

The guns have the oomph that makes me feel like a badass. Even when I'm just blasting holes for enemies to fall into, or blowing the crap out of the world, I feel powerful. Moments like this are pure, unadulterated fun, and where Armageddon shines. You can sling enemies into walls (or sling walls into enemies) and watch as they go crashing through the environment, causing secondary explosions.


The best example of this is the Magnet Gun, which allows you to attach a magnet to one object, shoot another magnet at something else, and then watch as object A flies to object B. Lots of games let you blow things up, but in Armageddon the environment is a weapon, a playground for you to manipulate, contort, and kill your enemies. What Red Faction: Armageddon gets right is its use of environmental destruction. The dialogue is cheesy and the fates of the characters never seem important when the only time I get to see what they're like is a few seconds in between long sequences spent blowing the crap out of everything. Games like Uncharted prove there are good ways to create believable characters with a mix of cut-scenes and intermittent dialogue during gameplay, but Red Faction doesn't accomplish this at all. The story is told almost exclusively through cut-scenes that break up the missions, with characters that we're told to care about rather than those who are developed so that it occurs naturally. Or, at least, they would be dramatic if the story wasn't so forced. Along the way there's romance, betrayal, and several other dramatic tropes. As if that weren't enough, Mason gets manipulated and used several years later, being forced to fight an alien menacethat's unleashed onto Mars in a struggle to save the few surviving Martians. Darius isn't living up to his grandpa's great name, failing to stop Mars' terraformer from being destroyed by terrorists, and forcing humans underground after the surface becomes nearly inhospitable. You play as Darius Mason, grandson of the protagonist Alec Mason from Red Faction: Guerilla.

Play Armageddon is the fourth game in the Red Faction franchise.
