[DLC] Red Faction: Guerrilla - Demons of the Badlands
Volition lets you return to Mars before the events of Red Faction: Guerrilla, but do you really want to?
Published: September 24, 2009
It feels a little weird to write this -- especially after it almost directly issues one of the wishes I had about Red Faction: Guerrilla's short little trip through the Badlands in the normal single-player campaign -- but I'm not entirely sure Demons of the Badlands is even worth picking up right now. Nearly everything that made Alec Mason's trip across the bleak surface of mars seems to have been whittled down to a mere pittance; the story content is minimal at best, the variety of challenges is scant and the actual territory you'll explore is a sliver of what the full game offers at 1/6th of the cost of the retail release.
It's not that there wasn't ample potential here; the idea of going back in time before the events that would eventually spark the uprising on Mars is a fantastic one, and if anything the Marauders and Badlands were probably the least-explored part of the main story (either because they were planning on releasing this DLC or because there simply wasn't time to explore it), but Demons of the Badlands' handling of all that potential is all but squandered. The game attempts to tie a tenuous thread linking Samanya's exodus from the Badlands tribes and her estrangement from her sister, their ruler, but it's all done so haphazardly and with little regard for the same storytelling that made the vanilla RFG storyline so interesting (and lengthy) that by the time you've taken Sam from Marauder to outcast, scarcely more than an hour and a half or so has gone by. That's some real fast character development.
It's also a bit of a shame that there's not more of a link to the rest of the game. I can understand that a re-use of all the areas isn't entirely feasible because of the small time difference between Demons and the main story campaign, but the effect is that one feels entirely walled off from the rest of Mars, locked in a self-contained, comparatively smallish area, with little to do beyond a handful of insanely tough Demolitions Master challenges and a bunch of copy/paste Marauder Actions to keep you busy past the four main story missions.
Of those four missions, only the final one really seems to approach the same sense of urgency and scale of the main quest, though there is some interesting bits of clambering around a shantytown-like series of ladders and corrugated metal huts early in a mission. Unfortunately, the destructible nature of the environments mean that those ladders can be destroyed just enough so as to not allow movement, but still appear to be intact. Frustrating.
That feeling is echoed by the rapid-fire pace of the game's high explosive weapons. Marauder tech is, after all, the core of Sam's ability to craft things that go boom for Alec in the main game, but here they're doled out not at the cost of found scrap, but after finishing a mission with little to no exposition about where the weapon came from. Win the mission, get the weapon. The limited space and targets are compounded by the fact that some of the weapons, like the rapid-fire rocket launching destructive power of the Missile Pod, really don't have a whole lot of room to get turned loose. Unless I'm missing something, the DLC is locked off from the rest of the main game, so there's no mixing and matching of the newer weapons.
This also means there's little reason beyond dropping EDF control in the area to help out the Marauders. There's no morale system (which is, honestly, okay; there was nothing so annoying as accidentally taking out a colonist and having the morale drop on you), and there's no real cash system, so aside from getting a full top-off of all your ammo in the crates throughout the world, all the bonus objectives and side missions feel worthless outside of some Trophies -- and Destruction Master challenges are so tough on Pro times and the extra collectibles so numerous that neither feels worth the effort.
I got genuinely interested in helping to liberate Mars during the normal campaign, and the brief glimpse I saw of the Badlands left them as some of the most mysterious and backstory-rich of the whole campaign, so it pains me to see it all being paid so much lip service. The calls back to the original Red Faction were subtle, but interesting, and nearly all of them came from Badlands exposure. To see a chance to link the games more with this expansion get wasted is all the more painful.
If the price of things dips below $5 and you feel yourself hankering for more single-player action, Demons of the Badlands isn't a terrible expansion, it's just woefully bereft of actual long-lasting content. Getting it at full price is definitely a bad idea.
It's not that there wasn't ample potential here; the idea of going back in time before the events that would eventually spark the uprising on Mars is a fantastic one, and if anything the Marauders and Badlands were probably the least-explored part of the main story (either because they were planning on releasing this DLC or because there simply wasn't time to explore it), but Demons of the Badlands' handling of all that potential is all but squandered. The game attempts to tie a tenuous thread linking Samanya's exodus from the Badlands tribes and her estrangement from her sister, their ruler, but it's all done so haphazardly and with little regard for the same storytelling that made the vanilla RFG storyline so interesting (and lengthy) that by the time you've taken Sam from Marauder to outcast, scarcely more than an hour and a half or so has gone by. That's some real fast character development.
It's also a bit of a shame that there's not more of a link to the rest of the game. I can understand that a re-use of all the areas isn't entirely feasible because of the small time difference between Demons and the main story campaign, but the effect is that one feels entirely walled off from the rest of Mars, locked in a self-contained, comparatively smallish area, with little to do beyond a handful of insanely tough Demolitions Master challenges and a bunch of copy/paste Marauder Actions to keep you busy past the four main story missions.
Of those four missions, only the final one really seems to approach the same sense of urgency and scale of the main quest, though there is some interesting bits of clambering around a shantytown-like series of ladders and corrugated metal huts early in a mission. Unfortunately, the destructible nature of the environments mean that those ladders can be destroyed just enough so as to not allow movement, but still appear to be intact. Frustrating.
That feeling is echoed by the rapid-fire pace of the game's high explosive weapons. Marauder tech is, after all, the core of Sam's ability to craft things that go boom for Alec in the main game, but here they're doled out not at the cost of found scrap, but after finishing a mission with little to no exposition about where the weapon came from. Win the mission, get the weapon. The limited space and targets are compounded by the fact that some of the weapons, like the rapid-fire rocket launching destructive power of the Missile Pod, really don't have a whole lot of room to get turned loose. Unless I'm missing something, the DLC is locked off from the rest of the main game, so there's no mixing and matching of the newer weapons.
This also means there's little reason beyond dropping EDF control in the area to help out the Marauders. There's no morale system (which is, honestly, okay; there was nothing so annoying as accidentally taking out a colonist and having the morale drop on you), and there's no real cash system, so aside from getting a full top-off of all your ammo in the crates throughout the world, all the bonus objectives and side missions feel worthless outside of some Trophies -- and Destruction Master challenges are so tough on Pro times and the extra collectibles so numerous that neither feels worth the effort.
I got genuinely interested in helping to liberate Mars during the normal campaign, and the brief glimpse I saw of the Badlands left them as some of the most mysterious and backstory-rich of the whole campaign, so it pains me to see it all being paid so much lip service. The calls back to the original Red Faction were subtle, but interesting, and nearly all of them came from Badlands exposure. To see a chance to link the games more with this expansion get wasted is all the more painful.
If the price of things dips below $5 and you feel yourself hankering for more single-player action, Demons of the Badlands isn't a terrible expansion, it's just woefully bereft of actual long-lasting content. Getting it at full price is definitely a bad idea.
