Red Faction: Guerrilla bucked the first-person tradition of Volition’s previous Red Faction and Red Faction 2 shooters by letting players loose in an open-world sandbox environment while pulling the camera view out to a third-person perspective. Guerrilla continued the series’ signature world destruction feature, however, but vastly improved this aspect by allowing players to literally bring buildings and structures crashing down by removing their supports, or simply by smashing them to bits, piece by piece.

Volition’s latest shooter, Red Faction: Armageddon, once again bucks the series’ trends by placing you in a more linearly constructed world (rather than a wide open space) to provide much more focussed gameplay and a stronger narrative than Guerrilla.

Epic world destruction capabilities are still (very well) represented, and while there are stretches of time where you’ll find yourself plodding through the same gameplay sequences, all is forgiven when the action ratchets up and the alien-shooting intensifies, and you’ll find quite a bit of gameplay variety to keep you interested until the very end.

The events of Red Faction: Armageddon kick off with a desperate assault on a Terraformer, a massive facility on Mars that refines the atmosphere of the planet to allow people to live (and breathe) on the surface. Playing as Darius Mason (grandson of Red Faction: Guerrilla protagonist Alec Mason), you and a team of Red Faction operatives storm the building not to capture it, but reclaim it and save it from destruction by a group of cultists lead by supreme bad guy, Adam Hale.

Unfortunately for Mason and the Red Faction, Hale and his group successfully disable the Terraformer, and with nothing to keep Mars liveable above ground, the huge colony occupying the planet is forced to live underground. Fast forward a few years, and the subterranean colony of Bastion has been carved out and Mason has traded in his Red Faction weaponry for high-powered mining equipment, doing work-for-hire operations to help others dig deeper into Mars to collect resources and retrieve artefacts.

It’s during one of these operations that Mason unwittingly disturbs an ancient race of Martian creatures which lose no time in overrunning Bastion, forcing the colony’s inhabitants to once again flee for their lives. It’s up to Mason, then, to uncover the mystery behind the race of aliens and the cultists’ bizarre goings-on, deal with angry colonist who want answers, and fight back against the horrific alien menace to force the creatures back to the depths from whence they came.

The story of Armageddon is furthered by Mason’s banter (at times witty) with a piece of gear called the Situational Awareness Module, or SAM, which feeds you objectives, directions and recommendations (often rejected by Mason) on how to tackle dangerous situations. Detailed and well-acted cinematics also do their part to tell us more about the world of Armageddon as well as the various characters involved in the adventure, while hidden audio logs flesh out the periphery of the narrative as everyday people can be heard in these recordings speaking about mysteries, or screaming out as they’re attacked by ‘something.’

The gameplay of Red Faction: Armageddon will be familiar to third-person shooter connoisseurs with the game’s familiar over-the-shoulder aim-and-shoot action, and developer Volition has included a very helpful ‘snap’ mechanic to let you aim at targets more easily (action game veterans may want to turn this off, however, as you might find yourself overcompensating while aiming, with wasted ammunition as a result).

At all times, you’ll have access to one of four weapons, assignable to one of four slots (accessed with the d-pad), and projectile weapons range from standard rifles, rocket launchers, pistols and shotguns, to more exotic fire power including weapons that instantly vaporise enemies, laser guns, and a rifle that shoots out your very own black hole (which sucks enemies into its influence and detonates with a satisfying implosion). While one weapon may be better suited to certain situations than others, or more effective, each of them is inordinately fun to use and feel punchy and rewarding to fire.

While these armaments are all successful at protecting you from nasties, it’s the non-projectile weapons and abilities that will put you over the edge during combat. You may start the game with the simple (but brutal) Maul Hammer and a powerful melee punch, but you’ll soon move on to better abilities. Abilities like Impact (to forcibly shove enemies away), Shockwave (to send enemies flying and floating into the air) and Shell (to form a protective dome around yourself to stave off projectile attacks).

All of these skills are made possible by technology called the Nano Forge. Worn on the wrist, the Nano Forge allows you to reconstruct broken equipment and structures to solve mild puzzles and open progression paths to further… whoa, wait! Reconstruct? We’re getting way ahead of ourselves here!

Red Faction: Armageddon is, to a certain extent, all about the destruction of buildings, walls, equipment, bridges, catwalks, silos, stalactites and stalagmites and almost anything else you can see (we’ll get to the enemy destruction part a little later).

While traversing the caverns of an ancient bioluminescent network of underground tunnels, walking through the metallic halls and hallways of military installations, crashing around makeshift colonist grottos, or plodding through an oppressive rocky desert during a violent electric sandstorm above ground, there will be opportunities to destroy everything.

The destruction capabilities in Armageddon are remarkable indeed (my review notes for the game are littered with the word ‘impressive’), and the developers have enabled players to effortlessly carve holes in walls simply by taking the Maul Hammer to them, unleashing a wave of Impact, or squeezing off a few rounds from your weapons. Structures, too, are easily scrubbed from the world by removing their supports (or entire walls), and all you need to do is stand back (way back) and watch as a building crumbles and crashes to the ground with surprising realism (and the expected camera shake and huge plumes of dust).

