Red Faction: Armageddon

The very first thing you notice when you play Red Faction: Armageddon is how incredibly tight the camera is on the main character. He takes up way too much of the screen and it makes gameplay so much more difficult and stressful. It becomes even more stressful when the game just has seemingly random difficulty spikes. Having too many enemies in the room can be an issue, but can feel rewarding when you defeat them all. Having too many big enemies that soak up your bullets like a sponge feels completely aggravating and unrewarding, especially when they also want to throw a ton of smaller enemies at you.

It's difficult for me to speak about the story, as I have never played a Red Faction game before. A lot of the more emotional elements of the story feel like they hinge on the fact that you may have previously played a Red Faction game so it feels really hard to judge something without complete context. I will say however, the final boss fight felt confusing and a bit forced in for the sake of having a boss enemy. It felt like it came almost out of nowhere.

The best part of this game is probably the weapons. Despite it being cool that Armageddon has completely destructible environments, it gets annoying very fast when enemies can just destroy the floor below you and drop you into lava. That's why the weapons, all of them very fun to use, really are the best part of the game. Each weapon feels like it does a lot of damage, and this is definitely the first time I've ever enjoyed using duel wield pistols. Movement also feels really good, especially rolling around.

I would not recommend this game for people who get overwhelmed with video games very easily. It is a lot happening all at once and can get very frustrating. Maybe give it a try if you want to try out some interesting weapons, but the story and other elements of the gameplay aren't really worth it.

In Armageddon, you play as a relative of Alec Mason from Red Faction: Guerilla. This time the game has switched from open-world, to a linear action game.

It’s a third person shooter, but it’s quite hard to play the standard way of hiding behind cover, given how easily it is destroyed. I usually preferred to keep moving, running and gunning, or simply trying to keep my distance and causing destruction from afar.

The main selling point of the game is the destruction. The great thing about the destruction is that if there is someone shooting from a building, you can blow the base of it to collapse it and send him tumbling down. In some places, you can strategically blow-up bridges to prevent enemies from reaching you.

You start off with a hammer and pistol but add loads of more interesting weapons to your collection across the game. You can choose any 4 weapons to carry with you, and there’s regular opportunities to switch your loadout. There’s the usual weapons like rifles, shotguns, rocket launchers, but then there’s plenty of futuristic ones which are very interesting. The nano rifle returns and disintegrates your target. There's even a black hole launcher that sucks anything nearby up and then explodes.

The Hammer is useful at the start of the game, but soon becomes obsolete when you get the Magnet Gun. To use the Magnet Gun, you shoot at one point then shoot at another to choose the “target” and “destination”, so this will pull the target to the destination. You can make enemies fly long distances, or tear parts of buildings to sweep across and cause more destruction in its path.

Excluding the Hammer and the Magnet gun, your weapons have a pretty limited amount of ammo, so you need to restock them using pick-ups. You switch out weapons a lot, especially earlier on. Later on, you can upgrade your clip sizes which reduces the need to switch out.

You can upgrade abilities at upgrade stations using salvage. This is collected from pick-ups, sometimes found when destroying buildings.

You start off with a Force-Push style move that knocks down enemies or collapses structures in front of you. I kept on forgetting that this move existed. There are some other abilities to unlock in the upgrade system, but I chose to focus on weapons.

Many of the enemies are really agile, and leap across walls. There’s wraiths that are invisible until they attack, but you know they are around due to the glitchy visual effect. There are some brute enemies which are slow, but have high health and deal strong attacks. In some areas, you need to destroy the spawn points to stop enemies from spawning in. You may also encounter these large tentacles that boost nearby enemy’s attributes, so need to be prioritised.

There’s some basic objectives like clearing out an area, destroying specific targets, collecting specific targets, but it ultimately comes down to the same gameplay. I thought the gameplay got less varied towards the end. There are some missions that feature Walkers which are like mech-suits which allow you to either fire rockets, or crush objects by dashing.

The environments are fairly repetitive. It’s pretty much different shades of red for the caves, then lots of dark-colours for the man-made structures. There’s lots of darkly-lit areas, but it never seemed scary - it’s an action game rather than horror.

The switch to a linear style means the gameplay is much more focussed and you aren’t distracted by basic collecting or side-missions. The game puts the focus on what makes the series great, which is the destruction. You can’t get lost even when there are branching paths due to the GPS system which places a dotted sequence to where you need to go.

You are able to rebuild things you destroyed. This mechanic is needed when you are allowed to blow up bridges, stairwells etc that would impede your own progress otherwise. Many fights come down to blasting and causing destruction in a small arena, then you may have to clean-up a bit in order to reach the exit.

The main game takes around 8 hours. There’s a horde mode which can be played in single or multiplayer. The DLC contains 4 missions, two in vehicles and two on foot, and mainly acts as a prequel. It’s not that exciting but features 2 guns that aren’t in the main game.

I think Armageddon is a decent action game, and is even more enjoyable if you show a bit of creativity in your destruction. I found using the Magnet Gun in certain sections was incredibly fun, and the gunplay felt more varied when you switched your loadout at regular intervals.

A huge step back from Guerilla. Instead of keeping the big, open word full of destructible environments they decided that the logical next step was to make most of the game take place in underground caves. Most of the time there's nothing for you to destroy, and when there is, it's usually a set of stairs you'll have to repair 3 minutes later to progress.
The entire game is incredibly linear and they do not let you explore the world to find different playstyles. Don't bother with this game.

wow i really hate this game. its designed so fucking poorly you can literally run past 90% of the entire game without firing. the entire game is a clusterfuck, 1000000 insect bugs all at once shitting out pew pew lazer colors all over the god damn screen, annoying as fuck rag doll physics from the bigger enemies when they hit you, the weapons are bland as hell, nothing in the entire game feels good to play. the forced on rails sections are god damn awful, the mech and 'flying' section is pathetic. the story is SHIT, i skipped every fucking cutscene, who cares?

bugs are the most boring fucking shit tier enemy design choice ever. whos STUPID idea was it to make almost every enemy a bug and THEN make the bullet sponges??? not to mention theyre always on the walls above your head and shit and its just annoyign as hell to fight them. they do a red lazer homing-lock on attack that is the most annoying thing ever. i have nothing good to say about this steaming pile of shit. definately below average. its painful to play. the ONLY good thing I can say about it is I managed to beat the entire game in one evening due to running past every enemy and skipping cutscenes. Fuck this.

4/10