Red Faction: Armageddon—the latest in Volition’s series of destruction-centric shooters—picks up with Darius Mason, descendant of the previous entry’s protagonist, and the colonists of Mars trapped underneath the surface following the destruction of the planet’s terraformer.
To make matters worse, Darius has accidentally unleashed a horde of alien monsters that seek to… well, it’s not really clear what the aliens want. They do appear intelligent (intelligent enough to destroy machinery Darius is trying to use against them), but they possess no character or story to speak of, instead assuming the role of predictably mute monsters to turn into paste.
The story is soft and more than a little dumb at times, with a cast of bland characters that, though voice acted quite capably, don’t have a scrap of personality between them. One could argue that it’s refreshing not to be fighting yet another revolution in a Red Faction game, but I felt the title lost some of its identity by choosing to go the fairly standard alien invasion route.
Of course, the real cause for concern is the switch to the closed, scaled-down environments—moving away from what made Red Faction: Guerrilla such a success. With its new setting, Armageddon eschews the wide open expanses of Guerrilla for a series of tunnels and chambers. Darius will occasionally visit the surface, but always in closed environments.
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