Let’s talk about those aliens for a bit. They make the game feel quite different from Guerrilla, and not just because they l𝓀ook different from human enemies. There’s a decent variety of the buggers, but they don’t just all mindlessly rush you. There are small melee creatures, but all of the others use projectiles, so the game remains a proper shooter. There are sniper aliens that leap around and cling to walls, there are invisible aliens that disorient you with hallucinatory effects, and there are huge aliens that throw radiating globs and then kamikaze at you and explode when they get low on health. Since this is a corridor shooter and the game wants you to feel the alien threat as a massive swarm, you will shoot a shit ton of them before the end of the game. This again makes Armageddon very different from Guerrilla, which had you just tooling around in vehicles for a huge part of the game.

Above: The Exo suit is kind of boring to look at, but it's not boring to drive

One problem with the alie♏n designs is that they don’t look different enough. We understand that they were designed to look like they’re all related to each other, but their design differences feel aesthetically redundant: they’re all claws, spines, and glowing bits and frankly there were a couple of times when a brand new alien was introduced in a cutscene and we actually said “Wait, why did that alien get a cutscene? We’ve already fought one of these, right?” We only figured out it was a new alien based on its attack patterns. It’s also an issue when a crowd of different aliens are all swarming you and it becomes difficult to prioritize targets. It’s not horrible, though – most of the time we could tell the aliens apart, but they could have used a lot more differentiation.

Above: Monster A

Above: Monster B. These are some of the less similar looking ones

The other area that faces sameness is the world design. Other than t꧙he obvious linearity and ubiquitous corridors, from a visual standpoint there are only so many ways you can make a cavern look. There is a lot of gray splashed all over the game, but at the same time we still enjoyed the visuals. The art team clearly realized the issue of making caves look interesting after hours and hours, so the environments actually change things up in subtle (and not so subtle) ways. The game is quite pretty and we think it looks better than Guerrilla, which if you’ll recall was mostly red or brown roads and mountains and some buildings to break things up. Armageddon could easily come across as visually monotonous if you don’t stop to appreciate the tiny details along the way – for instance, a simple nook in a wall that’s carefully filled with icicles and billowy blue light to form a pleasing snack for the eyes. It’s one of the advantages of going linear – you don’t have swaths of semi-empty countryside to gloss over with generic rock and dirt textures.

Above: A lot of the game looks like this. Still looks pretty damn good for just a cave