Red Faction: Battlegrounds

It's accessible and sort of amusing for a little while, but the instant you realize the single-player element is extremely short and ultimately disappointing, you might regret the purchase.

As a starter in the running towards Red Faction: Armageddon, Red Faction: Battlegrounds doesn't exactly work enticingly. And when viewing the game as a separate project, not much remains. What holds the game down the most is the meagre singleplayer campaign, which has little variation and too small maps. The items you'll unlock for Armageddon just don't suffice.

Battlegrounds has become a simple arcade game. The racing and shooting are very basic and the total package is just too repetitive, causing you to delete the game after a few hours. The game isn't all bad, but it's not worth 800 Microsoft Points or 7,99 euro.

Although the possibility of unlocking exclusive contents for RF: Armageddon might interest the most passionate fans of the franchise, Battlegrounds proves to be a mediocre product that will hardly appeal to any kind of gamer.

Red Faction: Battlegrounds isn't terrible, but it's hard to understand why this is a Red Faction game at all. What you're left with is a mediocre dual-stick shooter that is severely lacking in content and becomes repetitive quickly.

Red Faction: Battlegrounds is so bad that it actually will make you less hyped for the upcoming Red Faction: Armageddon. That is, in every way, a big failure.

The never-ending explosions shake the screen and before long chaos and confusion take over. Battlegrounds is hectic given the small maps and spawning becomes silly as you come back from death straight into another death. It's annoying, yet not as annoying as waiting for an online match to start thanks to a nonexistent community.

A total dud. [July 2011, p.89]