the game can’t stop switching out the mechanics before fully exploring them. Another life-sim element that annoys the shit out of me is the mechanic of dating women, this ties into the rags to riches power fantasy as you begin to date sexier and more classy women who expect you to dress better and have a nice car but again it’s not thought out properly, you will be hit with random notifications that your ‘progress with Denise’ has dropped it’s like the game constantly demands attention from you as if it were a real relationship but all that it accomplishes is making the player go and do things that they may not want to do. My relationship with a girl should not decrease like a meter 10 minutes after I had already met with her and completed a series of very obtuse and boring date objectives like going to a bar wearing an appropriate amount of swag clothing and a $300 flat top.
I’m sure I could say more about the fact that you’re expected to cheat on multiple women who are largely portrayed as shallow gold diggers that you fuck for like, power ups and car spawns but its a 2004 GTA game, I wasn’t expecting much.
Another element that falls flat for me is the map layout, on the one hand its much much larger than previous games and the game continues the trend from Vice City of having cool interiors and little details, in terms of a variety in elevation and road complexity it still holds up today but it is much harder to navigate than most open world maps, very often I was met impassible geometry between me and an objective. Verticality is a big part of the San Andreas map but its supremely annoying to navigate because it results in the game putting a brick wall in your face and you need to drive an entire block around it. The areas outside the cities are expansive and devoid of any significant landmarks, Vice City and GTA 3 did a good job of getting players used to their environment by landmarking shops and points of interest with other areas to create a puzzle-like map that players could familiarise themselves with quickly. Highways in Vice City were dotted with interesting coloured buildings or a business or a unique bridge to cross to reach a new part of the city, compare this to San Andreas where you drive along featureless two lane highways between cities as if the game is attempting to recreate the mundane experience of driving in real life California. Areas are so generic that you can’t get used to them and you are forced to check a map to make sure the long, twisting road you’re driving on won’t just shit you out in a completely arbitrary direction. When I think about the West Coast of the US and the places there I don’t think too fondly of driving for hours on the i-15 and yet that's exactly what the San Andreas map feels like. Bad traversal of the map is mitigated somewhat by the new inclusion of really fun on foot options like parachutes and jetpacks but these aren’t always available, the bulk of a GTA game is always driving and having a map that feels boxed in whilst also being way too big is frankly upsetting.
It may sound dramatic to be upset with a game like this but I feel like I’m missing a trick with San Andreas, I feel like there's something not clicking for me here. I like the story, I like the characters, I like the driving model, I love the soundtrack which would’ve been a hard act to follow after Vice City and yet is still full of bangers and I love the new movement mechanics, I love the extensive amount of content and environments the game has, I appreciate that the game is ambitious even if it is too ambitious sometimes and I can see why it remains so popular amongst fans but there’s just something not right with it. I constantly felt like the game was wrestling away control from me and its the same feeling I get from contemporary Rockstar games. San Andreas exists in this weird space where the franchise hasn’t committed to its goal of a narrative experience and still has remnants of player choice and player expression like weapon pickups and collectibles so I get the impression that I’m supposed to be going out of my way to prepare for something when the game will just take all that away from me and give me a set of tools that I have to use. When the game lets go of the scripted linear focus it’s great and some of my favourite missions were the things like the heists with Catalina, the game lets off and tells you to choose a target and you play out a small heist with a dynamic shoot-out and tense getaways, these were exciting and unpredictable and were on par if not better than some of the best missions in Vice City and GTA 3. When the game rewarded me for increasing my lung capacity ahead of a mission that requires strong swimming that felt good, it felt like the game was acknowledging the choices I made. If San Andreas had a consistent mission structure that really let the player loose on the open world to build their own fun I think it would an incredible game, as it stands I can’t love it as much. Going forward Rockstar games would become increasingly railroaded in focus but also they became utterly immense in their popularity and cultural impact, its clear that even if this game didn’t click with me, millions more came to love this style of game, I think to understand San Andreas you have to appreciate a more authored approached to mission based open world games, but for me I will always prefer the freedom and unchained mayhem of GTA 3 and Vice City.
This review is the 2nd in a multi-part series on the 3d era of Grand Theft Auto games, it follows on my review from GTA3.
This review is going to be biased, disingenuous and cowardly as I praise a game wholly on nostalgia, vibes and not much else. In my GTA3 review I held off criticising the game too hard because I felt that it was more important to get across how groundbreaking the game was for open world design but I cannot get away with that in this review. I necessarily need to talk about the shortcomings of Vice City because it cannot be as truly innovative as GTA3, instead the game builds on the same formula as the previous game but delivers a stylish, nostalgic and narrative focused experience… but the truth is, I don’t really want to. I love Vice City, it is by far my personal favourite game in the series by a mile and no criticism I can give of it can take away the big stupid grin that was plastered across my face as I flew a helicopter nose down over the blue glass waves of a Florida bay, Laura Branigan wailing through the radio.
Nostalgia is the operant word because the game isn’t shy about its retro factor. Set in 1986 and steeped in the culture of the time period, Vice City is nostalgic both literally in its presentation of a 1980s Miami drenched in Neon, New-wave music and sports cars but also narratively it’s a send up of 80s action films, actually calling it a ‘send-up’ is too generous, the game is just a blatant rip-off of Scarface but the protagonist is Italian Mafia instead of Cuban. Just about the only thing that differentiates the plot of Vice City from Scarface is that Tony Montana is forced to face the consequences of his actions and succumbs to greed and excess whereas Tommy Vercetti just… doesn’t. Vice City is not a cautionary tale about crime, it is just a glorification of criminality and a cathartic rags to riches journey with no downfall faced by the protagonist and no brakes on the exploitation of the drug trade. That said I don’t want to give the impression that the story is ‘good’ it’s very shallow, however I think its an improvement over GTA3. Claude’s journey barely has a point beyond revenge and he doesn’t really earn anything or have any desires or goals, he takes orders from random people until the game ends, the plot of Vice City gives us enough of a framework to enjoy the setting of the game, we want Tommy to succeed because we want money, guns, cars and toys just like he does, we want to be the boss.
Fresh out of a 15 year long prison sentence, Tommy Vercetti is sent to Vice City to conduct a drug deal on behalf of the Mafia, unfortunately the drug deal is an ambush and the Mafia reps and dealer are killed but Tommy and his shifty lawyer Ken Rosenberg manage to escape. Tommy now finds himself in a strange town and is tasked with tracking down the money and cocaine for his increasingly threatening Mafia boss. Unlike GTA 3 our protagonist is given a voice and personality, Tommy is voiced by Ray Liotta, giving a performance in between deadpan exasperation with the morons around him and the petulant anger of a sycophantic drug lord. Vercetti is constantly pissed and hotheaded in this game, its hard to ever feel sympathetic for him and instead he is best thought of as a vessel for the greed and violence of the player themselves. Changing to a voiced protagonist alters the feeling of the game significantly, in GTA3 Claude's muteness came across as totally psychotic and unfeeling, he was as grey and chaotic as the concrete jungle of Liberty City. Tommy however has a personality which feels like the prickly humid heat of a low sun hanging over a Florida swamp, he’s a lawful evil type of guy that uses money and organised criminal structures to gain wealth and power for himself, he doesn’t do whatever people tell him to do, instead preferring to take charge of a situation and delegate to his underlings.
Vice City thankfully continues the previous game’s mission design, the player is rewarded for creativity and the missions can be approached many different ways. One example is an early mission that gives you a chainsaw in a cutscene to assassinate a man, the cutscene even explicitly states “use this” and you’ll get unique dialogue and an additional cutscene for using this weapon to kill the target, however if you picked up a shotgun prior to the mission you can skip all of this entirely and just gun the target down. I think this is important because in my opinion Vice City and GTA 3 are the last vestige of this design, GTA as a series becomes increasingly more railroaded after this. There are lots of small examples of this design throughout the game, you can park vehicles in convenient places, find alternate routes to targets and prepare for missions beforehand and its as satisfying as ever to approach missions using your own creativity and planning.
Gameplay wise there isn’t much to expand on, the game features small quality of life improvements over GTA3 in terms of aiming, piloting aircraft and it has a functional in-game map which was sorely needed. I think the game really could have done with introducing some different gameplay elements because it really does feel like an expansion to the previous game in terms of how it plays, there’s no significant change in the sandbox, you drive, you walk around, you shoot and you don’t really interact with the game using any language other than violence, on the one hand this is good because its just a nice little update to an already great gameplay formula with an improved map, bigger story and some tweaks but we’ll see with San Andreas that the series will soon start to make additions and changes to this recipe. The map itself is by far one of the game’s strongest elements, Vice City is very carefully and thoughtfully designed compared to the big grey box of GTA3. I never even needed to use the map extensively because the game is so good at laying out a series of connecting landmarks, you can plot a route to a part of the city just with map knowledge alone. Every part of the game has standout shops, buildings, pickups or buy-able property and it connects them with unique looking bridges and highways, if you see a Mall in this game it’s a unique design and layout and you’ll know exactly where this mall is in relation to a club, a hotel, a police station, a hardware store, the map is a series of excellently blended puzzle pieces. Vice City isn’t just a map that you can familiarise yourself with but one that comes to feel homely and second nature, quite frankly I can navigate it better than I can my real life home-town.
In addition to the improvements in landmarking there is also a greater focus on details and interiors around the world, there are more shops and buildings that you can walk into and there is greater set dressing in general, one example is that rooms and houses you own in the game get objects added to them as you progress the missions, finding all the packages makes a little trophy appear in your hotel room, completing the film set business adds film reels and frames to your mansion, all of these elements combine to make Vice City feel cohesive and so much fun to explore, not just for pickups of weapons and armour but also because you might find a cool little detail like a tiki bar or doughnut shop or a butchers window with human meat. This attention to detail is an element which GTA 3 didn’t have and I’m glad that Vice City takes time to add these small touches to the world because it adds a brush of care an attention that makes the player want to look around and find these small bits and pieces of story-telling.
