It's been a few years (actually a few decades) since the events that transpired in Guerrilla. The survivors of the events on Mars have retreated to the underground caverns. However it looks like someone has disturbed something that was buried under the surface. For the first time in the franchise, the player will not only have to deal with human enemies but with a kind of alien that looks like a mix of a big lizard and a big bug.

Thankfully you have some new tools that you can use to combat these new foes. Oh sure you still have weapons that can blow stuff up real good and the Geo Mod engine is still one of the best, if not the best, game engines that emphasizes destructible environments. But this time your arsenal also has something that Volition calls the Nano Forge. Instead of blowing stuff up to pieces. the Nano Forge actually reforms a structure from the broken pieces it finds until whatever it was supposed to be in the first place is back and good as new. It's kind of like turning back time except that there's no temporal effects involved.
That doesn't mean there are not new ways to make a lot of debris in the game. Red Faction: Armageddon also gives you another cool device to use, the Magna gun. In the E3 2010 demo we got to see the gun fire at a truck parked near a large structure. Then the gun was fired at the structure itself. The magnetic link was then established that allowed the truck to lift off into the air and then careen into the building, shattering a large portion of it. A few more well placed Magna gun strikes brought the building down in spectacular fashion. The demo also showed that the Nano Forge and the Manga gun can be used together for some truly devastating attacks.

Oh and much like the demo of F.E.A.R. 3 that we also got to see at E3 2010 the Red Faction Armageddon demo also featured our protagonist entering a one-man mech and making a mess of the place. Wearing the one-man mech suit is apparently the new black in shooter games this year.

The gameplay certainly recalls the original Red Faction game and the new alien factor is an interesting twist that none of the games have had before. Yet we still have a lot of questions about this new game. For one thing the Geo Mod graphics, in terms of visual looks, really look dated compared to most of the first person shooters we got to see at E3 this year (including THQ's own game Homefront). We also don't have an idea of where this whole alien storyline is going to go. And multiplayer? There's no word yet on any such features in this new game.

Red Faction: Armageddon's return to the setting of the first game is certainly welcome (underground caverns show off the Geo Mod's destruction better than stuff on the surface) and the alien twist could lead to something interesting. But our concerns about the visual look of the game are genuine and we are still awaiting word on this game's multiplayer options. Thankfully Volition and THQ have a lot of time to deal with these issues as Red Faction Armageddon isn't due for release until sometime in March 2011.