Destroy & Repair In Red Faction: Armageddon

When the teaser trailer for Red Faction: Armageddon appeared last month it looked a bit odd. Set underground, it looked rather troublingly like a corridor shooter. And after the magnificent Red Faction: Guerilla, it would be such a shame to see the series take that turn. However, the five minutes of game footage revealed at Comic Con show something else entirely. I was still worried for the first minute or so - claustrophobic setting, and stupid crawly-creatures to laboriously kill. And then the man utters the magic words: "Magnet Gun".

It's a gun that grabs any piece of the scenery, and then throws it violently toward anything else. Which means you can throw a chunk of bridge at your enemy, or use bits of one building to destroy another. Because destroying buildings is still key. Here something called the Infestation has rendered some buildings infected with Martian badness, so it's your job to demolish them. That's what we want to hear.

The weapons you can see demonstrated below seem splendid, and reveal the next twist. You can repair that which you have destroyed, using this tactically as defence against onslaughts.

I'm still deeply concerned by the volume of enemies. Tiresome, ragged attacks from irritants, triggered by the game's primary fun - destroying things. So all destruction will carry the taint of an inevitable fight with what even the developer appears to struggle to kill. Hopefully they'll balance this correctly in time for the March 2011 release.