One aspect I dislike is that Vice City seems to be a bit more stingy on giving the player useful weapons and pickups, in GTA3 collecting the secret packages gives you a suite of weapons at safehouses but in Vice City you get a few very powerful weapons of a single type, like rockets or a minigun which are great by themselves but you can’t use them together. You also get a chance to pickup some secret vehicles like tanks and helicopters. These are very powerful and fun rewards to mess around with but they aren’t as helpful to the missions as an assault rifle or SMG and this makes the process of picking up weapons and ammo more tedious and lengthy as you have to hit up each spawn for a weapon, in fact its so tedious that if I failed a mission I would quit the game and reload a save file just so I didn’t have to do 10 minutes worth of getting more Uzi and AR-15 ammo. On the one hand its great that you get some powerful options to play around with but I think some less situational rewards would incentivise players to restart missions more quickly, GTA 3 didn’t have this problem because it made the rewards more useful and put the powerful weapons in Phil Cassidy’s shop, interestingly in Vice City, Cassidy returns and you can unlock his shop but why bother? Unless you really like using the m60 then you get a minigun and RPG delivered to your safehouses anyway. The rewards in the game feel like the game designers wanted to give the player more options for large scale chaos but in doing so they’ve neglected some of the smaller scale, on foot, gun-fighting elements of the sandbox. Sure you can just buy the weapons but they’re expensive early game and GTA 3 solved this problem by just giving the player actually useful rewards.
But all this sounds serviceable so what elevates the game? surely you can’t just slap an 80s skin on GTA3 and call it done? well as noted before the game is heavy on nostalgia and people are likewise very nostalgic for this game. Nostalgia is a cautious kind of relationship to have with any media, it’s very annoying when people suggest that ‘games used to be better’ or ‘they don’t make em like this any more’ because it sounds like disingenuous old man pining for a by-gone era; the world didn’t get worse, rather you just didn’t have anything else to worry about as a kid when this game was your only time sink, there are so many great games out now and accessing media is so much more convenient that you just wanna slap these morons and tell them to stop feigning some generational tragedy. However I think nostalgia can be a nice escape too and Vice City nails nostalgia. I said before that MSX FM is my favourite radio station and that is still true, but oh my God, Vice City’s licenced soundtrack is completely unparalleled. Every radio station is full of absolute classics; Hall & Oates, Michael Jackson, Bryan Adams, Gary Numan, Blondie, ELO, Yes, The Human League, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Spandau Ballet, Kate Bush, REO Speedwagon, Fat Larry’s Band, The Pointer Sisters, Rick James, Teena Marie, Twisted Sister, Ozzy, Iron Maiden, Slayer, Judas Priest, Mötley Crüe, Zapp & Roger, Grandmaster Flash, Cybotron, Afrika Bambaataa, Run DMC. Just banger after banger after banger, a cavalcade of non-stop tunes so good I sometimes drive around longer than I need to just to finish bopping to the song. I think this is so important because the soundtrack isn’t just a separate element of the game like it was in GTA3 but moreso it serves as a pillar of the atmosphere. When every single element of Vice City comes together it produces some of the best and most memorable parts of the whole GTA franchise, the missions themselves are fun sure and there’s a satisfying progression as you build a criminal empire with Tommy but nothing brings a feeling of deep joy to me, like racing down Ocean Drive in a cherry red Cheetah with Tyrone Brunson’s infectiously funky bass emanating from my speakers. When Rockstar North commits to getting a cinematic atmosphere right they are just masters of their craft. GTA3 has come back into focus recently because it’s very strange looking game that intersects with the current trend of liminal spaces and obsession with old video game graphics but that's more of an incidental thing, I like the vibe of GTA3 but Vice City is a different kind of vibe, a very authored facsimile of 80s excess that works on every level to immerse the player.
So that is my assessment of Grand Theft Auto Vice City, it’s my little guilty pleasure, my nostalgic getaway from the world where I can just sink into an 80s dream for a while, I admit this isn’t going to gel with everyone. People will probably play this game without this nostalgic reverence and find a dated and frustrating game with a shallow plot, cumbersome gameplay and a decent soundtrack and leave it there, in fact I do think GTA 3 remains the most important game in the franchise. I don’t care, I can only judge a game by how much joy it brings me and nothing brings me greater Joy than the sickening crunch of an old lady’s pelvis under the wheels of a Countach, Hawaiian shirt on, singing Video Killed the Radio Star, you can’t beat it.
This review is going to be biased, disingenuous and cowardly as I praise a game wholly on nostalgia, vibes and not much else. In my GTA3 review I held off criticising the game too hard because I felt that it was more important to get across how groundbreaking the game was for open world design but I cannot get away with that in this review. I necessarily need to talk about the shortcomings of Vice City because it cannot be as truly innovative as GTA3, instead the game builds on the same formula as the previous game but delivers a stylish, nostalgic and narrative focused experience… but the truth is, I don’t really want to. I love Vice City, it is by far my personal favourite game in the series by a mile and no criticism I can give of it can take away the big stupid grin that was plastered across my face as I flew a helicopter nose down over the blue glass waves of a Florida bay, Laura Branigan wailing through the radio.
Nostalgia is the operant word because the game isn’t shy about its retro factor. Set in 1986 and steeped in the culture of the time period, Vice City is nostalgic both literally in its presentation of a 1980s Miami drenched in Neon, New-wave music and sports cars but also narratively it’s a send up of 80s action films, actually calling it a ‘send-up’ is too generous, the game is just a blatant rip-off of Scarface but the protagonist is Italian Mafia instead of Cuban. Just about the only thing that differentiates the plot of Vice City from Scarface is that Tony Montana is forced to face the consequences of his actions and succumbs to greed and excess whereas Tommy Vercetti just… doesn’t. Vice City is not a cautionary tale about crime, it is just a glorification of criminality and a cathartic rags to riches journey with no downfall faced by the protagonist and no brakes on the exploitation of the drug trade. That said I don’t want to give the impression that the story is ‘good’ it’s very shallow, however I think its an improvement over GTA3. Claude’s journey barely has a point beyond revenge and he doesn’t really earn anything or have any desires or goals, he takes orders from random people until the game ends, the plot of Vice City gives us enough of a framework to enjoy the setting of the game, we want Tommy to succeed because we want money, guns, cars and toys just like he does, we want to be the boss.
Fresh out of a 15 year long prison sentence, Tommy Vercetti is sent to Vice City to conduct a drug deal on behalf of the Mafia, unfortunately the drug deal is an ambush and the Mafia reps and dealer are killed but Tommy and his shifty lawyer Ken Rosenberg manage to escape. Tommy now finds himself in a strange town and is tasked with tracking down the money and cocaine for his increasingly threatening Mafia boss. Unlike GTA 3 our protagonist is given a voice and personality, Tommy is voiced by Ray Liotta, giving a performance in between deadpan exasperation with the morons around him and the petulant anger of a sycophantic drug lord. Vercetti is constantly pissed and hotheaded in this game, its hard to ever feel sympathetic for him and instead he is best thought of as a vessel for the greed and violence of the player themselves. Changing to a voiced protagonist alters the feeling of the game significantly, in GTA3 Claude's muteness came across as totally psychotic and unfeeling, he was as grey and chaotic as the concrete jungle of Liberty City. Tommy however has a personality which feels like the prickly humid heat of a low sun hanging over a Florida swamp, he’s a lawful evil type of guy that uses money and organised criminal structures to gain wealth and power for himself, he doesn’t do whatever people tell him to do, instead preferring to take charge of a situation and delegate to his underlings.
Vice City thankfully continues the previous game’s mission design, the player is rewarded for creativity and the missions can be approached many different ways. One example is an early mission that gives you a chainsaw in a cutscene to assassinate a man, the cutscene even explicitly states “use this” and you’ll get unique dialogue and an additional cutscene for using this weapon to kill the target, however if you picked up a shotgun prior to the mission you can skip all of this entirely and just gun the target down. I think this is important because in my opinion Vice City and GTA 3 are the last vestige of this design, GTA as a series becomes increasingly more railroaded after this. There are lots of small examples of this design throughout the game, you can park vehicles in convenient places, find alternate routes to targets and prepare for missions beforehand and its as satisfying as ever to approach missions using your own creativity and planning.
Gameplay wise there isn’t much to expand on, the game features small quality of life improvements over GTA3 in terms of aiming, piloting aircraft and it has a functional in-game map which was sorely needed. I think the game really could have done with introducing some different gameplay elements because it really does feel like an expansion to the previous game in terms of how it plays, there’s no significant change in the sandbox, you drive, you walk around, you shoot and you don’t really interact with the game using any language other than violence, on the one hand this is good because its just a nice little update to an already great gameplay formula with an improved map, bigger story and some tweaks but we’ll see with San Andreas that the series will soon start to make additions and changes to this recipe. The map itself is by far one of the game’s strongest elements, Vice City is very carefully and thoughtfully designed compared to the big grey box of GTA3. I never even needed to use the map extensively because the game is so good at laying out a series of connecting landmarks, you can plot a route to a part of the city just with map knowledge alone. Every part of the game has standout shops, buildings, pickups or buy-able property and it connects them with unique looking bridges and highways, if you see a Mall in this game it’s a unique design and layout and you’ll know exactly where this mall is in relation to a club, a hotel, a police station, a hardware store, the map is a series of excellently blended puzzle pieces. Vice City isn’t just a map that you can familiarise yourself with but one that comes to feel homely and second nature, quite frankly I can navigate it better than I can my real life home-town.
In addition to the improvements in landmarking there is also a greater focus on details and interiors around the world, there are more shops and buildings that you can walk into and there is greater set dressing in general, one example is that rooms and houses you own in the game get objects added to them as you progress the missions, finding all the packages makes a little trophy appear in your hotel room, completing the film set business adds film reels and frames to your mansion, all of these elements combine to make Vice City feel cohesive and so much fun to explore, not just for pickups of weapons and armour but also because you might find a cool little detail like a tiki bar or doughnut shop or a butchers window with human meat. This attention to detail is an element which GTA 3 didn’t have and I’m glad that Vice City takes time to add these small touches to the world because it adds a brush of care an attention that makes the player want to look around and find these small bits and pieces of story-telling.
One aspect I dislike is that Vice City seems to be a bit more stingy on giving the player useful weapons and pickups, in GTA3 collecting the secret packages gives you a suite of weapons at safehouses but in Vice City you get a few very powerful weapons of a single type, like rockets or a minigun which are great by themselves but you can’t use them together. You also get a chance to pickup some secret vehicles like tanks and helicopters. These are very powerful and fun rewards to mess around with but they aren’t as helpful to the missions as an assault rifle or SMG and this makes the process of picking up weapons and ammo more tedious and lengthy as you have to hit up each spawn for a weapon, in fact its so tedious that if I failed a mission I would quit the game and reload a save file just so I didn’t have to do 10 minutes worth of getting more Uzi and AR-15 ammo. On the one hand its great that you get some powerful options to play around with but I think some less situational rewards would incentivise players to restart missions more quickly, GTA 3 didn’t have this problem because it made the rewards more useful and put the powerful weapons in Phil Cassidy’s shop, interestingly in Vice City, Cassidy returns and you can unlock his shop but why bother? Unless you really like using the m60 then you get a minigun and RPG delivered to your safehouses anyway. The rewards in the game feel like the game designers wanted to give the player more options for large scale chaos but in doing so they’ve neglected some of the smaller scale, on foot, gun-fighting elements of the sandbox. Sure you can just buy the weapons but they’re expensive early game and GTA 3 solved this problem by just giving the player actually useful rewards.
