Red Faction: Armageddon

Red Faction: Armageddon leans hardest on its destructive combat, where tunneling through alien-infested spaces and blasting cover apart is the main attraction. By our assessment, that is also its clearest strength: the game likes to let firefights reshape the room, and that makes each encounter feel more physical than in many shooters. The catch is that the series’ old red-sand rebellion identity is pushed aside for a more linear monster-fighting setup, so it loses some of the rough frontier flavor people remember from earlier Red Faction games. In play it is straightforward, loud, and often about moving from arena to arena while wreckage piles up around you. It sits nearer to a scripted action shooter than to the open-ended destruction fantasy the name may suggest. Red Faction: Armageddon is for players who want explosions, cover destruction, and a brisk campaign, and it is less convincing if what you want is the broader Mars rebellion premise.