Played through nearly all of it last night with a friend.
They kept the concepts of Guerrilla, but tried to move it underground, and the result was sadly a pretty lame one.
Blowing buildings up is still awesome, and the magnet gun is absolutely cool, but the pacing and dynamics of the gameplay just withered away in this one.
You run around caves, you shoot alien bug type things, you run around a makeshift colony/city, you shoot alien bug type things, rinse, repeat.
There was almost no deviation in this formula during the entire game. Every few hours there would be a vehicle segment where you were basically given god mode and the objective was just to hold down your "fire" button while moving from point a to point b. These usually happened right after the few "Boss" battles in the game.
I use the term loosely because aside from having more health, there wasn't anything really interesting or special about them. Only one of them really made use of the environment a bit more than normal, but it still didn't give you the sense that this was an important fight.
The graphics are pretty well done. The character models look good, the lighting is detailed, and the effects of the weapons are very satisfying. The audio is there, it's not bad, but it doesn't really stand out either. There was one track that had a very cyberpunk feel to it, almost straight out of Blade Runner or Tron. The voice acting was also fairly well done. Darius Mason (your character) has witty banter with his AI sidekick and you can tell that effort was put into reading the lines even if the script was dull and cheesy.
The biggest issues with the game are the fact that they didn't really expand upon their theme of destructibility. Armageddon felt more like a "sidegrade". The weapons were improved upon, and there are over a dozen of them in the SP, and they added a few extra moves and features that are related to the gravity/physics play, but at the same time the environments which you take part in destroying took a turn for the worse. They could have added another layer of physics manipulation, or even puzzles based around it, but instead they crammed the world of Guerrilla into a hallway shooter.
The game on its own merits is definitely good and playable. The story is utterly forgettable b-movie schlock, but it doesn't impact your experience in a negative way really, it's just "there". If you didn't know Guerrilla existed, you would probably be pretty impressed by this title, and for fans of Guerrilla, it's still an enjoyable romp through Mars' subterranean world (with a few surface missions here and there). Overall it's mostly disappointing to see them stay stagnant with the series after Guerrilla was such a pleasant surprise.
