Red Faction: Armageddon

Red Faction Armageddon delivers the usual - and even enhanced - amount of spectacular destruction and physics play, but we found the experience to be more limited than the previous game due to the linear gameplay and the removal of the great competitive multiplayer Guerrilla had. If you're a fan of the previous game, Armageddon will probably disappoint you; otherwise it's a solid third person shooter with a very satisfying destructive soul.

Red Faction: Armageddon is "digital playground" with some amazing toys, like the Magnet Gun and the Nano Forge abilities. There is no "open world" gameplay this time around, but the new, linear environments make this 10-hour long Campaign much more interesting. On the downside, there is no competitive Multiplayer and the survival-like mode, called "Infestation", won't provide enough online hours.

With a lot of help from the Magnet Gun, Red Faction: Armageddon has enough of that "summer blockbuster" feel to make you forget about Violations last outing.

Simply put, Armageddon doesn't deliver the same spectacular, over the top entertainment of its predecessor. The free roaming, completely stripped from this sequel, was clearly and important piece of the puzzle. As a simple third person shooter, the game doesn't work that well anymore, and you'll surely find much better products in the same genre.

Although Armageddon excels in the destruction stakes, combining it with some adrenaline-pumping action and cool special abilities, it leaves you feeling empty with its less-than-enthralling story – well less-than-interesting really – and level after level of tedious objectives.

Ultimately, Red Faction Armageddon isn't a bad game so much as it's a disappointment. While it achieves what it set out to do, providing a linear, set piece-based shooter reminiscent of early Red Faction games, it's a shame to see this kind of step back after the last game dared to take the series in an interesting new direction.

If Red Faction: Guerilla felt like a series approaching greatness, Armageddon has ceased that approach, and started apprehensively circling greatness. It's good, but it should have been better.

One of those middle of the road games which adheres to a familiar template closely enough to provide adequate entertainment in the short term but is unlikely to inspire any devotion. It falls over itself to make you feel like an unstoppable badass, but then rarely gives you the opportunity to show off.

In many basic ways, Armageddon is a superior game to Guerrilla. It makes strides in a number of key areas that are hard to ignore, including more polished visuals and a broader range of spectacular weapons and abilities. But ultimately, it manages to miss the mark when it comes to the core elements that made the open world game so great: freedom and ample opportunities to simply trash the game's world.

Armageddon's not bad, it's just plain. The game feels like Volition started from scratch, but accidentally threw out too much of what made the last game great.

The destruction is nice as expected, but the level design is simply a bit boring.

The open-world gameplay of Guerrilla is gone, and what's been put in its place is decidedly more of what you'd see in a more generic action game.

It still is, at its heart, a foundation of derivative shooter tropes dressed up with Red Faction's (fantastic) physics and weapons. It's a fun game and a worthwhile purchase if you're not hoping for more of Guerilla and you're not turned off by linearity.

Despite its forgettable story and pacing issues with the campaign, Red Faction: Armageddon is good fun for letting out your inner destructive child.

If it weren't for issues with pacing and repetitive environments during the first half of the campaign, Armageddon could really have become something memorable. Instead it's hard to think of it as anything but a forgettable third-person shooter where it's fun to explode everything to smithereens.

Armageddon can't help but feel like a poor cousin to the top games in the genre. It shines brightest when it's doing its own thing, but when it tries to fall in line with genre tropes, it comes up short.

With Red Faction: Armageddon I got the sense that Volition was really excited about creating a few segments and merely obliged their responsibility to fill in the gaps. There was nobility to be found in breaking the core design away from the success of Guerrilla, but the shift in dynamic ultimately irrelevant in the final product. Armageddon can be fun, but its linearity casts it alongside other (and better) games rather than a bold new direction for the series.

There are moments when it's quite good, but it's also a bit too derivative, the enemies are as dumb as a box of hair, and it relies too much on the coolness of the magnet gun and the ability to knock down a tower with a hammer.

I can't and won't say Guerrilla was a perfect game, but it was far and beyond more ambitious and entertaining than Armageddon.

Nice action-packed shooter in which we won't find nothing new but lots of enemies, guns and interesting stuff to have some fun for a while. It's a shame Vilition's use of a story that lack any interesting feature at all.

Ultimately, Armageddon feels like an opportunity missed. It feels like the series has taken two steps backwards after the promise shown by Red Faction Guerrilla, the focus moving away from destructible environments and coming to rest on generic shoot 'em up action.

It isn't that Red Faction Armageddon isn't a fun game; it's just not a very deep or involved one.

Although Red Faction: Armageddon offers one of the coolest weapons of the year, a good weapon mechanic and destructible environments, the game falls flat with an uninspiring single-player campaign and a short-lived multiplayer segment.

It's a shame that these excellent physics and novel weapons haven't been given a better showcase. [Issue#112, p.112]

Does nothing for the franchise whatsoever. [Issue#74, p.84]

Once again, Volition delivers exceptional tech, but fails to shape it into a truly engaging and sustaining experience.

Short of an outstanding visual appeal, and with a rather poor level design and uninspired story, Red Faction Armageddon won't be able to raise itself above the TPS usual crowd. But despite its shortcomings, the appeal of destructibility and of a very playable action remains efficient enough to see through the solo campaign. Multiplayer may be fun a couple of hours, but it's very forgettable.

Red Faction: Armageddon contains loads of potential: it has delightful weapons and allows for amazing amounts of destructibility. This potential hardly comes to fruition though, as the game degrades itself to a claustrophobic and cliché-filled hallway-shooter. A few fun vehicle-sections and extra game-modes save this title from getting an insufficient grade.

Although the game has its merits, like an impressive environmental destruction, Volition's choice to turn the title into a pure third person shooter doesn't seem to have paid off the way it should have. A poor narrative and an excessive linearity are in fact two flaws that can hardly be ignored.

Red Faction: Armageddon suffers from a linear and uninspiring level design that unfortunately drags down the fun a bit. But the destruction mechanics are as excellent as always.

Quotation forthcoming.

A polished and satisfying reflex shooter that removes meaningful decisions from the game and trivializes its own greatest technology.

Technically accomplished and mechanically sound. But unfortunately that's not enough in a world of Dead Spaces and Gears of Wars. Aside from marvelling at the odd collapsing building, there's little here to hold your attention for more than a few hours. It's not a bad game by any stretch of the imagination; it's just an entirely forgettable one.

Red Faction: Armageddon Halfway House - too many boarders with a bit of heart.

Its mechanics are sound but its design uninspired, failing to do any one thing better than the standout entries in the genre. And the few unique tricks it does have, its predecessor did better. After Guerrilla made such a resounding impact, it's a shame that the best you can say about this latest Red Faction is that it's just OK.

A better journalist might make a little comment here, just to wrap things up, about how you were fighting for freedom in Red Faction: Guerrilla, yet as a gamer you had it all along. Despite liberating Mars at the end of that game, find yourself more restricted than ever in the follow-up. I'm not that guy.

Everything Armageddon does, it does well, in the same way that a lobotomy victim might walk and talk just fine.

The real issue here isn't so much that Armageddon is a mediocre game -- which it is -- rather that it's such a letdown after its excellent predecessor.