A linear alien corridor shooter with destructible environments which sounds good on paper, but it becomes very tedious in some locations. You will suffer a lot, certain scenarios within the game are just way to hard in normal mode, especially when the game tries to give you way too many enemies at the end to fend off. Dumbed-down version of Guerrilla... they butchered way too much stuff, look at the concept art released by Volition. Mediocre pacing; need to watch the tv show 'Red Faction Origins' to understand half of the plot presented in Armageddon. Way too many weapons, some are just trash early game while it's nice for more unique weapon builds and variety; its just not needed whatsoever. I can't blame the developers since they were given six or nine months to work on this. Not entirely a bad game... should've been a spinoff, not a sequel to Guerrilla. There's also New Game+ for those interested in a challenge whilst keeping your previous stuff.

Multiplayer (Infection Mode) is BORING & dead, I've played Guerrilla's multiplayer, and can say that was more fun. You basically survive a couple of waves, defending yourself from aliens along the perks you've unlocked throughout your normal gameplay.

Red Faction Armageddon is a former shell of itself. Poor decision handling and greediness from its publisher THQ with passionate developers willing to finish a half-assed game. Buy it during a sale, get the DLC 'Path of War' since some of the achievements are locked behind a cheap paywall.

There's an undeniable catharsis in breaking stuff, just ask Fred Durst or a toddler with your iPhone. I don't know what it is in our monkey brains that makes destruction and demolition so much fun but seeing a once pristine structure reduced to ash and rubble hits some depraved dopamine receptor. Since the first game in the series, Red Faction has always capitalised on the science of smashing up walls with hammers and explosives, I don't want to get tied into rambling about the history of the franchise, but I do want to briefly mention the 'Geo-Mod' engine which has characterised the series established trademark razing of buildings which are held together by fragile breadstick struts and Pâté. I also specifically want to mention Red Faction Guerrilla (2009) which is the predecessor to Armageddon and both games share a lot of DNA, I think it's necessary to establish Guerrilla because it helps to illustrate exactly where Armageddon sucks balls.

Red Faction Guerrilla is a pretty decent game, it does a really great job of centring the mechanics of wreckage. From the very start of the game your character is established as a working-class mining jobber who scavenges scrap metal from destroyed structures, in addition the game is concerned with the actions done by rebel group that gains power and influence through terrorism and blowing up private military assets, the game also provides the player with mini challenges where you must destroy a target with limited resources or within a time limit. Destruction and demolition aren't just tertiary to Guerrilla, busting up pipelines and bases is a central pillar of the open world gameplay and narrative, when the game does try to be a 3rd person shooter its quite disappointing and you can probably see where I'm going with this. Red Faction: Armageddon is the antithesis to Guerrilla’s cathartic freedom and instead chooses to build upon the bland shooting of guerrilla through a linear scripted 3rd person shooter campaign. The game is considered a sequel and appears to be built on the same engine with many of the same technical aspects and yet it falls so short of its predecessor.

To preface this review, I played this game on PC at max settings with keyboard and mouse controls. The game took me just under 6 hours to complete from start to finish in one sitting. I played on Normal difficulty, I did not play the 'Path to War' DLC which adds a couple of weapons and missions.

Upon booting the game some technical issues beginning to crop up, the game has two modes DX9 and DX10-11, this is characteristic of games from the same time period and in fact some of these technical issues can be chalked up to simply trying to play a 11 year old game on a more contemporary platform, one bug which persisted throughout my experience is a looping 'pause' glitch which booted me back to the main menu whenever a major cutscene started, if I had to speculate this is a result of the game not being very well optimised for SSDs. I have encountered similar issues in games before which preceded the boom in storage speeds and mainstream adoption of SSDs, it may have been short sighted I mean SSDs were available at the time, albeit at a MUCH more impractical price than we have today. I can't really blame the developers for not predicting the future as well as they could have but one thing you can put them on blast for is not having an FOV slider, this game is spent tunnel-visioned behind your characters back, it is a strain on the eyes and some extra peripheral vision should have been a necessity. The whole game stinks of a hashed together console port and was clearly built with a controller in mind. Controls are at least rebind-able and the game by default assigns jump and dodge to the same action as if you were moving a thumb stick and pressing a button, however you can choose to split these actions across two keys if you want, which is fine. In terms of audio, you get separate binary 1-100 sliders for music and sound effects which is good. Accessibility options are limited with subtitles only and no option to change text size or colour, which is daft because the subtitles are blue and quite large.

