Red Faction: Armageddon: There's still life to be found on the red planet

Formats: Xbox 360, PS3 and PC

Developer: Volition, Inc.

Publisher: THQ

Release date: June 10th

Age Rating: 15 BBFC / 18 PEGI

Price: £49.99 RRP (Xbox 360 and PS3), £39.99 (PC)

It's back to Mars for the fourth instalment of the critically acclaimed Red Faction series and to long-term fans, it's definitely not going to be a disappointment.

Having never played any Red Faction games in the past, I went in not knowing what to expect and I was pleasantly surprised with what I saw.

The game itself is set in 2170, on a terraformed red planet, which has been colonised by humans. But a group of cultists, lead by the main antagonist, Adam Hale, destroyed the terraformer, rendering the surface of the planet uninhabitable forcing the colonists underground.

You play as Darius Mason, who makes it his mission to track down Hale and the cultists.

The gameplay itself is much like your typical third person action shooter, and you can't diverge at all from the set course the game has put in place with a GPS system even guiding you where to go.

However, the game is made by the damage you can cause to the environment as almost everything is destructible, meaning you can wipe out entire waves of enemies using a  magnet gun by sending a building crashing down on top of them.

With it being possible to turn anything into nothing more than a pile of rubble, you can sometimes find yourself cut off from your next objective, but a clever feature is that you can rebuild any thing you can destroy.

As you progress in the game you encounter different enemies, which mean you have to change strategies in how to defeat the oncoming hordes, keeping the game fresh even after many hours of play time.

This is helped by relatively lengthy boss fights being placed sparingly throughout the game as well as levels where you are put in control of vehicles, which is nothing out of the ordinary but does help to spice up the gameplay a bit.

A downside to this game is the multiplayer, which is limited to taking on wave upon wave of enemies along with three friends, which is no real change from the single-player.

Whilst Red Faction: Armageddon is nothing spectacular in any sense, it is undoubtedly fun and is easy to pick up and play whether you have played any of the other titles in the series or not.