If your game isn't starting on the main branch of Red Faction: Armageddon, a number of people have had some luck with shifting to the publicbeta branch.

To activate this, right click on the game on in your library, under Properties, select Betas, and choose the publicbeta from the dropdown. There will be a small update to download and then you'll have the Public Beta branch.

There's an annoying screen overlay in the publicbeta branch - this can be hidden by opening the console (default button for this is - the key to the left of the 1 key on most modern keyboards.

Once the console is open, type in and press enter.

This will hide the overlay, but you'll likely need to do this each time you open the game.


Don't worry if this doesn't get you working straight away - there's something else you can try with the main branch, and a bunch of stuff that you can do on both the publicbeta and main branch to resolve other issues

These steps should be carried out regardless whether you got the game working with the publicbeta branch or whether you're using the main game.

First, go to the game files (Right click the game in your library and Browse Local Files) and do the following:

In turn, you're going to do the following steps on these files:

rf4_launcher.exe
RedFactionArmageddon.exe
RedFactionArmageddon_DX11.exe


On the Compatibility tab, set the compatibility mode to either Windows 7, or Windows XP (Service Pack 3)
On the same tab, check both the "Disable fullscreen optimizations" and "Run as administrator" checkboxes
Click Apply, and OK to save your changes and close the box

Make each of these files Large Address Aware. As a 32bit game, these only have access to 2GB of memory - making them Large Address Aware gives them access to up to 4GB of memory, which a number of people have reported as making the game more stable.
I use the 4gb patch tool[ntcore.com] which is a simple tool to make 32bit executables Large Address Aware, although there are other tools that do the same job


There's also a known issue whereby access to over 16 cores can cause problems on AMD CPUs.
If you're running this on AMD CPUs, you can limit core access to 16 by setting "game mode".

I don't know whether or not this same issue affects Intel CPUs but haven't had this issue personally.


Finally, there's a known issue where you can softlock the game in a certain section - this can be remediated by capping the game's FPS to 60 using whatever tool you favour for FPS capping.


Once this is all done, try running the game again, using both the DX9 and DX10/11 options in the launcher to see if one works even if the other doesn't

There's a couple of Hail Mary longshots you can use if your game still isn't running after doing everything above.

These have worked for me on both the main and publicbeta branches, so if your game still isn't working at this point, it can't hurt to try some of these.


Personally I found that my issues were mostly being caused by the sound in the FMVs rather than anything else. When the FMV loaded, the sound fell over and it kicked me back to the menu.

As an aggressive option you can try setting the master volume to 0 and retrying the New Game/DLC again.
I had consistent results with turning the volume down to 0 across both branches and both versions of DX.

But maybe you want sound on? The music isn't terrible, and whilst some of the audio mixing is far from great, they did a pretty decent job on the VA lines, and it's more helpful to know where enemies are.
I played it a bit with no sound, but tried to see if I could figure out anything else that might help me to be able to have sound on.


So if you also want sound, there's something else you can try, and I honestly can't believe that this worked for me but you can try disabling in-game chat.
I disabled In-Game Chat, and set it to Push-To-Talk so I don't know which of them did the trick for me, but the combination of both solved almost all of my problems.

Sometimes when it hits a load with an FMV, the game will drop back to the main menu anyway. Annoying, but it normally works again if you choose Continue from your menu.
Occasionally I have to Continue two or three times, but so far it's not refused to let me back in after a few attempts

Hopefully if you did everything above, you should have a (mostly) stable experience playing this game.

Something weird that I found is that the main game only ran under DX9 with sound-on, in-game chat off.
Weirdly, the DLC only ran under DX10/11 with sound-on, in-game chat off.
So if you try the main campaign on DX10/11 and it doesn't work with sound, give it a go on DX9.

You might have to start it 2 or 3 times (it really does seem to be an issue with the game hooking audio when an FMV loads) but it's been pretty consistent for me since doing all of the above.

I can now play both the main campaign, and the DLC, on either the main or publicbeta branch.

With this game being heavily discounted in the Steam Summer Sale, I figured there would be more people getting this, and hopefully this guide can save some of the headaches that I had trying to get this to work.