The game starts on colonial Mars with the player character Darius Mason, descendant of the Mason family lineage whose members appear as protagonists in previous games, Mason men are always blessed with bald heads and powerful cum through their Martian fuckboy bloodline. Darius is in a convoy with the Red Faction, the military on Mars. These sir-yes-sir OORAH dipshits are on their way to assault a group of cultists lead by one Adam Hale at the central terraforming facility. Hale wants to destroy the terraformer and make Mars uninhabitable for... some reason… uh, something to do with the cultists having a sense of supremacy over Mars? It's unclear as to what Hale's ideology is; you can hear him ranting over intercoms about being the cultists being true rulers of Mars but I don't know why he thinks that and the game really expects you to be a Red Faction series lore-head. Armageddon really kneecaps the narrative right out of the gate, the game is sufficiently disconnected from Guerrilla by decades in the series timeline and the only reason I know of some context here is because I glanced at the wiki, there is effort to accommodate a self-contained story and it really should have done so because the start of the game is a mess and frequently name-drops factions and organisations throughout the story which the player has no understanding of unless they have prior knowledge of the setting. I understand that this is technically a sequel but the game does not benefit from this approach; there are no stakes, Mason doesn't have any motivation or reason to be where he is and his occupation and backstory and not given any relevance. Darius Mason just a gruff soldier man who turns up to a fight. By contrast when you start Guerrilla the game gives a more slow-paced introduction to Alec Mason, his job, his family, and his indifference on the political divide on Mars, the game then tears his family away from him and forces him down a path of political resistance. Guerrilla’s writing is not exactly amazing but there's an immediate sense of empathy, purpose and motivation given to Alec Mason, Darius does not get the same treatment. I don't strictly have an issue with blank slate military characters that act as a vessel for the player but unlike most male brick type military protagonists, Darius is a wise-cracking gimp who tries desperately to have a personality akin to something like a marvel movie comic wit. Imagine if you took Master Chief but instead of being a quiet killing machine, he’s spouting cringe ‘Well Gee I guess that happened’ lines like he’s auditioning for Guardians of the Galaxy.

We'll get back to Darius' lack of character later. The first mission sets off a bad impression of the gameplay, Darius enters the facility and shoots shambling human enemies with no preservation instinct. It's very boring, you are given a hammer and encouraged to smack walls which drop salvage much like the previous game, salvage will be used later down the line for marginal upgrades to health and speed and reload times and stuff like that. The mission goes wrong, Hale destroys the terraformer and the game cuts to a time skip immediately, this is very abrupt and is a devastatingly confusing element to the story, the game glosses over a lot of details which aren't immediately obvious and basically just cuts from an explosion to Mason dicking around in a hole, taking scavenger jobs. It's explained that humanity has been reduced to living in caves and rusted shanty towns. very rarely are humans venturing onto the harsh surface for fear of violent dust storms following the destruction of the terraformer. Hale is presumed dead and so Mason gets a job to go into a hole and break a crystal, anyway long story short it turns out he was hired by Hale who is alive and Darius is tricked into unleashing a dormant race of insects which terrorise and kill the diminished settler population; thus, Mason unwittingly wreaks Armageddon. I cannot explain how jarring this is in-game, the game basically drops a twist that a character previously thought dead was alive within the space of 10 minutes, there's no weight to Adam's return and once again his motivation for causing death and destruction are not explained in game, nor is his recognising Mason and his grudge against the Mason family (The wiki says Alec Mason killed his dad or something I don’t fucking know)