There are times when your chosen target for annihilation stubbornly remains standing despite the very real forces of gravity, but for the most part these demolition runs are quite realistic. Fun!

It’s not until you gain access to a very key piece of equipment that this destruction factors into core gameplay and combat: The awesome Magnet Gun! With this weapon in your arsenal, you’re able to maximise your damage by targeting what you want ruined or torn apart with one shot, and then targeting where you want that piece of building/bridge/scaffolding/boulder to move towards with another shot. In no time at all, a chunk of a wall, for example, will rocket across a room simply because you targeted that wall and a location on the other side of a cavern.

Playing around with the Magnet Gun provides endless entertainment as not only can you make buildings collapse in on themselves (target its wall and then its interior), but you can also effectively use it to lob mounds of junk (and explosives) at the game’s range of enemies to damage and obliterate them. Similarly, you can send enemies themselves flying into a jagged ceiling by targeting them with the Magnet Gun’s two-part mechanism.

Have we spoken about the enemies in Armageddon yet? Not really?

The range of foes, beasts and creatures in the game isn’t immense, but they each compliment one another well in groups, with small and quick acid-spitting bugs, bipedal energy throwing aliens, gigantic, plodding brutes that project volatile balls of energy, teleporting creatures, as well as gun-toting humans. You may face a mechanical monstrosity or two. Combat is also switched up with the appearance of organic structures that imbue aliens with extra health, while spawning egg sacks allow a continuous supply of enemies to enter into the world (until you destroy that sack, of course).

While the story of Red Faction: Armageddon is successful in drawing you further into the game, at some point varied and interesting gameplay must take over to keep you engaged, and unfortunately it takes quite a while for this title’s pace to pick up and get you past standard run and gun action.

When the pace does ratchet up, however, you’ll find yourself piloting a devastatingly powerful mechanical exo-suit (which can tromp through the world and make things explode), a few different spider-like ‘walkers’ (able to stroll through buildings without noticing and cause extreme destruction) and even a flying machine (that floats and zooms – in equal measure – through caverns and can unload powerful volleys of explosive death).

These sections mix up the variety of gameplay in Armageddon alright, but there are still times when you’ll be performing the same actions (running and shooting the same aliens) for just too long, and completing the same kinds of objectives (‘Clear the Room,’ for example) a few too many times, which leads to one (potentially) fatal flaw in this title: the game design sin of forcing players to make their own fun.

Red Faction: Armageddon is a sandbox game, through and through, and doesn’t need the open-world environments of other sandbox games to let players lose on enemies with a wide range of weapons and abilities. You can choose to take down a collection of creatures with your rifle, then switch to a rocket launcher to bring a building crashing down on another group of aliens, before bringing out the Magnet Gun to send enemies flying into the air, followed up by the removal of the very floor from under yet another set of crawlers to help them on their way to a fiery death in a river of lava below, all capped off by a few up-close-and-personal melee attacks with your Impact and Shockwave abilities. Using Shell during all of this is also recommended.

But you could also just stick to your rifle and kill all of the enemies that way, with the occasional lob of a grenade or rocket. The availability of ammunition caches (or lack thereof) will restrict you to some extent, but for the most part you don’t have to destroy anything, defeating the purpose of this feature’s inclusion. It’ll help you collect salvage (which is used to upgrade your weapons and abilities), but this commodity is sourced in other ways, too.

If you do take advantage of the sandbox nature of Armageddon, however, you’ll be rewarded for your efforts with that rare little thing called ‘fun,’ rather than with pure gameplay rewards. Watching the chaotic results of your own destructive actions (as structures collapse into a heap, enemies fly across the screen, explosions detonate sending objects careening about, and buildings shatter) is extremely satisfying – this kind of pure amusement is something that’s missing from a lot of games these days!

Despite my oafishly hypercritical ways, it’s difficult to find severe faults with Red Faction: Armageddon. The singleplayer campaign is lengthy, the action is intense and incredibly solid throughout, the story is intriguing to the end and the game’s sandbox nature allows for all kinds of unexpected fun. Add to this a discrete ‘Ruin’ mode (that tasks you with causing as much destruction and devastation as possible in a time limit) and an ‘Infestation’ multiplayer mode (a four-player diversion that challenges you and three others to survive an onslaught of increasingly difficult waves of enemies), and the offering is rounded out nicely.

Then, once you’ve finished the campaign you’re able to unlock new weapons (including the super powerful Mr. Toots) and buy cheats and visualisation modes to add a completely new spin to the game, which adds up to immense replay value.

The biggest fault I can find with Armageddon is the game’s unbalanced pacing which results in extended periods of repetitive gameplay, without any injections of variety to spice things up. If you take advantage of your capabilities for destruction, however, and indulge in (and experiment with) the vast array of weaponry at your disposal, even this gripe is minimised.

Red Faction: Armageddon is an extreme action romp with a great sense of scale to the story and impressive gameplay escalation – seek it out for a rewarding, fun and explosive time!

Purchase: