If you recall my Red Faction Guerrilla review you will remember that I love this game.  So, when they announced the Demons of the Badlands DLC I knew I would be getting it.  The Demons of the Badlands add-on gives you the back story Samanya from the game’s main campaign. I really enjoyed playing as Samanya and learning the story of how she went from being a Marauder to part of the Red Faction movement on Mars. There are three main story missions and eleven optional side  missions.  I completed all of these missions in around 5 hours, but the final main story missions was 40 to 50 minutes of that.  It was a very lengthy missions with multiple checkpoints but it was also a lot of fun.  There are 10 new achievements available and most of them are pretty strait forward.  There are only two that will require some serious effort or grinding.  One of these is to get pro times on both of the transported missions and all six demolition missions.  These side missions are harder than the ones in the main game’s campaign. I don’t mind them being challenging but these are going to take a lot of work to complete. The other taxing achievement is for collecting 75 energy cells. This one is not so much hard as it is a grind.  The power cells do not show up on your map so you have to keep your eyes open as you’re traveling around.  There are more than 75 of them so you do not have to find them all but I only found about 50 of them playing through all the available missions.  They tend to be inside or on top of buildings and since you don’t have a jetpack you have to level every building to look for them.

There were some changes from the primary Red Faction Guerrilla campaign in the Demons of the Badlands expansion.  In addition to never getting a jetpack there are also seven new weapons available. My favorites are the Spiker and Missile Pod. I never got tired of using them. There are also some Marauder modified vehicles and walkers throughout the game.  I actually really liked the Marauder walker because it has giant spiked clubs on the ends of its arms for doing a lot of damage.  One fairly big difference is that to get weapon upgrades in the expansion you do not have collect salvage to trade. The upgrades unlock automatically as you complete the side missions.  Since I was already trying to collect energy cells it was nice to not have to also gather salvage.

My only complaint about the Demons of the Badlands expansions is that there are only two safe-houses and they are both on the southern edge of the map.  So, when you get to a red alert level you night have to drive for two or three minutes to get there and reset the alert to green.  Since most of the game world is valleys and cliffs this can be difficult as you need to stay on a narrow path while avoiding the onslaught of enemy vehicles. Not a huge issue but it would have been nice to have a third safe house somewhere in the northern third of the map.

If you liked Red Faction Guerrilla then the Demons of the Badlands add-on is worth getting.  At $10 it has a lot of value for the amount of play time packed into it with familiar missions types but all new weapons and story plot.