Red Faction: Give It Another Chance, THQ

Red Faction: Armageddon was bad enough to kill off the franchise, it seems. Today is a sad day to be a gamer if you’re anything like me and had mad appreciation skills for the original game and the open world destructothon that was Guerrilla.

To quote VG247:

“Farrell also said THQ doesn’t ‘intend to carry forward’ with the Red Faction series ‘in any meaningful way,’ considering that the ‘two successive versions just found a niche.’”

A niche of, according to VGChartz, roughly 1.3 million people per game – pre-Armageddon. That’s not exactly a tiny amount, and while we’re expected to see every game shifting Modern Warfare numbers that’s just not going to happen.

So what’s the solution? Well, seeing as Volition – for whatever reason – went back on what made people like Guerrilla so much, resulting in a game nobody liked and nobody has bought, I have a suggestion: just make Guerrilla again. But with slightly improved technology. Abandon the story elements and costly things like CG cut scenes. Introduce incremental updates on a yearly basis – release them via that thing THQ loves so dearly: DLC. Give us more animal-based hammers for 20p a pop. Bring back the vehicles and freedom.

Don’t just release Yet Another 3^rd-Person Shooter that nobody in their right mind is going to give two flecks of dried-up spunk about. Don’t be surprised that when you release a shit game, no matter how much marketing muscle you put behind it it ends up being underwhelmingly received. Oh, and don’t try and charge £58 for it on PSN. The most idiotic decision of all time? Quite possibly.

I want more Red Faction. I don’t want this extended universe rubbish – I watched the SyFy movie and it was awful, even though it had the T-1000 in it. I played Battlegrounds and it was awful. Armageddon itself wasn’t awful per se, but it just wasn’t very good. It felt soulless. Designed by committee rather than – as Volition normally does – designing it for people to have fun with.

Abandon that approach. Go back to how it was. Try again. Don’t just drop Red Faction – it’s one of my favourite series. Even if only 50% of the main series releases have been any good.

Oh, and by the way – you’d all better go out and buy Saints Row: The Third regardless of how good it is, because if Volition ends up getting shitcanned as a result of all this I am going to go postal.