But all this sounds serviceable so what elevates the game? surely you can’t just slap an 80s skin on GTA3 and call it done? well as noted before the game is heavy on nostalgia and people are likewise very nostalgic for this game. Nostalgia is a cautious kind of relationship to have with any media, it’s very annoying when people suggest that ‘games used to be better’ or ‘they don’t make em like this any more’ because it sounds like disingenuous old man pining for a by-gone era; the world didn’t get worse, rather you just didn’t have anything else to worry about as a kid when this game was your only time sink, there are so many great games out now and accessing media is so much more convenient that you just wanna slap these morons and tell them to stop feigning some generational tragedy. However I think nostalgia can be a nice escape too and Vice City nails nostalgia. I said before that MSX FM is my favourite radio station and that is still true, but oh my God, Vice City’s licenced soundtrack is completely unparalleled. Every radio station is full of absolute classics; Hall & Oates, Michael Jackson, Bryan Adams, Gary Numan, Blondie, ELO, Yes, The Human League, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Spandau Ballet, Kate Bush, REO Speedwagon, Fat Larry’s Band, The Pointer Sisters, Rick James, Teena Marie, Twisted Sister, Ozzy, Iron Maiden, Slayer, Judas Priest, Mötley Crüe, Zapp & Roger, Grandmaster Flash, Cybotron, Afrika Bambaataa, Run DMC. Just banger after banger after banger, a cavalcade of non-stop tunes so good I sometimes drive around longer than I need to just to finish bopping to the song. I think this is so important because the soundtrack isn’t just a separate element of the game like it was in GTA3 but moreso it serves as a pillar of the atmosphere. When every single element of Vice City comes together it produces some of the best and most memorable parts of the whole GTA franchise, the missions themselves are fun sure and there’s a satisfying progression as you build a criminal empire with Tommy but nothing brings a feeling of deep joy to me, like racing down Ocean Drive in a cherry red Cheetah with Tyrone Brunson’s infectiously funky bass emanating from my speakers. When Rockstar North commits to getting a cinematic atmosphere right they are just masters of their craft. GTA3 has come back into focus recently because it’s very strange looking game that intersects with the current trend of liminal spaces and obsession with old video game graphics but that's more of an incidental thing, I like the vibe of GTA3 but Vice City is a different kind of vibe, a very authored facsimile of 80s excess that works on every level to immerse the player.
So that is my assessment of Grand Theft Auto Vice City, it’s my little guilty pleasure, my nostalgic getaway from the world where I can just sink into an 80s dream for a while, I admit this isn’t going to gel with everyone. People will probably play this game without this nostalgic reverence and find a dated and frustrating game with a shallow plot, cumbersome gameplay and a decent soundtrack and leave it there, in fact I do think GTA 3 remains the most important game in the franchise. I don’t care, I can only judge a game by how much joy it brings me and nothing brings me greater Joy than the sickening crunch of an old lady’s pelvis under the wheels of a Countach, Hawaiian shirt on, singing Video Killed the Radio Star, you can’t beat it.
This thoroughly awful game with its repetetive and boring melee combat, damage sponge enemies and distinct lack of any charm whatsoever narrowly avoids half a star because it does have funny destructive environments that you can ragdoll people into.
2001
This is the first in a series of reviews of the 3d era of Grand Theft Auto.
When playing hugely influential games from a previous era I like to try and place myself in the shoes of someone from the time. Grand Theft Auto was already a household name but the third numbered entry was a hugely influential title in the history of games. Playing it back today it can seem quaint and dated but you have to understand how this game was received from the perspective of a 2001 audience whose only exposure to open world 3D environments would be driving games like Driver or Midtown Madness. The ability to even leave your car and start blasting innocent people would have seemed like a crazy novelty and indeed it generated shock and horror from the mainstream media and advocacy groups for its portrayal of mayhem and senseless violence. Going forward the GTA series became a powerhouse and it’s DNA can be found in most open world games to this day, I think it’s crucial to understand just how hard GTA nailed it’s 3d open world gameplay with this entry and what the secret sauce of these games are.
I planned to play the game unmodified to understand it’s core gameplay and history, however this is simply not possible with the Steam version on modern platforms, I tried to get it to run without mods but I couldn’t get it to boot. With little option I turned to a mod called ‘Definitive Edition’ (Not to be confused with the officially released GTA Definitive Edition Trilogy, which is a bad product that you should not buy). This mod allows the game to run well but does add some ‘quality of life’ features that weren’t in the original as well as various graphical enhancements and effects which do alter the look of the game. I think this is a compromise that is necessary to make however the mod did tone down the blue tint and motion blur that was in the original ps2 version which I think is iconic. I did opt to disable some mods like ‘classic axis’ which adds modern camera controls, quite frankly it’s more frustrating to use than the original stupid fixed camera position and created a glitch with aimed weapons like the sniper. I also downloaded a simple map mod, GTA 3 does not come with an in-game map by default. Physical copies of the game came with a paper map with all the locations on it, the map mod I downloaded was an early pause screen map with no legend or icons present. It had a waypoint feature but no GPS. (which is a good thing, I’ll explain later) I think its fair that I should have a convenient map to reference and use as I please.
Gameplay in GTA 3 is really divided into 2 distinct but related scenarios, driving is the means of navigating the world and the on-foot gameplay serves the bulk of the combat, however these systems overlap significantly. Your car is also a weapon and you can run to hijack cars to get away from the scenes of chaos you create, you can also perform drive-by shootings for mobile firepower. Hijacking cars in Grand Theft Auto is so iconic that it’s the name of the game and in GTA 3 it’s just as satisfying as ever to pull an old lady out of her shitty SUV and drive it headfirst into a ditch. It’s really amazing just how much time you will spend in a car in this game, there are options to use a boat or even a plane however jumping in water is an instant death because Claude’s massive balls prevent him from swimming and anyway there’s not much in the bays of the city to explore. Plane controls are absolutely dreadful, I still don’t know how to get it to fly for longer than 4 seconds even after consulting the internet so I avoided the dodo. Cars are king in GTA 3 and thankfully the driving is good, the variety of vehicles means that different cars feel unique to drive, heavy set cars sway and swing on their suspension as real cars would, they’re slow but they’re so much fun to swing and handbrake turn, conversely sports cars are nimble, fast and brake quickly but they’re also very flimsy. Police chases are exhilarating thanks to very aggressive police car AI who will attempt to pit and crash your car, leaving you vulnerable when you have to abandon your vehicle and face the cops gunfire head-on.
There are parts of GTA 3 that I think surpass even more recent Rockstar releases like GTA V and Red Read Redemption 2; the game is very hands-off and unstructured in it’s open world design which leads to engaging and organic gameplay moments that the player creates for themselves. Aside from the system of having to unlock parts of the city through story and mission progression, all trust is put in you as a player to memorise, navigate and build your arsenal. There are no GPS lines on mini-maps that lead you by the nose, there is no slow-walking lengthy character exposition or heavy scripting, GTA 3 missions are open ended and on you to use your wits and knowledge to complete using the tools that the game provides. Some people say the game is unforgiving and sometimes you might find yourself dying to something which isn't fair like a dodgy camera or bad lock-on but for the most part it's on you to gear up and prep for dangers ahead and in that sense it's very fair, likewise if you flip a car or make a mistake its on you to fix in that moment, you can't reload an easy mid-mission checkpoint so thinking on your feet and playing flexibly during a mission is important. There are powerful weapons, armour and vehicles at your disposal if you know where to look, if you collect secret packages you can even get them to spawn in your safehouse. This is one reason I think the GTA 3d trilogy is so highly regarded, because not only is the player given an open sandbox to fuck around in but because they had to commit their city to memory in order to equip themselves. Navigating Liberty City becomes second nature, you start to memorise spawns for fast cars and assault rifles. You learn the map inside out and you can navigate the streets like the back of your hand and just when you think you’re comfortable a new area of the map is opened and you can start exploring all over again. You really begin to immerse yourself in the world and it’s an excellent sense of freedom that you can’t replicate in modern games that demand gigantic maps with lines and arrows that tell you the shortest route to an icon. If you want to get somewhere in GTA 3 you better commit that route and area to your memory. All of this this freedom is complimented by a great amount of detail and interaction in the world which makes you feel at home in Liberty City.
There are details in this game which seem second nature to us now but that’s because GTA 3 pioneered these small touches and raised our expectations so greatly like the way your car becomes impacted and dented; doors and hoods fly open, fenders get ripped off, hiitting a fire hydrant spurts jets of water into the air, streetlamps get uprooted and roll around with a metallic thud. Rain splashes on your car windscreen and running over a pedestrian creates a sickening crunch as your wheels leave behind a trail of bloody tire marks. All of this shows that the developers really went all out on trying to create a world that was not just a hollow sandbox arena to play in but a vision for a world and city that you could tear through with impactful and satisfying interactions. It’s a symphony of violence and a celebration of unchained mayhem. I think it must have taken a really talented group of developers to be able to integrate all these small and intricate gameplay details into an open-world with a such a broad scope.
Missions in GTA 3 are also really varied and open to interpretation, unlike in say, red dead 2 where the player is expected to follow a very linear chain of scripted events. GTA 3 puts a couple dots on your radar and tells you to go commit some hate crimes in whatever order you please. I’m not even being facetious about the ‘hate crime’ comment, one of the rampage missions I picked up handed me a flamethrower and said ‘Roast 20 Colombians’ whereupon a group of men in flower shirts saying ‘ay gringo’ spawned on the street. Juvenile racism aside the missions are a superb and refreshing experience after having sat through so many linear sight-seeing tours in modern games. GTA 3 presents a feeling of being totally unchained and let loose on a world that was begging for it.
