Red Faction Battlegrounds

[Badnik Mechanic]

Red Faction Battlegrounds is a classic example of a company not wanting to take a risk.

It would have been so easy to just call this 'battlegrounds' and say "It's set on earth in the future." But they've attached Red Faction to the front. So they didn't need to take the risk and do something new. They just took everything from the 3rd red faction game, and made a small download title.

Thats not to say RFB is bad, because it's not, it's actually pretty fun... the problem is, it doesn't add anything to the Red Faction universe, it could so easilly have been a completely new title.

Also, this is the first Red Faction game where you're not playing as a single man on a mission, The Red Faction have taken Mars, it's now a time between the 3rd and the 4th title. Even though there are small references to the EDF being active, theres virtually no sense that there is an 'enemy.'

So what is RFB.

It reminds me a lot of old 16 bit era games, you drive around a small arena shooting other players and trying to blow them up. Theres a large selection of units to pick, divided between the Red Faction and EDF name, however a Red Faction jeep will do more or less the same thing that an EDF jeep will.

Theres a number of arenas to fight in which won't take too long to memorise and a number of game modes ranging from standard Team and single Deathmatch, to King of the Hill, Capture the flag and a variation of it.

As well as the online experience theres a single player mission/challenge mode which is fun if not a tad easy, and yes experience gained in this mode does count to your online stats, which is a must as each rank unlocks new units and bonus' for these units until you unlock the final unit. But ranking up is amazingly easy, I got to rank 10 very quickly and by then everything is unlocked (except the rank 20 trophy). Theres a number of special power ups too which do give you some degree of tactical thinking and each unit is increadibly weak at it's rear... even a machine gun vs a tank will destroy it in a few seconds if you attack from behind.

The graphics are pretty decent for a download title, can't complain given what you get, the arenas all look different and each one has a different design to the other, but... the bulk of the designs are from Red Faction 3, two of the arenas seem to be focused more towards the 4th game.

Music is... a bit lazy, they just took the tracks from the last game and put them in this one.

Each time you set up a game you can fully customise the experience, even down to the freequency of power ups. You are also not peanalised with no XP for doing this. I also advise that the first thing you do is change the game time to 'long' as the normal playtime is relatively short.

The main problem with the game however is that one unit in particular is very overpowered, the Combat Walker is more or less the only unit you will use unless you deliberately limit what units can be selected in the game. It will utterly destroy anything except other walkers, but since the only other walker fires machine guns and lacks lock on missiles... it's not going to last very long even if it does have more movability.

This can take away tactical planning from some game types as you'l slowly find yourself in "Right I killed him... now because my health is low, that player will kill him... the dude I killed just respawned, he'll now kill the guy I did... now I'll kill him again and..."

Overal, RFB isn't a terrible game, it's pretty fun, although there have been some horrendous lag issues, and like the last Red Faction game, this one also has the curse of a shockingly poor online system which can't find games or claims games are full when they're not.

The problem with it, is that it's lacking it's own identity right now, whilst it's called Red Faction, other than destroying other units, you're not really changing the landscape which was the main selling point of all 3 previous games, whilst there are exploding barrels in the arenas, it offers little tactical advantage unless an opponent is right next to them.

It's currently free for all PSN+ Users (Europe only!) otherwise it costs 800 Microsoft points and £6.29/€7.99/$9.99 from the PS store. Or... pre-ordering Red Faction 4 at Amazon will also get you a free DLC code (but look into the T&C's for that one). It's not a terrible price for what you get, but I think £5 would have been more justified.

DLC is also planned for this title.