Honestly if not for some minor complaints Red Faction Armageddon would be a damn near perfect game. As it is, this is a strong contender for best game of the year for its fantastic mix of intense action, fun character customization that changes how you play the game, great graphics and all around fantastic gameplay experience. Even the minor flaws are easily ignored and most will likely not even notice them, as wrapped up in the game as they will be.
The action does start to drag in the last couple of hours...If you're excited by even the slightest hint of carnage, though, the rubblelicious Armageddon delivers. We absolutely got what we came for: an exciting sci-fi shooter with carnage galore and some of the most crazy-powerful guns we've seen in ages. [June 2011, p.50]
Although too linear and unrelated with the previous Red Faction: Guerrilla Games, it is a fun, intense and frantic game which is sometimes espectacular, with a great physics engine that allows dynamical destruction of the environments, although the game not always makes the most of it.
Although Armageddon excels in the destruction stakes, combining it with some adrenaline-pumping action and cool special abilities, it leaves you feeling empty with its less-than-enthralling story – well less-than-interesting really – and level after level of tedious objectives.
With Red Faction: Armageddon I got the sense that Volition was really excited about creating a few segments and merely obliged their responsibility to fill in the gaps. There was nobility to be found in breaking the core design away from the success of Guerrilla, but the shift in dynamic ultimately irrelevant in the final product. Armageddon can be fun, but its linearity casts it alongside other (and better) games rather than a bold new direction for the series.
Although the game has its merits, like an impressive environmental destruction, Volition's choice to turn the title into a pure third person shooter doesn't seem to have paid off the way it should have. A poor narrative and an excessive linearity are in fact two flaws that can hardly be ignored.
Red Faction: Armageddon is a perfectly functional third-person shooter, but there's nothing at all to recommend it. The design is incoherent on its own merits, even more so in the context of the series, and the narrative fares even worse.