I haven’t mentioned the story yet and quite frankly that’s because it’s rubbish and I can’t be bothered, it’s clear that story isn’t a priority here. The game starts with your girlfriend betraying you in a bank robbery and leaving you for dead so you do missions for various gangs until the plot decides to move on, most missions are isolated from the main plot with only a handful directly tied to the overarching story. There’s a cast of characters who have their own quirks and personalities but the ones that survive are very shallow and one dimensional, the only one I like is the Donald Trump stand-in mayor of the city and Rockstar clearly agrees because he went on to appear in subsequent games. The player character, Claude, is completely and utterly mute and comes across as a total psycho who just un-fazingly commits horrific crimes and extreme violence. The whole game feels very chaotic evil and drab compared to other games in the series but in that sense I kinda like Claude as an unsettling figure. Really he’s just a goofy looking dude in some cargo pants but that makes him more scary, he’ll slaughter an entire group of people just because someone asks him to. Real quick I would like to touch on the licenced music in the game. Radio stations are an iconic part of the series thanks in no small part of the variety of stations in GTA 3 and this game has one of my personal favourite stations. MSX FM which is like a drum and bass pirate radio station the likes of which you can still tune into to this very day in parts of the UK. It’s an institution in itself and MC Codebreakers utterly incomprehensible rhymes still bring me great joy. Aside from that there’s also a techno/trance station, pop, rock, hip-hop, Reggae and talk show with series staple and apparently real human guy Lazlo.
What I’m hoping to get across with this review is to offer more than just a cursory glance at a game which is considered to just be obsolete and ageing. I went easy on criticising the game because I think it really deserves better than to be known as the lesser game in the classic 3d trilogy. Yes it is true that it can be a clunky and frustrating experience where you die to unfair nonsense, because your camera got stuck or your lock-on didn’t work properly. Claude is very fragile and one wrong step or jump can turn you into Swiss cheese, you do have to get into a routine of arming yourself to the teeth and using body armour ALL THE TIME, however this only feeds into the exploration aspect of the game as you reroute and pick up all those weapon spawns again. I think GTA 3 is not just a stepping stone for the series (although to be clear it definitely is) but is also a case study in open world design and a great game on it’s own merit. I had a blast playing it and I think it more than accomplished the goal at creating one of the most intricate and most fun open world games of it’s time. If your only experience with this game is using weapon cheats to mess around as a kid I do highly recommend revisiting this entry, it’s a blast.
When playing hugely influential games from a previous era I like to try and place myself in the shoes of someone from the time. Grand Theft Auto was already a household name but the third numbered entry was a hugely influential title in the history of games. Playing it back today it can seem quaint and dated but you have to understand how this game was received from the perspective of a 2001 audience whose only exposure to open world 3D environments would be driving games like Driver or Midtown Madness. The ability to even leave your car and start blasting innocent people would have seemed like a crazy novelty and indeed it generated shock and horror from the mainstream media and advocacy groups for its portrayal of mayhem and senseless violence. Going forward the GTA series became a powerhouse and it’s DNA can be found in most open world games to this day, I think it’s crucial to understand just how hard GTA nailed it’s 3d open world gameplay with this entry and what the secret sauce of these games are.
I planned to play the game unmodified to understand it’s core gameplay and history, however this is simply not possible with the Steam version on modern platforms, I tried to get it to run without mods but I couldn’t get it to boot. With little option I turned to a mod called ‘Definitive Edition’ (Not to be confused with the officially released GTA Definitive Edition Trilogy, which is a bad product that you should not buy). This mod allows the game to run well but does add some ‘quality of life’ features that weren’t in the original as well as various graphical enhancements and effects which do alter the look of the game. I think this is a compromise that is necessary to make however the mod did tone down the blue tint and motion blur that was in the original ps2 version which I think is iconic. I did opt to disable some mods like ‘classic axis’ which adds modern camera controls, quite frankly it’s more frustrating to use than the original stupid fixed camera position and created a glitch with aimed weapons like the sniper. I also downloaded a simple map mod, GTA 3 does not come with an in-game map by default. Physical copies of the game came with a paper map with all the locations on it, the map mod I downloaded was an early pause screen map with no legend or icons present. It had a waypoint feature but no GPS. (which is a good thing, I’ll explain later) I think its fair that I should have a convenient map to reference and use as I please.
Gameplay in GTA 3 is really divided into 2 distinct but related scenarios, driving is the means of navigating the world and the on-foot gameplay serves the bulk of the combat, however these systems overlap significantly. Your car is also a weapon and you can run to hijack cars to get away from the scenes of chaos you create, you can also perform drive-by shootings for mobile firepower. Hijacking cars in Grand Theft Auto is so iconic that it’s the name of the game and in GTA 3 it’s just as satisfying as ever to pull an old lady out of her shitty SUV and drive it headfirst into a ditch. It’s really amazing just how much time you will spend in a car in this game, there are options to use a boat or even a plane however jumping in water is an instant death because Claude’s massive balls prevent him from swimming and anyway there’s not much in the bays of the city to explore. Plane controls are absolutely dreadful, I still don’t know how to get it to fly for longer than 4 seconds even after consulting the internet so I avoided the dodo. Cars are king in GTA 3 and thankfully the driving is good, the variety of vehicles means that different cars feel unique to drive, heavy set cars sway and swing on their suspension as real cars would, they’re slow but they’re so much fun to swing and handbrake turn, conversely sports cars are nimble, fast and brake quickly but they’re also very flimsy. Police chases are exhilarating thanks to very aggressive police car AI who will attempt to pit and crash your car, leaving you vulnerable when you have to abandon your vehicle and face the cops gunfire head-on.
There are parts of GTA 3 that I think surpass even more recent Rockstar releases like GTA V and Red Read Redemption 2; the game is very hands-off and unstructured in it’s open world design which leads to engaging and organic gameplay moments that the player creates for themselves. Aside from the system of having to unlock parts of the city through story and mission progression, all trust is put in you as a player to memorise, navigate and build your arsenal. There are no GPS lines on mini-maps that lead you by the nose, there is no slow-walking lengthy character exposition or heavy scripting, GTA 3 missions are open ended and on you to use your wits and knowledge to complete using the tools that the game provides. Some people say the game is unforgiving and sometimes you might find yourself dying to something which isn't fair like a dodgy camera or bad lock-on but for the most part it's on you to gear up and prep for dangers ahead and in that sense it's very fair, likewise if you flip a car or make a mistake its on you to fix in that moment, you can't reload an easy mid-mission checkpoint so thinking on your feet and playing flexibly during a mission is important. There are powerful weapons, armour and vehicles at your disposal if you know where to look, if you collect secret packages you can even get them to spawn in your safehouse. This is one reason I think the GTA 3d trilogy is so highly regarded, because not only is the player given an open sandbox to fuck around in but because they had to commit their city to memory in order to equip themselves. Navigating Liberty City becomes second nature, you start to memorise spawns for fast cars and assault rifles. You learn the map inside out and you can navigate the streets like the back of your hand and just when you think you’re comfortable a new area of the map is opened and you can start exploring all over again. You really begin to immerse yourself in the world and it’s an excellent sense of freedom that you can’t replicate in modern games that demand gigantic maps with lines and arrows that tell you the shortest route to an icon. If you want to get somewhere in GTA 3 you better commit that route and area to your memory. All of this this freedom is complimented by a great amount of detail and interaction in the world which makes you feel at home in Liberty City.
There are details in this game which seem second nature to us now but that’s because GTA 3 pioneered these small touches and raised our expectations so greatly like the way your car becomes impacted and dented; doors and hoods fly open, fenders get ripped off, hiitting a fire hydrant spurts jets of water into the air, streetlamps get uprooted and roll around with a metallic thud. Rain splashes on your car windscreen and running over a pedestrian creates a sickening crunch as your wheels leave behind a trail of bloody tire marks. All of this shows that the developers really went all out on trying to create a world that was not just a hollow sandbox arena to play in but a vision for a world and city that you could tear through with impactful and satisfying interactions. It’s a symphony of violence and a celebration of unchained mayhem. I think it must have taken a really talented group of developers to be able to integrate all these small and intricate gameplay details into an open-world with a such a broad scope.
Missions in GTA 3 are also really varied and open to interpretation, unlike in say, red dead 2 where the player is expected to follow a very linear chain of scripted events. GTA 3 puts a couple dots on your radar and tells you to go commit some hate crimes in whatever order you please. I’m not even being facetious about the ‘hate crime’ comment, one of the rampage missions I picked up handed me a flamethrower and said ‘Roast 20 Colombians’ whereupon a group of men in flower shirts saying ‘ay gringo’ spawned on the street. Juvenile racism aside the missions are a superb and refreshing experience after having sat through so many linear sight-seeing tours in modern games. GTA 3 presents a feeling of being totally unchained and let loose on a world that was begging for it.
I haven’t mentioned the story yet and quite frankly that’s because it’s rubbish and I can’t be bothered, it’s clear that story isn’t a priority here. The game starts with your girlfriend betraying you in a bank robbery and leaving you for dead so you do missions for various gangs until the plot decides to move on, most missions are isolated from the main plot with only a handful directly tied to the overarching story. There’s a cast of characters who have their own quirks and personalities but the ones that survive are very shallow and one dimensional, the only one I like is the Donald Trump stand-in mayor of the city and Rockstar clearly agrees because he went on to appear in subsequent games. The player character, Claude, is completely and utterly mute and comes across as a total psycho who just un-fazingly commits horrific crimes and extreme violence. The whole game feels very chaotic evil and drab compared to other games in the series but in that sense I kinda like Claude as an unsettling figure. Really he’s just a goofy looking dude in some cargo pants but that makes him more scary, he’ll slaughter an entire group of people just because someone asks him to. Real quick I would like to touch on the licenced music in the game. Radio stations are an iconic part of the series thanks in no small part of the variety of stations in GTA 3 and this game has one of my personal favourite stations. MSX FM which is like a drum and bass pirate radio station the likes of which you can still tune into to this very day in parts of the UK. It’s an institution in itself and MC Codebreakers utterly incomprehensible rhymes still bring me great joy. Aside from that there’s also a techno/trance station, pop, rock, hip-hop, Reggae and talk show with series staple and apparently real human guy Lazlo.
What I’m hoping to get across with this review is to offer more than just a cursory glance at a game which is considered to just be obsolete and ageing. I went easy on criticising the game because I think it really deserves better than to be known as the lesser game in the classic 3d trilogy. Yes it is true that it can be a clunky and frustrating experience where you die to unfair nonsense, because your camera got stuck or your lock-on didn’t work properly. Claude is very fragile and one wrong step or jump can turn you into Swiss cheese, you do have to get into a routine of arming yourself to the teeth and using body armour ALL THE TIME, however this only feeds into the exploration aspect of the game as you reroute and pick up all those weapon spawns again. I think GTA 3 is not just a stepping stone for the series (although to be clear it definitely is) but is also a case study in open world design and a great game on it’s own merit. I had a blast playing it and I think it more than accomplished the goal at creating one of the most intricate and most fun open world games of it’s time. If your only experience with this game is using weapon cheats to mess around as a kid I do highly recommend revisiting this entry, it’s a blast.
