Red Faction: Armageddon

Generations after Red Faction: Guerrilla, Mars’s surface has become uninhabitable and its people live below ground. Red Faction: Armageddon follows Darius Mason, Alec Mason’s grandson, as an alien outbreak spreads through the settlements. Its directed third-person campaign combines firefights with destructive weapons and a Nano Forge that can also rebuild damaged structures.

Red Faction: Armageddon shifts the series from Alec Mason's open-world uprising to the later life of his descendant, Darius. After the Terraformer is destroyed, Mars can no longer support people on its surface, so human settlements move into caverns and underground facilities. Darius is a working-class Martian with ties to the Red Faction, and the crisis that drives the campaign begins when hostile creatures emerge from below and overwhelm Bastion, a major settlement. The outbreak soon threatens the scattered communities that remain. Darius is caught up in the disaster and sets out to protect human survivors as the invasion spreads. The story acknowledges the earlier rebellion through Alec and the Mason family history, but its immediate conflict is a survival campaign against an alien threat rather than another fight to remove the Earth Defense Force from power.

Most of the campaign takes place in tunnels, caverns, settlements and industrial spaces beneath the Martian surface. The route between objectives is more directed than Guerrilla's surface-wide map, though some larger chambers create room to move around a fight and use the surrounding structures. Darius follows mission objectives through these connected areas, encountering alien groups, human survivors and the remains of a society reshaped by the Terraformer's failure. The built environment is more than scenery: beams, walkways and walls can be broken during a fight, changing lines of fire and the cover available to either side. In some encounters, the player can use destruction to collapse a route or bring part of a structure down on enemies. The underground setting narrows the journey into a sequence of combat spaces, while still allowing the player to use the physical layout as part of each engagement.

Combat combines a conventional third-person shooter arsenal with weapons designed around the series' destruction systems. The shotgun and assault rifle cover familiar close- and mid-range roles, while the Rail Driver provides a scoped shot, and the Charge Launcher attaches explosives that can be detonated remotely. Other tools include the Nano Rifle, which disintegrates many materials, and weapons such as the Plasma Cannon, whose shots drive through objects with destructive force. The Magnet Gun uses a two-target sequence: mark one object, then mark a second, and magnetic force pulls the first toward the second. That lets Darius turn debris, enemies or pieces of a structure into moving hazards, shifting the fight from aiming only at hostile bodies to choosing a collision that changes the whole space. Its ammunition is not the limiting resource described for ordinary guns, so it can also be used to dismantle structures as the player moves through a level.

The Nano Forge gives Darius powers that extend beyond firing weapons. Its abilities draw on a regenerating energy supply and can be unlocked or improved as the campaign progresses. Shockwave sends nearby enemies into a suspended state, leaving them vulnerable while Darius attacks; Berserk increases weapon damage temporarily; and a protective Shell blocks incoming projectiles while threatening foes caught within it. The Force ability pushes enemies and can topple structures. Repair works in the opposite direction from demolition: damaged or destroyed man-made structures can be rebuilt, restoring walls, bridges or other parts of the space. That ability lets the player choose to destroy cover for an offensive opening and later restore it for protection, or rebuild a route after an explosive fight. The Forge's energy recharges over time, so the player weighs when to spend it on crowd control, defence, force or reconstruction rather than using every power continuously.

Salvage connects exploration and destruction to character development. It can be collected from damaged structures and from containers found around Mars, then spent at upgrade stations on new Nano Forge abilities and improvements. Additional upgrade tiers become available as the story advances, and new weapons picked up during the single-player campaign are placed in weapon lockers, where Darius can arrange his equipped selection. Health recovers gradually when he is outside combat, while Nano Forge energy also returns over time; ammunition, by contrast, depends on the weapons carried and supplies found along the route. Audio logs scattered through the world preserve accounts from before and after the Terraformer's collapse, adding civilian and historical context to the immediate crisis. These systems give the campaign a steady rhythm of moving through a mission, searching the spaces around it, collecting useful salvage and returning to an upgrade station when the next tier opens.

Outside the campaign, Armageddon separates survival combat from destruction scoring. Infestation is an objective-based mode for one to four players, built around successive waves of enemies; its combat arenas shift attention toward staying alive while completing the task for each round. Ruin instead gives destruction its own goal: damage human-made structures to build a score, either in a competitive challenge or in casual free play. The player selects a map and uses the same arsenal and structural physics that appear in the campaign. Infestation measures progress against attacking waves, while Ruin measures how much damage can be caused in an arena.