Most of the game is spent fighting the bug creatures and quite frankly I am glad because they are a more interesting enemy than the human cultists, in fact the game begins to get genuinely fun here. The bugs swarm the player from every single direction, they start off as an annoying quadruped crawling creature but new variants are introduced ranging from fast moving bipedal soldier types to slow moving tank-like enemies, these enemies are called 'The Plague' You can really tell how much effort was put into the animations and movement of The Plague, enemies hang from ledges and walls, they dart around frantically and they recoil in pain when shot, they can be knocked over and rag dolled into walls, they explode into bits when hit with rockets and grenades and they can be disintegrated with energy weapons. I really came to appreciate how much effort really went into making the enemies fun to fight, well most of them anyway, there are 2 standout examples of some seriously shitty enemy design that ruin what would otherwise be a good selection of adversaries. Tank enemies who are a complete damage sponges appear all over the campaign and they really do not gel well with the other enemies, they are slow moving with ranged attacks and they take several magazines worth of ballistics and multiple explosives to kill. The other terrible enemy type is a cloaking enemy that makes the players vision go wobbly. They are invisible and stalk the player but will then reveal themselves in front of you and screech and hit you with a charged laser, if you fail to kill them quick enough then they will engage their cloak and relocate making them extremely annoying to fight, in addition they block off paths with some sort of weird webbing effect so you must kill them to progress. These enemies really fail to synergise with the ‘swarm’ nature of The Plague, they are very frustrating to fight even with late game weapons. Armageddon has a good variety of weapons; each weapon has its own benefits and the player gets 4 weapon slots which they can customise from lockers spread over the levels. The weapons in this game are an extremely mixed bag and they are very unbalanced, some weapons are just plain garbage and not just in effectiveness but also how they feel and some weapons are fucking dope as hell. Explosive weapons in general should be always equipped such as a rocket launcher or grenade launcher, plasma weapons are effective at long range destruction as they disintegrate walls and panels and ballistic weapons control hordes but become unusable and trash starting from mid-game, there’s also a powerful black hole gun which draws enemies into it. However, the standout weapon amongst the entire arsenal is the Magnet gun; fire one magnet into an enemy or structure and fire a second magnet into another location and the two points attract together with a strong force that rips apart everything in their way. It’s so awesome to attach this to the bottom of a building, attach the second anchor to an enemies face and just bury that fucker in a mountain of scrap or vice versa you can attach a point to the enemy and the second point into a solid wall and watch as the little bastard smushes against the surface like a fly on a windscreen, it’s also good for rag dolling the larger enemies or sending them into a pit of lava, I love creativity that the magnet gun offers and I would have liked it if the game was more centred around using it to solve destruction related objectives

There’s a couple more mechanics worth mentioning, repairing and abilities. Repair seems counter-intuitive to the game’s destruction but it’s clear that it’s intended to make sure you don’t soft-lock yourself from progressing by destroying some stairs or platforms that you need to use to progress, you can shoot a beam in front of you to revert broken things back to their original state or you can toss a repair projectile at an area and repair everything in its radius. The game makes very limited use of this repair function and it’s used contextually to repair generators and power outlets to open locked doors, it has unlimited use and doesn’t really interact with the combat in any meaningful way, it’s disappointing, it would be cool if you could use it to repair walls in front of enemies and block them from shooting your or maybe even bisect them or embed them into walls but as it stands it inclusion seems to stem more from the necessity of having a destructible environment with a linear shooting game, which begs the question: why bother with the format at all? You also have two auxiliary abilities as a player, both use the same energy resource which regenerates with a cool-down. The first one is a basic force push ability which is good for knocking down enemies and the second is an AOE uppercut which suspends nearby enemies in zero G and makes them vulnerable, these play into the flow of combat. I don’t mind them but I think they should’ve been more powerful. Combat in this game, when it works is genuinely great and I think there’s a formula here that is potentially incredible, but it’s held back by a couple factors.

You start to prioritise targets, formulate strategies, and use the tools and abilities that the game provides then the game reaches its peak, however it’s short lived the game goes out of its way to roadblock you from doing this too often. Giant enemy nodes which have a ton of health and buff all enemies around it, these become priority #1 and deplete your resources immediately, the Magnet Gun is not very effective against them as it doesn’t target enemies which are too large, I also mentioned how the enemies crowd around the player in hordes, this can be fun however towards the finale the game is stupid with its spawning of enemies. Typically, enemies spawn from pods which can be destroyed but towards the end of the game pods appear everywhere, the giant node enemies appear all over the level and it becomes a mess of constantly spawning bullet sponge enemies that are best just walked through rather than bothering trying to fight them, it doesn’t help that the game gives you an asthmatic 3 second jog as a “sprint” option. What is with games of this era and giving you a shitty limited sprint? Why did people think this was a fun element? Whatever… at least the game has a good selection in its arsenal and with a few balancing tweaks and a solid gameplay loop I genuinely think this game could have been elevated into a much better experience. It's almost not worth mentioning but the game does have entirely forgettable vehicles segments, quite a few actually, these are glorified turret sequences where you shift around a walker with rockets and a machine gun or electric shock gun and do little to vary up the shooting galleries, in an open world game or even a game with just more open levels I would appreciate the inclusion of these vehicles segments but as they stand they didn’t do much to elevate the experience. If it seems like I’ve been bouncing around the gameplay and neglecting the story it’s because the story, plot and characters of this game are truly dreadful, I honestly am struggling to find a place to start with how terrible the narrative of this game is. Armageddon is a mess of tropey and poorly reasoned story threads held together with emotionally stunted characters. There are no memorable story moments, the characters learn nothing, the plot is simultaneously meandering but also proceeds at a breakneck pace with no downtime or reflection. Watching the events of this game unfold is like watching ocean waves crash against a cliff, a non-stop chaotic endeavour with no rhythm, fleeting and unending. Despite being only 6 hours long the game feels like it was padded and rushed, the script feels like it was written as a first draft, the dialogue is pure cringe and the performances of the VAs fall completely flat. I would go as far as saying that Armageddon makes gaming as a medium appear less legitimate as a narrative artform because it’s embarrassing schlock, some basic elements of a 3-act structure would have made this game’s story more bearable to play through.