2022
I wanna start by saying that this game comes about as close to my perfect aesthetic as I've ever seen, really the only other thing that comes close is Mirror's Edge. This is a personal thing that has made me instantly fall in love with the environments in this game and particularly the early levels which feel like the devs took images from my brain as I fall asleep listening to drum and bass and turned it into my dream game. In terms of visuals its an easy 5 stars from me, the reflective blue glass oceans, sheen white surfaces and vibrant skies are a treat on the eyes.
I do wish the game has more video quality options to really crank it up in high fidelity however one of the benefits of this game is that its very accessible on lower end hardware so if your PC is trash its still worth getting this game.
So the game is about running time trial levels and using cards, cards act as equipable weapons and also discarding them allows your character to perform advanced manouvres like dashing, slamming, grappling hook shot etc. It's less of an FPS and moreso a puzzle game where you manage the resources of a level. At first glance a lot of reviewers notice that movement is VERY floaty, you jump fairly high and the gravity is quite low so you saunter down gracefully, this might seem to clash with the fast pased movement and indeed some reviewers noted their displeasure at this but it's necessary for a couple of reasons: firstly it means you can make mid air shots and turns with more time and precision and secondly it adds value to the movement mechanics where you slam and dash; it makes you think about using resources to bypass the low gravity and finish levels quicker vs keeping those resources for a later part of a level and descending more slowly. So if you are put off by floaty movement I would advise to stick with it, you'll have opportunities to really hammer down great vertical distances as the game progresses.
The gameplay loop really clicked for me and I felt determined to Ace every level and collect all the in game gifts which are scattered around. Some may criticise the game for it's linearlity and convenient placement of cards but you can really see what a delicate balancing act it is to have a game offer enough freedom to go outside the levels intended path to get a better time when you need to gain at least some gold medals to progress the game at all. Being able to stick to a path and still progress the story is essential and in that sense sticking to the linear levels is probably how a lot of people who don't necessarily find value in the challenge might decide to complete the game and for them they need a way to still enjoy the story content, it would be a bad idea to lock the story behind more lateral soeedrunning knowledge.
That said the game does offer a selection of hints which show the player small time saving skips to get the ranks they need to progress which I think is a nice touch that teaches the player to think strategically about the level design and encourages the player to find their own methods of time saves. For people like me who want to keep optimising our runs and pathing theres a lot of oppertunity to take different approaches to levels and really master the mechanics of the game. It's a hard balancing act and I think the game does a good job of being easy enough so that casual players can see all the content whilst offering something more for determined players.
Throughout the levels you can find gifts that you can give to characters that advance a Persona-esque social link system, this is a great way of tying the story to the gameplay whilst offering some nice downtime to speak to characters. However in Persona where spending time with people was meaningful and lead to interesting side stories most of the dialogue here is meaningless and usually involes the characters getting up to some zany antics like pranking other characters or being horny or something pointless, nobody really learns anything and even well into the late game these extra dialogues don't advance the plot in any meaningful way, it's mostly just a distraction and a way to show off the characters quirks and their personalities, which wouldn't be an issue if they were interspersed with more meaningful events but as it stands theres too much dicking around. There are also a few challenge levels specific to each character which is nice and the main story beats are unlocked through snippets of memories where the player character recalls something plot specfic.
FYI it should briefly be mentioned that completing these gift interactions does change the outcome of the game.
The Player character, Neon White, has amensia and is picking up the pieces to his past. He is sent to heaven as an assassin to fight demons on gods behalf and earn his place in the afterlife where meets Neon Yellow, Violet and Red and they're all a bit cagey in letting him in on what happened to them in a past life. In terms of story content I wanna keep this spoiler free but it's a bit of a hit and miss, the characters have their own personalities and the voice acting in this game is very good but the dialogue is not great. You can tell the writers went to great effort to make the character interactions have a bit of personality and banter to them but quite frankly that's all they have, it's quite frustrating at times because the character interactions serve as quite good emotional beats for White and it is heart warming to see these characters get along but the plot is so contrived. There is at least 3 macguffins and bullshit rules that get invented on the spot for the sole purpose of wrapping up the story. The whole plot really needed some work, I think the characters could have had the same emotional impact that they have without so much extraneous dialogue and the plot could have been given more context and consideration.
I don't want to come out of this review making it seem like the issue with the plot is too detrimental to the overall game experience but it can't be ignored when it serves as the players motivation for completing the levels. I wouldn't say that the story should be excluded and in fact I'm happy that the game gives the player the oppertunity to chill out between chapters and hang out with the homies, rather I think there are some aspects of the story which needed a bit more completion and tidying up, I think a dlc with more levels and a compact side story would be hugely welcome.
Before I finish I just want to comment on the music briefly, it's superb. Composed by Machine Girl its an absoloute joy to listen to in game and outside of the game, I highly reccommend checking out the soundtrack on Machine Girl's bandcamp because it's a top notch collection of breaks, dnb and indsutrial sounds.
Overall I was really impressed with Neon White and I'm going to keep playing it, post-game there are a number of difficult challenge runs and you can go back and try to beat the developer score levels that make the game worth replaying. If you're looking for a visually stimulating, fast-paced first person game with a hint of puzzle solving and platforming then this is definerely worth a look.
I do wish the game has more video quality options to really crank it up in high fidelity however one of the benefits of this game is that its very accessible on lower end hardware so if your PC is trash its still worth getting this game.
So the game is about running time trial levels and using cards, cards act as equipable weapons and also discarding them allows your character to perform advanced manouvres like dashing, slamming, grappling hook shot etc. It's less of an FPS and moreso a puzzle game where you manage the resources of a level. At first glance a lot of reviewers notice that movement is VERY floaty, you jump fairly high and the gravity is quite low so you saunter down gracefully, this might seem to clash with the fast pased movement and indeed some reviewers noted their displeasure at this but it's necessary for a couple of reasons: firstly it means you can make mid air shots and turns with more time and precision and secondly it adds value to the movement mechanics where you slam and dash; it makes you think about using resources to bypass the low gravity and finish levels quicker vs keeping those resources for a later part of a level and descending more slowly. So if you are put off by floaty movement I would advise to stick with it, you'll have opportunities to really hammer down great vertical distances as the game progresses.
The gameplay loop really clicked for me and I felt determined to Ace every level and collect all the in game gifts which are scattered around. Some may criticise the game for it's linearlity and convenient placement of cards but you can really see what a delicate balancing act it is to have a game offer enough freedom to go outside the levels intended path to get a better time when you need to gain at least some gold medals to progress the game at all. Being able to stick to a path and still progress the story is essential and in that sense sticking to the linear levels is probably how a lot of people who don't necessarily find value in the challenge might decide to complete the game and for them they need a way to still enjoy the story content, it would be a bad idea to lock the story behind more lateral soeedrunning knowledge.
That said the game does offer a selection of hints which show the player small time saving skips to get the ranks they need to progress which I think is a nice touch that teaches the player to think strategically about the level design and encourages the player to find their own methods of time saves. For people like me who want to keep optimising our runs and pathing theres a lot of oppertunity to take different approaches to levels and really master the mechanics of the game. It's a hard balancing act and I think the game does a good job of being easy enough so that casual players can see all the content whilst offering something more for determined players.
Throughout the levels you can find gifts that you can give to characters that advance a Persona-esque social link system, this is a great way of tying the story to the gameplay whilst offering some nice downtime to speak to characters. However in Persona where spending time with people was meaningful and lead to interesting side stories most of the dialogue here is meaningless and usually involes the characters getting up to some zany antics like pranking other characters or being horny or something pointless, nobody really learns anything and even well into the late game these extra dialogues don't advance the plot in any meaningful way, it's mostly just a distraction and a way to show off the characters quirks and their personalities, which wouldn't be an issue if they were interspersed with more meaningful events but as it stands theres too much dicking around. There are also a few challenge levels specific to each character which is nice and the main story beats are unlocked through snippets of memories where the player character recalls something plot specfic.
FYI it should briefly be mentioned that completing these gift interactions does change the outcome of the game.
The Player character, Neon White, has amensia and is picking up the pieces to his past. He is sent to heaven as an assassin to fight demons on gods behalf and earn his place in the afterlife where meets Neon Yellow, Violet and Red and they're all a bit cagey in letting him in on what happened to them in a past life. In terms of story content I wanna keep this spoiler free but it's a bit of a hit and miss, the characters have their own personalities and the voice acting in this game is very good but the dialogue is not great. You can tell the writers went to great effort to make the character interactions have a bit of personality and banter to them but quite frankly that's all they have, it's quite frustrating at times because the character interactions serve as quite good emotional beats for White and it is heart warming to see these characters get along but the plot is so contrived. There is at least 3 macguffins and bullshit rules that get invented on the spot for the sole purpose of wrapping up the story. The whole plot really needed some work, I think the characters could have had the same emotional impact that they have without so much extraneous dialogue and the plot could have been given more context and consideration.
I don't want to come out of this review making it seem like the issue with the plot is too detrimental to the overall game experience but it can't be ignored when it serves as the players motivation for completing the levels. I wouldn't say that the story should be excluded and in fact I'm happy that the game gives the player the oppertunity to chill out between chapters and hang out with the homies, rather I think there are some aspects of the story which needed a bit more completion and tidying up, I think a dlc with more levels and a compact side story would be hugely welcome.
Before I finish I just want to comment on the music briefly, it's superb. Composed by Machine Girl its an absoloute joy to listen to in game and outside of the game, I highly reccommend checking out the soundtrack on Machine Girl's bandcamp because it's a top notch collection of breaks, dnb and indsutrial sounds.
Overall I was really impressed with Neon White and I'm going to keep playing it, post-game there are a number of difficult challenge runs and you can go back and try to beat the developer score levels that make the game worth replaying. If you're looking for a visually stimulating, fast-paced first person game with a hint of puzzle solving and platforming then this is definerely worth a look.
This review contains spoilers
There's an undeniable catharsis in breaking stuff, just ask Fred Durst or a toddler with your iPhone. I don't know what it is in our monkey brains that makes destruction and demolition so much fun but seeing a once pristine structure reduced to ash and rubble hits some depraved dopamine receptor. Since the first game in the series, Red Faction has always capitalised on the science of smashing up walls with hammers and explosives, I don't want to get tied into rambling about the history of the franchise, but I do want to briefly mention the 'Geo-Mod' engine which has characterised the series established trademark razing of buildings which are held together by fragile breadstick struts and Pâté. I also specifically want to mention Red Faction Guerrilla (2009) which is the predecessor to Armageddon and both games share a lot of DNA, I think it's necessary to establish Guerrilla because it helps to illustrate exactly where Armageddon sucks balls.
