Under any other circumstances I would consider Red Faction Armageddon a decent shooter. A third-person ‘get yo ass to underground Mars’ that makes use of some fantastic weapons and destructible environments to liven up its formulaic setting and story. Unfortunately the biggest issue I had with Armageddon is that it isn’t the sequel to Red Faction Guerrilla.

Playing as Darius, the grandchild to Guerilla’s Alex Mason, the game begins with an assault on the Mars terraformer. The giant industrial complex that is critical to the habitation of the Red planet and under attack by some dudes terriorist group.

Thanks to the bungling efforts of the Darius the terraformer is junked, forcing everyone underground as the planet above goes to hell. Fast-forward a little bit and at the end of the next level Darius screws up again, this time releasing the former inhabitants of Mars to make life even worse for everyone.

What I liked:

• The Magnet Gun – Without a doubt the most impressive weapon since the Gravity Gun has to be Armageddon’s Magnet Gun. With this piece of fine arse you can magnetically throw enemies or scenery into each other – sending pieces of Martian architecture ripping into Martian natives or other buildings with deadly fun. It’s the only feature that makes the campaign remotely bearable as you add creativity into the gameplay.

• Ruin mode – As there’s so little scope for destructibility within the main game Volition decided to create a mode purely for that. And guess what? It’s great fun. With leaderboards and a variety of maps this is the mode that makes Armageddon worthwhile – if they’d released this as a standalone PSN/Live title then it would be well worth 1200 points. Unfortunately for those renting the game it’s hidden behind a paywall. 400 points are required to unlock it and it seems obvious that everyone related to the project knew that this was the best part.

 

What I bloody hated:

• Setting: The open-world of Red Faction Guerrilla was a janky mess at times but it played to the destructibleenvironment motif like the Rite of Spring. Armageddon replaces this with dull, cavernous linear levels that neither look good or offer enough variety to keep things interested.

• Aliens: As generic as the environment is, it’s got nothing on the Martian natives that you’ll fight for 80% of the time. Quite frankly it’s near-impossible to remember what they’re like now, suffice to say that they move around irritating quickly, look dull and do nothing special. Simply forgettable.

• Visuals: When I first started Armageddon on the Xbox 360 the visuals were so bad I thought my settings had been screwed with. I actaully came out of the game and checked to see if I as running in 480P mode. I wasn’t. The really does look like a piece of shite on the 360. I even went back to Guerrilla for a couple of hours (to relieve the pain more than anything else) and yep, there it was, looking better than Armageddon by quite some distance. The PS3 version looks a little better and the PC wins by mile but it’s just about DX11 tessellation - it’s about style. With the setting being underground the game can’t help but look like a murky turd but there’s no attempt to do anything special with the lighting or any creative level design. It’s simply a poor looking game all round.

• Gameplay: God, it even hurts my head to write about how bored I was with the boring bits of the game. Nearly every level in shooters follows a standard path – you go through rooms of enemies, clear them out and move on – sometimes battling through waves of bad guys and sometimes they’ll be a bad turret section. Bosses will have glowing points on you need to hit. Armageddon does such a good job of showing these mechanics that you’ll see every encounter coming and every twist in the road ahead. It’s like Resistance 2, just without the scale. It’s that DULL.

 

The Judgement:

 

Aside from Ruin mode Armageddon fails to deliver on Guerrilla’s promises in the most generic and tiring manner. As a ordinary third-person shooter it has some redeeming qualities but the failure to creatively use the Geo-mod tech and dismiss the open-world qualities of its predecessor with such dullness is criminal. Rent it if you must but you’d be better off buying Guerrilla and reliving those destructible wet dreams all over again.

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