When it comes to sheer rubble-icious fury, it’s hard to beat Red Faction: Guerrilla, where a few smart swings of a big honkin’ hammer could level a building, practically burying you in the remains. So how do you give the sequel even more over-the-top destruction? The devious architects at Volition chose to take the action underground, letting you demolish structures on the walls, ceiling, and everywhere else around you. In other words, three-hundred-and-sixty degrees of righteous mayhem!

Sadly, said structures belong to your fellow colonists — the people Alec Mason helped liberate from Earth Defense Force bullies in the last game. It’s more than 50 years later, and some crazy stuff’s happened in the meantime. A war on Mars’ surface sent the miners scurrying below the surface, where they built a new, subterranean society. But 72 hours ago, a vicious new alien race attacked your settlements and began consuming them, like some kind of giant invading termites. Now you’re in the unfortunate position of having to annihilate your own dwellings to cut off the aliens’ food supply and fend them off…so let the chips (of every infested building) fall where they may!

Of course, you’re no longer playing as Alec, who presumably took a dirt nap long ago. (Hopefully the game — or its movie tie-in, Red Faction: Origins [see boxout] — will reveal his fate.) Instead, you’re Darius Mason, grandson of Alec and fellow RFG comrade Samanya. And in the short sequence the developers showed us from Armageddon, Darius certainly seems like a son of champions. He’s leading a convoy of human survivors through an underground area, searching for Marauder allies or other colonists. “We’re all gonna die…” says a survivor nervously as they encounter a bunch of dead bodies. Darius calmly tells him to stay put, but before long, the man’s fears are realized.

As the first wave of aliens attack, we get a good look at the Creepers, the scurrying, four-limbed uglies that typically clear a path for the infestation. Then come the Ravagers — smarter, stronger E.T.s who use walls and ceilings to their advantage. Now facing an army of baddies, our Volition guide takes the chance to show us one of Armageddon’s key new weapons, the Magnet Gun…and hot damn! Using it to mark one object (in this case, a metal pillar) and then another (here, an alien), you can launch the first item into the second at killer speeds. Between carving up aliens with a more standard assault rifle, he pulps others by flinging all manner of beams and barricades into their bug-like bodies.

Needing a rest, our guide blasts a hole in a cargo container, jumps in, and then whips out a familiar device: Guerrilla’s Nano Forge. Passed down from Alec, the weapon has several sweet abilities you’ll gain over the course of Armageddon’s campaign. One is Shockwave (shown at left), a massive burst that repels and disables enemies, leaving them open for follow-up attacks. Another is some form of invisibility. But the one shown in our demo — the ability to repair any man-made structure — offers all kinds of fascinating possibilities, as we discover when our guide quickly fixes the hole in the cargo container, giving him an instant hiding place to regenerate health. “One of my favorite things is to get behind cover, fling it at someone with the Magnet Gun, repair it, and then [do it all over again],” explains lead level designer Jameson Durall, giving us a good sense of the weapon’s awesome potential.

The demo ends soon after — just long enough for us to see a new, giant, tentacled alien emerge from the ground — but Durall teases us with some more tantalizing info. For one thing, claustrophobes can breathe easy: you won’t spend the whole game underground. At some point you’ll be on the surface, where you’ll fight not only more aliens, but also the unknown enemies the colonists battled in the war that forced the Red Faction belowground. Surface areas will be more open than subterranean ones, but like the rest of the game, they won’t be open-world. That's right — Volition has narrowed the scope of the game a bit, making it more of a linear experience this time around, although they promise “lots of gameplay options” in the game’s various locales.

We’re also happy to learn that much of Guerrilla’s arsenal will return, including the LEO suit — a devastating mech-type exoskeleton that lets you stomp foes — and, of course, the almighty hammer. Joining their ranks will be some other “really cool over-the-top” weapons, notes Durall; one of them, the Singularity Gun, will “lay waste to all kinds of stuff.” The developer couldn’t confirm whether jetpacks, characters from Guerrilla, or the Ostrich Hammer would find their way into Armageddon, but from everything we’ve seen, it seems like the game’s already exploding with raw, bone-crushing mayhem.