Red Faction Guerrilla is a pretty decent game, it does a really great job of centring the mechanics of wreckage. From the very start of the game your character is established as a working-class mining jobber who scavenges scrap metal from destroyed structures, in addition the game is concerned with the actions done by rebel group that gains power and influence through terrorism and blowing up private military assets, the game also provides the player with mini challenges where you must destroy a target with limited resources or within a time limit. Destruction and demolition aren't just tertiary to Guerrilla, busting up pipelines and bases is a central pillar of the open world gameplay and narrative, when the game does try to be a 3rd person shooter its quite disappointing and you can probably see where I'm going with this. Red Faction: Armageddon is the antithesis to Guerrilla’s cathartic freedom and instead chooses to build upon the bland shooting of guerrilla through a linear scripted 3rd person shooter campaign. The game is considered a sequel and appears to be built on the same engine with many of the same technical aspects and yet it falls so short of its predecessor.
To preface this review, I played this game on PC at max settings with keyboard and mouse controls. The game took me just under 6 hours to complete from start to finish in one sitting. I played on Normal difficulty, I did not play the 'Path to War' DLC which adds a couple of weapons and missions.
Upon booting the game some technical issues beginning to crop up, the game has two modes DX9 and DX10-11, this is characteristic of games from the same time period and in fact some of these technical issues can be chalked up to simply trying to play a 11 year old game on a more contemporary platform, one bug which persisted throughout my experience is a looping 'pause' glitch which booted me back to the main menu whenever a major cutscene started, if I had to speculate this is a result of the game not being very well optimised for SSDs. I have encountered similar issues in games before which preceded the boom in storage speeds and mainstream adoption of SSDs, it may have been short sighted I mean SSDs were available at the time, albeit at a MUCH more impractical price than we have today. I can't really blame the developers for not predicting the future as well as they could have but one thing you can put them on blast for is not having an FOV slider, this game is spent tunnel-visioned behind your characters back, it is a strain on the eyes and some extra peripheral vision should have been a necessity. The whole game stinks of a hashed together console port and was clearly built with a controller in mind. Controls are at least rebind-able and the game by default assigns jump and dodge to the same action as if you were moving a thumb stick and pressing a button, however you can choose to split these actions across two keys if you want, which is fine. In terms of audio, you get separate binary 1-100 sliders for music and sound effects which is good. Accessibility options are limited with subtitles only and no option to change text size or colour, which is daft because the subtitles are blue and quite large.
The game starts on colonial Mars with the player character Darius Mason, descendant of the Mason family lineage whose members appear as protagonists in previous games, Mason men are always blessed with bald heads and powerful cum through their Martian fuckboy bloodline. Darius is in a convoy with the Red Faction, the military on Mars. These sir-yes-sir OORAH dipshits are on their way to assault a group of cultists lead by one Adam Hale at the central terraforming facility. Hale wants to destroy the terraformer and make Mars uninhabitable for... some reason… uh, something to do with the cultists having a sense of supremacy over Mars? It's unclear as to what Hale's ideology is; you can hear him ranting over intercoms about being the cultists being true rulers of Mars but I don't know why he thinks that and the game really expects you to be a Red Faction series lore-head. Armageddon really kneecaps the narrative right out of the gate, the game is sufficiently disconnected from Guerrilla by decades in the series timeline and the only reason I know of some context here is because I glanced at the wiki, there is effort to accommodate a self-contained story and it really should have done so because the start of the game is a mess and frequently name-drops factions and organisations throughout the story which the player has no understanding of unless they have prior knowledge of the setting. I understand that this is technically a sequel but the game does not benefit from this approach; there are no stakes, Mason doesn't have any motivation or reason to be where he is and his occupation and backstory and not given any relevance. Darius Mason just a gruff soldier man who turns up to a fight. By contrast when you start Guerrilla the game gives a more slow-paced introduction to Alec Mason, his job, his family, and his indifference on the political divide on Mars, the game then tears his family away from him and forces him down a path of political resistance. Guerrilla’s writing is not exactly amazing but there's an immediate sense of empathy, purpose and motivation given to Alec Mason, Darius does not get the same treatment. I don't strictly have an issue with blank slate military characters that act as a vessel for the player but unlike most male brick type military protagonists, Darius is a wise-cracking gimp who tries desperately to have a personality akin to something like a marvel movie comic wit. Imagine if you took Master Chief but instead of being a quiet killing machine, he’s spouting cringe ‘Well Gee I guess that happened’ lines like he’s auditioning for Guardians of the Galaxy.
We'll get back to Darius' lack of character later. The first mission sets off a bad impression of the gameplay, Darius enters the facility and shoots shambling human enemies with no preservation instinct. It's very boring, you are given a hammer and encouraged to smack walls which drop salvage much like the previous game, salvage will be used later down the line for marginal upgrades to health and speed and reload times and stuff like that. The mission goes wrong, Hale destroys the terraformer and the game cuts to a time skip immediately, this is very abrupt and is a devastatingly confusing element to the story, the game glosses over a lot of details which aren't immediately obvious and basically just cuts from an explosion to Mason dicking around in a hole, taking scavenger jobs. It's explained that humanity has been reduced to living in caves and rusted shanty towns. very rarely are humans venturing onto the harsh surface for fear of violent dust storms following the destruction of the terraformer. Hale is presumed dead and so Mason gets a job to go into a hole and break a crystal, anyway long story short it turns out he was hired by Hale who is alive and Darius is tricked into unleashing a dormant race of insects which terrorise and kill the diminished settler population; thus, Mason unwittingly wreaks Armageddon. I cannot explain how jarring this is in-game, the game basically drops a twist that a character previously thought dead was alive within the space of 10 minutes, there's no weight to Adam's return and once again his motivation for causing death and destruction are not explained in game, nor is his recognising Mason and his grudge against the Mason family (The wiki says Alec Mason killed his dad or something I don’t fucking know)
Most of the game is spent fighting the bug creatures and quite frankly I am glad because they are a more interesting enemy than the human cultists, in fact the game begins to get genuinely fun here. The bugs swarm the player from every single direction, they start off as an annoying quadruped crawling creature but new variants are introduced ranging from fast moving bipedal soldier types to slow moving tank-like enemies, these enemies are called 'The Plague' You can really tell how much effort was put into the animations and movement of The Plague, enemies hang from ledges and walls, they dart around frantically and they recoil in pain when shot, they can be knocked over and rag dolled into walls, they explode into bits when hit with rockets and grenades and they can be disintegrated with energy weapons. I really came to appreciate how much effort really went into making the enemies fun to fight, well most of them anyway, there are 2 standout examples of some seriously shitty enemy design that ruin what would otherwise be a good selection of adversaries. Tank enemies who are a complete damage sponges appear all over the campaign and they really do not gel well with the other enemies, they are slow moving with ranged attacks and they take several magazines worth of ballistics and multiple explosives to kill. The other terrible enemy type is a cloaking enemy that makes the players vision go wobbly. They are invisible and stalk the player but will then reveal themselves in front of you and screech and hit you with a charged laser, if you fail to kill them quick enough then they will engage their cloak and relocate making them extremely annoying to fight, in addition they block off paths with some sort of weird webbing effect so you must kill them to progress. These enemies really fail to synergise with the ‘swarm’ nature of The Plague, they are very frustrating to fight even with late game weapons. Armageddon has a good variety of weapons; each weapon has its own benefits and the player gets 4 weapon slots which they can customise from lockers spread over the levels. The weapons in this game are an extremely mixed bag and they are very unbalanced, some weapons are just plain garbage and not just in effectiveness but also how they feel and some weapons are fucking dope as hell. Explosive weapons in general should be always equipped such as a rocket launcher or grenade launcher, plasma weapons are effective at long range destruction as they disintegrate walls and panels and ballistic weapons control hordes but become unusable and trash starting from mid-game, there’s also a powerful black hole gun which draws enemies into it. However, the standout weapon amongst the entire arsenal is the Magnet gun; fire one magnet into an enemy or structure and fire a second magnet into another location and the two points attract together with a strong force that rips apart everything in their way. It’s so awesome to attach this to the bottom of a building, attach the second anchor to an enemies face and just bury that fucker in a mountain of scrap or vice versa you can attach a point to the enemy and the second point into a solid wall and watch as the little bastard smushes against the surface like a fly on a windscreen, it’s also good for rag dolling the larger enemies or sending them into a pit of lava, I love creativity that the magnet gun offers and I would have liked it if the game was more centred around using it to solve destruction related objectives
There’s a couple more mechanics worth mentioning, repairing and abilities. Repair seems counter-intuitive to the game’s destruction but it’s clear that it’s intended to make sure you don’t soft-lock yourself from progressing by destroying some stairs or platforms that you need to use to progress, you can shoot a beam in front of you to revert broken things back to their original state or you can toss a repair projectile at an area and repair everything in its radius. The game makes very limited use of this repair function and it’s used contextually to repair generators and power outlets to open locked doors, it has unlimited use and doesn’t really interact with the combat in any meaningful way, it’s disappointing, it would be cool if you could use it to repair walls in front of enemies and block them from shooting your or maybe even bisect them or embed them into walls but as it stands it inclusion seems to stem more from the necessity of having a destructible environment with a linear shooting game, which begs the question: why bother with the format at all? You also have two auxiliary abilities as a player, both use the same energy resource which regenerates with a cool-down. The first one is a basic force push ability which is good for knocking down enemies and the second is an AOE uppercut which suspends nearby enemies in zero G and makes them vulnerable, these play into the flow of combat. I don’t mind them but I think they should’ve been more powerful. Combat in this game, when it works is genuinely great and I think there’s a formula here that is potentially incredible, but it’s held back by a couple factors.
