Red Faction: Armageddon (2011)

Pro

• Magnet Gun is one of the most entertaining weapons ever.
• Solid graphics.
• Repairing power looks cool and offers more freedom.
• Player is far less fragile than in Red Faction: Guerrilla.
• Gathering scrap isn't an annoyance anymore.

Con

• Utterly obnoxious use of cutscenes and walking slowly while talking.
• Checkpoints despite this being the 21st century.
• Sound issues for many players.
• Very short (7 hours).
• Headache-inducing menu.
• Overly dark levels that feel oppressive in a bad way.
• Occasional flawed level design.
• Repair power is underused.
• Awful vehicle sections (excavator, lava boat).
• Lack of enemy variation.
• A few annoying enemies are bullet-sponges even with fully upgraded guns.
• Mostly boring skills.
• Completely linear.
• Moronic story.
• Due to ammo limitations you'll probably use the same guns throughout the entire game.

Conclusion

Red Faction Armageddon takes one step forward and three steps backward. It introduces a few nice elements but cripples the game by taking away player agency through constant cut scenes, linearity, imbalanced weapons/skills and some of the most boring vehicle sections ever. Red Faction: Guerrilla was more generic but it also offered more freedom, more fun and more excitement.

I never played Red Faction games before and bought this accidentally because it was cheap and I needed to pick something else in the shop to get discount. So I can miss the point of this game and hardcore fan can say something bad about me. Anyway, let's start.

> Destruction? In 2011? Do you even Crysis?
That's what I wrote about this game in my Steam "review", but, by the irony, destruction is not the point of this game. Like, at all.

This is a hallway shooter and mostly it placed somewhere in dark caves or something like that. This scenery can only bore you, and it does it well. Most of the time you fight with insect-like creatures or necromorphs (Dead Space influence?) or something like that. “Insects” usually take their position on the walls or ceiling. In the caves. Scenery ruins the whole destruction (no pun intended) feature here - when you’re in the caves, you can only use some ruins of buildings for your purpose. You literally feel the fresh air when you moving to the top, and rare encounters with humans are greeted with genuine joy - you now understand how bad things are.

Shoutout to the guns: they were interesting, fun to shoot and generally quite unique. Was it designers' idea or someone else, it's a great addition that makes the gameplay less tedious. There’s a repair feature, and I want to compliment it too - but it’s used only in situationary tasks like “Repair a generator”, “Repair three generators”, “Repair the road to move forward”. The last task is the most creative one here. I’m afraid that many people could’ve come up with something less banal. Dialogs with S.A.M. will make you smile, they’re not unique, but when everything’s boring as hell, these conversations save your interest for a little more.

The second half of the game is less boring, there’s more action and our hero have more skills and abilities. If you’ll survive first half, you’ll be rewarded. Anyway, it’s still boring.

The dark colour scheme conceals the good graphics, but it’s only a good level, nothing extraordinary. Technically it’s ok, you only wish that the destruction feature was used more creatively and more frequently. The short DLC uses it better, but it goes only for 1 hour.
__________

2 stars.
Guns here were the only extraordinary thing.