Darius is an extremely unlikeable emotionally stunted man-child who undergoes absolutely no drastic changes or dramatic arc in the story, he frequently blames himself for opening the bugs lair when he was tricked into it but then gets angry and defensive when others confront him about it. He tries to have witty banter with his AI companion SAM, but every attempt at humour falls so flat, it’s embarrassing to watch. There is a love interest in the form of Kara, she appears at the start of the game then reappears at the second half, she has no personality and no agency, her only purpose is to serve as motivation for Darius and stand around in revealing cleavage armour. It’s almost comical how much of a set dressing Kara is and when she and Darius finally embrace, she is killed off IMMEDIATELY and Darius gets slightly miffed about it. Adam Hale is the primary antagonist, halfway through the game he chases the player around a bit and then a cutscene occurs where his head just straight up falls off, you don’t even see how it happens, his vehicle gets disabled and then the next frame he’s just dead, it’s very unsatisfying and underwhelming. The game then shambles around until Darius decides to fix the terraformer with his repair ability and ventures into the bugs nest to kill the queen, why he couldn’t do this earlier I don’t know, matter of fact I really don’t understand what the terraformer even does. Without the presence of the terraformer people still breathe and live on mars, the only thing it seemed to affect was the weather and preventing dust storms so I guess it’s a geo-engineering or weather control device in that case? Why is there only one? Why can’t another one be built? The entire planet is dependant on this single tower with no supporting network behind it. It’s an entirely silly plot device and the game makes no effort to place stakes in it any further than it being the thing that the baddy wants to destroy.

The game is not aided by its lacklustre presentation, whilst the environments have some great lighting and the models look good the environments comprise of a bland series of caves and hallways, on reflection I really fail to remember what most of the game looks like aside from a few key areas such as a lava lake. I don’t think you could accuse the game of looking like a generic grey military shooter which characterised the 2010s, there are some very garish and distracting effects and bright colours all over the shooting arenas, but I don’t think this works in the games favour, as much as we criticise call of duty’s bland colour palate, I can distinctly remember levels from every game and a variety of different desert, forest, and urban environments. Red Faction Armageddon is severely lacking in variety in its levels and the amount of blooming garish colours really makes the combat have less clarity and feedback.

Some people might be tempted to say the story doesn’t matter so long as the gameplay is there, I disagree completely. As an experience, this game does not hold up to scrutiny in its narrative and it hurts the game badly. Compare this to ‘Gears of War’ which is a similar third person shooter. On paper Armageddon comes out on top of Gears in the gameplay department but Gears is the much more beloved game by the gaming public and I also think Gears is a better experience. Characters in Gears talk to each other in downtime, they have history and they show some emotion, they all have reasons why they fight and find themselves in their situation, they are military meatheads but they have emotions and purpose that drives them and they don’t make attempts to be zany or throw out quips (well Baird does but fuck Baird) The voice actors in Gears of War give a much more structured and convincing performance with a better script and the quality of the writing far exceeds anything in Armageddon, all of this adds up into an emotional and memorable experience, to be clear I don’t think Gears of War is a particularly amazing story or a ‘great’ game but it goes to show just how much a solid narrative foundation can elevate a below-average game into something worth playing for a lot of people. Armageddon is not worth playing, it’s derivative and dull. The occasional flash of a creative combat system does nothing to change the fact that this game is a mess, I really wish we could have gotten a true successor to Guerrilla using some of the tools included in Armageddon, imagine a destruction centred open world game with a powerful magnet gun and repairing mechanic. I get the sense that this is not the game that the developers wanted to make, it’s a very half-baked attempt at a third person shooter and it’s frustrating because you developers were clearly very talented and competent, the lighting and environments are well crafted, the weapons are varied and fun and the enemies are painstakingly animated. My final verdict on this game is thus: Play Guerrilla instead.