It is often more fun to destroy than it is to create. Many of us realized this when we were young, when we played with Lego sets or made sandcastles. Scores of video games endorse this philosophy.
The new Red Faction most magically does not.
In New York last week, representatives from the company making the upcoming Red Faction Armageddon let me play their game. For this series, one might as well they say that they let me take a hammer to it. That would be a good thing, because there was nothing more spectacular in the last Red Faction than wrecking the industrialized, colonized Mars its creators had built.
You get a sledgehammer again in Armageddon,a new linear adventure set on Mars with the hero in the role of heroic fighter this time rather than heroic insurgent. You can still knock through a wall, smash down a tower or pulverize almost any other people-made structure in the game. You can lob charges at these things and press a button to detonate them and begin a waterfall of debris. You can fire a new singularity gun that shoots a small black hole that sucks together the objects and hapless enemies surrounding it. You can zap each beam and panel of a building one-by-one with a special dissolving gun, a weapon that one could use in the last Red Faction game to collapse a bridge one subtracted strut at a time.
But what a joy it is in the new Red Faction to mend things. What a treat it is to reverse chaos.
At any time in the demo of Armageddon, I was able to raise the hand of the hero I controlled and have him restore the ruins that I or other computer-controlled characters in the game had created.
In a firefight, I could blow up a catwalk to kill a villain, then walk to the catwalk, arm extended, and watch it magically reconstruct itself.
To fight a vicious spider-like boss, I could hide behind cover, shoot, cower from return fire and then respond to the destruction of the boxes I hid behind by using that restoration magic to make those boxes reassemble.
Perhaps the joy of repairing what was broken is what satisfies a mechanic who fixes beaten cars or excites the successful practitioner of a challenging surgery. The pace of repair is beautifully swift in Red Faction, as if watching a snowman somehow unmelt from puddle to Frosty in about four seconds.
