If you’re familiar with the Red Faction series, then you know Mars as
a dangerous place where the regimes are oppressive and the building
codes are lax. In Red Faction: Armageddon, alien infestation replaces
armed uprising as the series takes on a new tone. This third-person
shooter may tell an unremarkable tale and lack the freedom of its
open-world predecessor, Red Faction: Guerrilla, but Armageddon serves up
a fresh new batch of creative mayhem with extensive destructibility and
a devastating array of weapons and powers. Blasting your way through
hordes of aliens and wreaking merry havoc on the overrun human
infrastructure is an entertaining endeavor, but it’s the ingenious and
versatile magnet gun that takes the thrills of destruction to new
heights. Whether you’re soldiering solo in the single-player campaign or
staving off an enemy onslaught with friends online, Red Faction:
Armageddon provides a lot of great ways to indulge your destructive
desires.
The events of Red Faction: Armageddon take place two generations
after those of Red Faction: Guerrilla, so while fans can spot
connections between the two games, they are little more than historical
references. The most pertinent fact is that you play as Darius Mason,
grandson of Guerrilla’s protagonist, Alec Mason, and like his ancestor,
Darius is a man of action, not words. After a brief prologue, he gets
caught up in a deadly alien outbreak that threatens every human on Mars,
and his quest to save the day drives the rest of the campaign. The
cutscenes that chronicle the alien outbreak may look nice, but they tell
an uninspired story full of action-movie cliches. The profanity-laden
dialogue might make you smirk from time to time, but don’t expect to get
much out of the boilerplate plot.