You start to prioritise targets, formulate strategies, and use the tools and abilities that the game provides then the game reaches its peak, however it’s short lived the game goes out of its way to roadblock you from doing this too often. Giant enemy nodes which have a ton of health and buff all enemies around it, these become priority #1 and deplete your resources immediately, the Magnet Gun is not very effective against them as it doesn’t target enemies which are too large, I also mentioned how the enemies crowd around the player in hordes, this can be fun however towards the finale the game is stupid with its spawning of enemies. Typically, enemies spawn from pods which can be destroyed but towards the end of the game pods appear everywhere, the giant node enemies appear all over the level and it becomes a mess of constantly spawning bullet sponge enemies that are best just walked through rather than bothering trying to fight them, it doesn’t help that the game gives you an asthmatic 3 second jog as a “sprint” option. What is with games of this era and giving you a shitty limited sprint? Why did people think this was a fun element? Whatever… at least the game has a good selection in its arsenal and with a few balancing tweaks and a solid gameplay loop I genuinely think this game could have been elevated into a much better experience. It's almost not worth mentioning but the game does have entirely forgettable vehicles segments, quite a few actually, these are glorified turret sequences where you shift around a walker with rockets and a machine gun or electric shock gun and do little to vary up the shooting galleries, in an open world game or even a game with just more open levels I would appreciate the inclusion of these vehicles segments but as they stand they didn’t do much to elevate the experience. If it seems like I’ve been bouncing around the gameplay and neglecting the story it’s because the story, plot and characters of this game are truly dreadful, I honestly am struggling to find a place to start with how terrible the narrative of this game is. Armageddon is a mess of tropey and poorly reasoned story threads held together with emotionally stunted characters. There are no memorable story moments, the characters learn nothing, the plot is simultaneously meandering but also proceeds at a breakneck pace with no downtime or reflection. Watching the events of this game unfold is like watching ocean waves crash against a cliff, a non-stop chaotic endeavour with no rhythm, fleeting and unending. Despite being only 6 hours long the game feels like it was padded and rushed, the script feels like it was written as a first draft, the dialogue is pure cringe and the performances of the VAs fall completely flat. I would go as far as saying that Armageddon makes gaming as a medium appear less legitimate as a narrative artform because it’s embarrassing schlock, some basic elements of a 3-act structure would have made this game’s story more bearable to play through.
Darius is an extremely unlikeable emotionally stunted man-child who undergoes absolutely no drastic changes or dramatic arc in the story, he frequently blames himself for opening the bugs lair when he was tricked into it but then gets angry and defensive when others confront him about it. He tries to have witty banter with his AI companion SAM, but every attempt at humour falls so flat, it’s embarrassing to watch. There is a love interest in the form of Kara, she appears at the start of the game then reappears at the second half, she has no personality and no agency, her only purpose is to serve as motivation for Darius and stand around in revealing cleavage armour. It’s almost comical how much of a set dressing Kara is and when she and Darius finally embrace, she is killed off IMMEDIATELY and Darius gets slightly miffed about it. Adam Hale is the primary antagonist, halfway through the game he chases the player around a bit and then a cutscene occurs where his head just straight up falls off, you don’t even see how it happens, his vehicle gets disabled and then the next frame he’s just dead, it’s very unsatisfying and underwhelming. The game then shambles around until Darius decides to fix the terraformer with his repair ability and ventures into the bugs nest to kill the queen, why he couldn’t do this earlier I don’t know, matter of fact I really don’t understand what the terraformer even does. Without the presence of the terraformer people still breathe and live on mars, the only thing it seemed to affect was the weather and preventing dust storms so I guess it’s a geo-engineering or weather control device in that case? Why is there only one? Why can’t another one be built? The entire planet is dependant on this single tower with no supporting network behind it. It’s an entirely silly plot device and the game makes no effort to place stakes in it any further than it being the thing that the baddy wants to destroy.
The game is not aided by its lacklustre presentation, whilst the environments have some great lighting and the models look good the environments comprise of a bland series of caves and hallways, on reflection I really fail to remember what most of the game looks like aside from a few key areas such as a lava lake. I don’t think you could accuse the game of looking like a generic grey military shooter which characterised the 2010s, there are some very garish and distracting effects and bright colours all over the shooting arenas, but I don’t think this works in the games favour, as much as we criticise call of duty’s bland colour palate, I can distinctly remember levels from every game and a variety of different desert, forest, and urban environments. Red Faction Armageddon is severely lacking in variety in its levels and the amount of blooming garish colours really makes the combat have less clarity and feedback.
Some people might be tempted to say the story doesn’t matter so long as the gameplay is there, I disagree completely. As an experience, this game does not hold up to scrutiny in its narrative and it hurts the game badly. Compare this to ‘Gears of War’ which is a similar third person shooter. On paper Armageddon comes out on top of Gears in the gameplay department but Gears is the much more beloved game by the gaming public and I also think Gears is a better experience. Characters in Gears talk to each other in downtime, they have history and they show some emotion, they all have reasons why they fight and find themselves in their situation, they are military meatheads but they have emotions and purpose that drives them and they don’t make attempts to be zany or throw out quips (well Baird does but fuck Baird) The voice actors in Gears of War give a much more structured and convincing performance with a better script and the quality of the writing far exceeds anything in Armageddon, all of this adds up into an emotional and memorable experience, to be clear I don’t think Gears of War is a particularly amazing story or a ‘great’ game but it goes to show just how much a solid narrative foundation can elevate a below-average game into something worth playing for a lot of people. Armageddon is not worth playing, it’s derivative and dull. The occasional flash of a creative combat system does nothing to change the fact that this game is a mess, I really wish we could have gotten a true successor to Guerrilla using some of the tools included in Armageddon, imagine a destruction centred open world game with a powerful magnet gun and repairing mechanic. I get the sense that this is not the game that the developers wanted to make, it’s a very half-baked attempt at a third person shooter and it’s frustrating because you developers were clearly very talented and competent, the lighting and environments are well crafted, the weapons are varied and fun and the enemies are painstakingly animated. My final verdict on this game is thus: Play Guerrilla instead.
Red Faction Guerrilla is a pretty decent game, it does a really great job of centring the mechanics of wreckage. From the very start of the game your character is established as a working-class mining jobber who scavenges scrap metal from destroyed structures, in addition the game is concerned with the actions done by rebel group that gains power and influence through terrorism and blowing up private military assets, the game also provides the player with mini challenges where you must destroy a target with limited resources or within a time limit. Destruction and demolition aren't just tertiary to Guerrilla, busting up pipelines and bases is a central pillar of the open world gameplay and narrative, when the game does try to be a 3rd person shooter its quite disappointing and you can probably see where I'm going with this. Red Faction: Armageddon is the antithesis to Guerrilla’s cathartic freedom and instead chooses to build upon the bland shooting of guerrilla through a linear scripted 3rd person shooter campaign. The game is considered a sequel and appears to be built on the same engine with many of the same technical aspects and yet it falls so short of its predecessor.
To preface this review, I played this game on PC at max settings with keyboard and mouse controls. The game took me just under 6 hours to complete from start to finish in one sitting. I played on Normal difficulty, I did not play the 'Path to War' DLC which adds a couple of weapons and missions.
Upon booting the game some technical issues beginning to crop up, the game has two modes DX9 and DX10-11, this is characteristic of games from the same time period and in fact some of these technical issues can be chalked up to simply trying to play a 11 year old game on a more contemporary platform, one bug which persisted throughout my experience is a looping 'pause' glitch which booted me back to the main menu whenever a major cutscene started, if I had to speculate this is a result of the game not being very well optimised for SSDs. I have encountered similar issues in games before which preceded the boom in storage speeds and mainstream adoption of SSDs, it may have been short sighted I mean SSDs were available at the time, albeit at a MUCH more impractical price than we have today. I can't really blame the developers for not predicting the future as well as they could have but one thing you can put them on blast for is not having an FOV slider, this game is spent tunnel-visioned behind your characters back, it is a strain on the eyes and some extra peripheral vision should have been a necessity. The whole game stinks of a hashed together console port and was clearly built with a controller in mind. Controls are at least rebind-able and the game by default assigns jump and dodge to the same action as if you were moving a thumb stick and pressing a button, however you can choose to split these actions across two keys if you want, which is fine. In terms of audio, you get separate binary 1-100 sliders for music and sound effects which is good. Accessibility options are limited with subtitles only and no option to change text size or colour, which is daft because the subtitles are blue and quite large.
The game starts on colonial Mars with the player character Darius Mason, descendant of the Mason family lineage whose members appear as protagonists in previous games, Mason men are always blessed with bald heads and powerful cum through their Martian fuckboy bloodline. Darius is in a convoy with the Red Faction, the military on Mars. These sir-yes-sir OORAH dipshits are on their way to assault a group of cultists lead by one Adam Hale at the central terraforming facility. Hale wants to destroy the terraformer and make Mars uninhabitable for... some reason… uh, something to do with the cultists having a sense of supremacy over Mars? It's unclear as to what Hale's ideology is; you can hear him ranting over intercoms about being the cultists being true rulers of Mars but I don't know why he thinks that and the game really expects you to be a Red Faction series lore-head. Armageddon really kneecaps the narrative right out of the gate, the game is sufficiently disconnected from Guerrilla by decades in the series timeline and the only reason I know of some context here is because I glanced at the wiki, there is effort to accommodate a self-contained story and it really should have done so because the start of the game is a mess and frequently name-drops factions and organisations throughout the story which the player has no understanding of unless they have prior knowledge of the setting. I understand that this is technically a sequel but the game does not benefit from this approach; there are no stakes, Mason doesn't have any motivation or reason to be where he is and his occupation and backstory and not given any relevance. Darius Mason just a gruff soldier man who turns up to a fight. By contrast when you start Guerrilla the game gives a more slow-paced introduction to Alec Mason, his job, his family, and his indifference on the political divide on Mars, the game then tears his family away from him and forces him down a path of political resistance. Guerrilla’s writing is not exactly amazing but there's an immediate sense of empathy, purpose and motivation given to Alec Mason, Darius does not get the same treatment. I don't strictly have an issue with blank slate military characters that act as a vessel for the player but unlike most male brick type military protagonists, Darius is a wise-cracking gimp who tries desperately to have a personality akin to something like a marvel movie comic wit. Imagine if you took Master Chief but instead of being a quiet killing machine, he’s spouting cringe ‘Well Gee I guess that happened’ lines like he’s auditioning for Guardians of the Galaxy.
We'll get back to Darius' lack of character later. The first mission sets off a bad impression of the gameplay, Darius enters the facility and shoots shambling human enemies with no preservation instinct. It's very boring, you are given a hammer and encouraged to smack walls which drop salvage much like the previous game, salvage will be used later down the line for marginal upgrades to health and speed and reload times and stuff like that. The mission goes wrong, Hale destroys the terraformer and the game cuts to a time skip immediately, this is very abrupt and is a devastatingly confusing element to the story, the game glosses over a lot of details which aren't immediately obvious and basically just cuts from an explosion to Mason dicking around in a hole, taking scavenger jobs. It's explained that humanity has been reduced to living in caves and rusted shanty towns. very rarely are humans venturing onto the harsh surface for fear of violent dust storms following the destruction of the terraformer. Hale is presumed dead and so Mason gets a job to go into a hole and break a crystal, anyway long story short it turns out he was hired by Hale who is alive and Darius is tricked into unleashing a dormant race of insects which terrorise and kill the diminished settler population; thus, Mason unwittingly wreaks Armageddon. I cannot explain how jarring this is in-game, the game basically drops a twist that a character previously thought dead was alive within the space of 10 minutes, there's no weight to Adam's return and once again his motivation for causing death and destruction are not explained in game, nor is his recognising Mason and his grudge against the Mason family (The wiki says Alec Mason killed his dad or something I don’t fucking know)
Most of the game is spent fighting the bug creatures and quite frankly I am glad because they are a more interesting enemy than the human cultists, in fact the game begins to get genuinely fun here. The bugs swarm the player from every single direction, they start off as an annoying quadruped crawling creature but new variants are introduced ranging from fast moving bipedal soldier types to slow moving tank-like enemies, these enemies are called 'The Plague' You can really tell how much effort was put into the animations and movement of The Plague, enemies hang from ledges and walls, they dart around frantically and they recoil in pain when shot, they can be knocked over and rag dolled into walls, they explode into bits when hit with rockets and grenades and they can be disintegrated with energy weapons. I really came to appreciate how much effort really went into making the enemies fun to fight, well most of them anyway, there are 2 standout examples of some seriously shitty enemy design that ruin what would otherwise be a good selection of adversaries. Tank enemies who are a complete damage sponges appear all over the campaign and they really do not gel well with the other enemies, they are slow moving with ranged attacks and they take several magazines worth of ballistics and multiple explosives to kill. The other terrible enemy type is a cloaking enemy that makes the players vision go wobbly. They are invisible and stalk the player but will then reveal themselves in front of you and screech and hit you with a charged laser, if you fail to kill them quick enough then they will engage their cloak and relocate making them extremely annoying to fight, in addition they block off paths with some sort of weird webbing effect so you must kill them to progress. These enemies really fail to synergise with the ‘swarm’ nature of The Plague, they are very frustrating to fight even with late game weapons. Armageddon has a good variety of weapons; each weapon has its own benefits and the player gets 4 weapon slots which they can customise from lockers spread over the levels. The weapons in this game are an extremely mixed bag and they are very unbalanced, some weapons are just plain garbage and not just in effectiveness but also how they feel and some weapons are fucking dope as hell. Explosive weapons in general should be always equipped such as a rocket launcher or grenade launcher, plasma weapons are effective at long range destruction as they disintegrate walls and panels and ballistic weapons control hordes but become unusable and trash starting from mid-game, there’s also a powerful black hole gun which draws enemies into it. However, the standout weapon amongst the entire arsenal is the Magnet gun; fire one magnet into an enemy or structure and fire a second magnet into another location and the two points attract together with a strong force that rips apart everything in their way. It’s so awesome to attach this to the bottom of a building, attach the second anchor to an enemies face and just bury that fucker in a mountain of scrap or vice versa you can attach a point to the enemy and the second point into a solid wall and watch as the little bastard smushes against the surface like a fly on a windscreen, it’s also good for rag dolling the larger enemies or sending them into a pit of lava, I love creativity that the magnet gun offers and I would have liked it if the game was more centred around using it to solve destruction related objectives
There’s a couple more mechanics worth mentioning, repairing and abilities. Repair seems counter-intuitive to the game’s destruction but it’s clear that it’s intended to make sure you don’t soft-lock yourself from progressing by destroying some stairs or platforms that you need to use to progress, you can shoot a beam in front of you to revert broken things back to their original state or you can toss a repair projectile at an area and repair everything in its radius. The game makes very limited use of this repair function and it’s used contextually to repair generators and power outlets to open locked doors, it has unlimited use and doesn’t really interact with the combat in any meaningful way, it’s disappointing, it would be cool if you could use it to repair walls in front of enemies and block them from shooting your or maybe even bisect them or embed them into walls but as it stands it inclusion seems to stem more from the necessity of having a destructible environment with a linear shooting game, which begs the question: why bother with the format at all? You also have two auxiliary abilities as a player, both use the same energy resource which regenerates with a cool-down. The first one is a basic force push ability which is good for knocking down enemies and the second is an AOE uppercut which suspends nearby enemies in zero G and makes them vulnerable, these play into the flow of combat. I don’t mind them but I think they should’ve been more powerful. Combat in this game, when it works is genuinely great and I think there’s a formula here that is potentially incredible, but it’s held back by a couple factors.
You start to prioritise targets, formulate strategies, and use the tools and abilities that the game provides then the game reaches its peak, however it’s short lived the game goes out of its way to roadblock you from doing this too often. Giant enemy nodes which have a ton of health and buff all enemies around it, these become priority #1 and deplete your resources immediately, the Magnet Gun is not very effective against them as it doesn’t target enemies which are too large, I also mentioned how the enemies crowd around the player in hordes, this can be fun however towards the finale the game is stupid with its spawning of enemies. Typically, enemies spawn from pods which can be destroyed but towards the end of the game pods appear everywhere, the giant node enemies appear all over the level and it becomes a mess of constantly spawning bullet sponge enemies that are best just walked through rather than bothering trying to fight them, it doesn’t help that the game gives you an asthmatic 3 second jog as a “sprint” option. What is with games of this era and giving you a shitty limited sprint? Why did people think this was a fun element? Whatever… at least the game has a good selection in its arsenal and with a few balancing tweaks and a solid gameplay loop I genuinely think this game could have been elevated into a much better experience. It's almost not worth mentioning but the game does have entirely forgettable vehicles segments, quite a few actually, these are glorified turret sequences where you shift around a walker with rockets and a machine gun or electric shock gun and do little to vary up the shooting galleries, in an open world game or even a game with just more open levels I would appreciate the inclusion of these vehicles segments but as they stand they didn’t do much to elevate the experience. If it seems like I’ve been bouncing around the gameplay and neglecting the story it’s because the story, plot and characters of this game are truly dreadful, I honestly am struggling to find a place to start with how terrible the narrative of this game is. Armageddon is a mess of tropey and poorly reasoned story threads held together with emotionally stunted characters. There are no memorable story moments, the characters learn nothing, the plot is simultaneously meandering but also proceeds at a breakneck pace with no downtime or reflection. Watching the events of this game unfold is like watching ocean waves crash against a cliff, a non-stop chaotic endeavour with no rhythm, fleeting and unending. Despite being only 6 hours long the game feels like it was padded and rushed, the script feels like it was written as a first draft, the dialogue is pure cringe and the performances of the VAs fall completely flat. I would go as far as saying that Armageddon makes gaming as a medium appear less legitimate as a narrative artform because it’s embarrassing schlock, some basic elements of a 3-act structure would have made this game’s story more bearable to play through.
Darius is an extremely unlikeable emotionally stunted man-child who undergoes absolutely no drastic changes or dramatic arc in the story, he frequently blames himself for opening the bugs lair when he was tricked into it but then gets angry and defensive when others confront him about it. He tries to have witty banter with his AI companion SAM, but every attempt at humour falls so flat, it’s embarrassing to watch. There is a love interest in the form of Kara, she appears at the start of the game then reappears at the second half, she has no personality and no agency, her only purpose is to serve as motivation for Darius and stand around in revealing cleavage armour. It’s almost comical how much of a set dressing Kara is and when she and Darius finally embrace, she is killed off IMMEDIATELY and Darius gets slightly miffed about it. Adam Hale is the primary antagonist, halfway through the game he chases the player around a bit and then a cutscene occurs where his head just straight up falls off, you don’t even see how it happens, his vehicle gets disabled and then the next frame he’s just dead, it’s very unsatisfying and underwhelming. The game then shambles around until Darius decides to fix the terraformer with his repair ability and ventures into the bugs nest to kill the queen, why he couldn’t do this earlier I don’t know, matter of fact I really don’t understand what the terraformer even does. Without the presence of the terraformer people still breathe and live on mars, the only thing it seemed to affect was the weather and preventing dust storms so I guess it’s a geo-engineering or weather control device in that case? Why is there only one? Why can’t another one be built? The entire planet is dependant on this single tower with no supporting network behind it. It’s an entirely silly plot device and the game makes no effort to place stakes in it any further than it being the thing that the baddy wants to destroy.
The game is not aided by its lacklustre presentation, whilst the environments have some great lighting and the models look good the environments comprise of a bland series of caves and hallways, on reflection I really fail to remember what most of the game looks like aside from a few key areas such as a lava lake. I don’t think you could accuse the game of looking like a generic grey military shooter which characterised the 2010s, there are some very garish and distracting effects and bright colours all over the shooting arenas, but I don’t think this works in the games favour, as much as we criticise call of duty’s bland colour palate, I can distinctly remember levels from every game and a variety of different desert, forest, and urban environments. Red Faction Armageddon is severely lacking in variety in its levels and the amount of blooming garish colours really makes the combat have less clarity and feedback.
Some people might be tempted to say the story doesn’t matter so long as the gameplay is there, I disagree completely. As an experience, this game does not hold up to scrutiny in its narrative and it hurts the game badly. Compare this to ‘Gears of War’ which is a similar third person shooter. On paper Armageddon comes out on top of Gears in the gameplay department but Gears is the much more beloved game by the gaming public and I also think Gears is a better experience. Characters in Gears talk to each other in downtime, they have history and they show some emotion, they all have reasons why they fight and find themselves in their situation, they are military meatheads but they have emotions and purpose that drives them and they don’t make attempts to be zany or throw out quips (well Baird does but fuck Baird) The voice actors in Gears of War give a much more structured and convincing performance with a better script and the quality of the writing far exceeds anything in Armageddon, all of this adds up into an emotional and memorable experience, to be clear I don’t think Gears of War is a particularly amazing story or a ‘great’ game but it goes to show just how much a solid narrative foundation can elevate a below-average game into something worth playing for a lot of people. Armageddon is not worth playing, it’s derivative and dull. The occasional flash of a creative combat system does nothing to change the fact that this game is a mess, I really wish we could have gotten a true successor to Guerrilla using some of the tools included in Armageddon, imagine a destruction centred open world game with a powerful magnet gun and repairing mechanic. I get the sense that this is not the game that the developers wanted to make, it’s a very half-baked attempt at a third person shooter and it’s frustrating because you developers were clearly very talented and competent, the lighting and environments are well crafted, the weapons are varied and fun and the enemies are painstakingly animated. My final verdict on this game is thus: Play Guerrilla instead.