Red Faction®: Armageddon™

I beat this back on launch, but had somehow forgotten just how terrible it was. Firstly, the good. Visually, the game is pretty, especially for the time of release. The destruction is on-par with Red Faction: Guerilla. Physics kills are satisfying. The reconstructor can be neat. Some of the weapons are designed very well. The music is serviceable. I had one crash, and the only bug I had otherwise was the game opening the pause menu every time it autosaved for some reason. Now, everything else: The gameplay is so samey and boring that it feels like a chore or a job to play through. The game isn't hard at all, your only deaths will be due to fall damage or complacency. Half the upgrades and guns you get are boring and useless, the other half will carry you through the entire game. The machinegun you start with, the rail driver, the magnet gun and the black hole gun combined with the power that will literally give you infinite ammo make the game a breeze. Most of the other weapons are BB guns by comparison. The story is utter nonsense. The technology on display, which was allegedly developed on Mars by either the civilians (who live in literal homeless camps), Red Faction (who exist solely to protect the civilians and fight cultists), or the Mauraders from Guerilla (who also live in homeless camps and have done so for about 50-60 years since the previous game) would make the Covenant from Halo blush. It's insane the amount of alien/future tech built that nobody seemingly knew about in the previous 3 games, or was built by one of the aforementioned factions in the last like, 50 years. It makes zero sense, and serves zero purpose to the plot or gameplay. The world could've looked like it did in RF1/RFG and it would've been much better for it. The "ruins" you visit are meant to be either old Ultor ruins from the first game, or made by the Mauraders. Neither of which make any sense. The ruins you will spend 80% of the game in look like alien structures from Alien/Prometheus, not something a bunch of desert dwelling raiders who don't shower, or the company that could barely provide beds for their guards and miners just 100 years ago. The visual design is all over the place, and doesn't feel like any of the Red Faction games that came before besides a few Ultor posters and EDF logos you might see. The enemies were meant to be the creations of Capek, one of the bosses from the first game. While, on paper, this would make an interesting twist on a Red Faction title, in practice it's just boring generic shooting. The enemies (which don't even look like the mutants from the first game, besides walking on 4 legs sometimes), are generic and boring. They glow different bright cheesy colors, flip around the environment, and shoot projectiles at you. A few of them are bigger and lumber around, but just take more bullets to kill. The only interesting enemies (the tentacles that fling objects) aren't a challenge. You'll be seeing the same enemy at least 100 times by the end of the game. You also fight some cultists, of which there are 3 types: A rifleman, a grenadier, and a big dumb guy. None of them are fun to fight, none of them are challenging. The game makes no effort to mix up the combat or have the enemies engage each other. Darius is childish and forgettable. His responses to what would be horrific and terrorizing scenarios are just bland comedy. He's dressed like Vin Diesel in Pitch Black for most of the game. He literally causes *two* world-ending, catostrophic events by being nothing short of a complete moron, and has the audacity to get attitude with the one person calling him out for the deaths of countless people on Mars. He is otherwise a generic soldier man, too cool for orders, and at one point punches a Colonel in the face for no reason and with zero consequences. SAM (your AI assistant) is sarcastic and rarely useful. The entire game could've had her dialogue cut entirely and it would've been the exact same game, besides some annoying robot smarting off. This was meant to be a sort of horror game, and the whole time you're cringing at the attempts at humor. The game somehow manages to drag itself out further than it ever deserved. Characters are introduced and killed off basically one scene after the other. The main bad guy dies about 1/3rd of the way through the game in a cutscene. Your femme fatale dies a little after to a random monster. You fight the "final" boss, only to discover there's a whole other level after this. The game is littered with long vehicle sections, turret segments, and other gameplay gimmicks that were old and tired when the game released, let alone today. I beat it in 9 hours, but it felt like 20. The game also has zero pacing. Each cutscene might drop you off in the next room, or into some battle out of the blue that you weren't introduced to. None of the cutscenes do much to push the story along, and the protagonist is just kinda along for the ride, bumbling his way towards what might be called an ending if we had zero standards or taste. The set piece that gets blown up at the beginning (the Terraformer) gets repaired in literally two minutes at the end. The year or so that Mars was hit with storms and radiation could've been undone in five minutes, but the protagonist and every other person on Mars was too stupid to realize they could've just fixed the thing with Mason's magical arm. Just like Red Faction 2 and the latter half of Guerilla, this game forgets what made the original great: The destruction. You can blow up and sling around pipes and walkways, but about halfway through the game the destruction pretty much disappears from gameplay entirely. There's zero point in blowing anything up or using the magnet gun when you have 4 other weapons that kill enemies faster, and you won't need to repair stairs/walkways to progress this way. There's other game modes, like multiplayer, New Game + and some challenges, but I could care less. Seeing that it costs 10x the amount for a cheat that gives you a black and white filter than it does to get the best upgrades in the game made me uninstall after one playthrough. Didn't even bother with the DLC, either. I can't imagine spending $7 more on the game would be worth anyone's time. The game wanted so bad to be the next Dead Space or Gears of War, while barely even considering that it's part of the Red Faction series. It's a Red Faction game in name only. Stick to Red Faction and Red Faction Guerilla, this one belongs in the trash with Red Faction 2.