Average
Armageddon has two primary game modes. The main campaign has gone from an open-ended, Grand Theft Auto-style game to a strictly linear, close-quarters, and poorly plotted mess. And then we have Ruin mode, which is less of a game and more of a virtual toy: You're unleashed on a world full of structures, and you can destroy the hell out of them -- either on a minute-long timer, or with no time limit at all. The more you destroy, the more cool weapons you unlock to cause yet more havoc. It's incredibly fun in short bursts, but without any overarching goals or real sense of rewards, it's really more of a time-waster than an honest-to-goodness game in its own right.
Nevertheless, it's a hell of a lot more fun than the campaign, which is truly terrible for a variety of reasons... not the least of which is the fact that it consists of doing the same thing in the same types of rooms against the same enemies ad infinitum. Or seemingly infinitum... or actually just really, really longitum. See, the beginning of the game has these fanatics blow up Mars' terraformer, which somehow doesn't cause people to suffocate and die, but does cause the hero to have to delve into the planet's caves and inadvertently unleash an alien menace onto the unsuspecting human population. Yeah, who cares, right? If only Cohagen would just give these people their air, all would be well. Dammit, Cohagen!
But anyway, the problem with these alien menaces is that they're all the damn same. You fight bigger and badder versions of them as you progress, but for the most part, it's just iterations of the same thing. You've got your little ankle-biter enemies, your big hulking brutes, your ranged guys, and your quick-as-hell wall jumpers. That's... pretty much it, excepting the occasional boss or two. This is also true of the level maps, which consist almost entirely of small chambers connected to each other by narrow corridors, none of which you can pass through without having to deal with more waves of boring enemies. On the plus side, you get some pretty nifty gear with which to do said dealing. I especially dug the magnet gun, a weapon that allows you to shoot a piton into something -- be it an enemy or a piece of terrain -- and then shoot an opposite-charged piton into something else, dragging the two objects into each other. You can pin enemies to walls, bury them in rocks or debris, or throw them off cliffs quite easily this way, and it's a ton of fun. Also neat: the upgraded Nanoforge, with which you can now reconstruct stuff you've destroyed... allowing you to, say, break down a wall, run inside the gap, and reconstruct the wall. Instant cover!
A lot of the other weapons -- like the singularity cannon and the slice-and-dicing plasma beam -- are pretty cool too, but what sucks about the weapons in general is Armageddon's ridiculously overpowered auto-aim. I know console controls don't impart quite the same level of finesse as a keyboard and mouse, but this is ridiculous: Pressing the left shoulder button literally snaps the reticule onto a nearby enemy and tracks him. All you need to do is pull the right trigger, and voila! Alien soup. It is, of course, possible not to use this if you don't want to, but the fact that it was included at all speaks to how haphazardly designed the game is. It's too easy with it enabled, and too difficult without it. That's just poor design.
It even crops up in Armageddon's multiplayer, a cooperative survival mode called Infestation, where you and up to three friends face off against endless waves of bad guys. Sure, it's fun for a while with a team of good buddies... but not being able to face off against others is a drag, and the game doesn't really reward teamwork in the way that other, better co-op shooters do. That is, enemy attacks won't incapacitate lone wolves: You can effectively act as a one-man alien-killing machine if you want, as help from your buddies extends only as far as reviving them from prone/near-death status. And cooperative goals in these multiplayer missions don't extend beyond simple survival, unlike in, say, Bulletstorm, where you're tasked with team-killing bad guys in interesting ways.
See, the real issue here isn't so much that Armageddon is a mediocre game -- which it is -- rather that it's such a letdown after its excellent predecessor. I'm not sure why Volition tried to reinvent the wheel here, but (while Armageddon's got some good ideas) it was a major mistake to do so. Ah, well... if this one kills Red Faction, maybe Volition will finally make another FreeSpace game. I can dream, can't I?
