Armageddon is a MUD that markets itself as a 'tough love' roleplaying game, where nothing is free and actions have real consequences in a dangerous world. Murder, corruption, betrayal, blah blah blah. I was really enthusiastic about this, but the game is poorly implemented and impossible to break into.

You will have a lot of difficulty playing this game if you are new. Armageddon is geared towards old players to an incredible degree - and they do this through the restriction of knowledge. Maps are in ASCII art and lack detail. To craft items, you need to OOCly know the recipe for the craft, which is available nowhere in the game or the website. You need to ask another character to tell you the recipe. For every recipe in the game. There is no information available on how to do most things, such as creating antidotes, locating crafting ingredients, or making money in general.

You see, there's a culture that talking about game mechanics at all in OOC is taboo. If you ask a question on the forums or in their official Discord, the answer will invariably be 'find out IC'. And in Armageddon, finding things out IC will usually kill you.

After you die because you didn't know that one particular room has an NPC which can 1-shot you before you finish typing 'flee west', you're expected to create a new character. This would be fine, in a hack-and-slash that doesn't market itself as a serious roleplaying game. In Armageddon, you need a lengthy appearance description and backstory for your new character, every time. Expect to go through dozens of these characters before you go through enough trial and error to memorise which rooms and scenarios will instantly kill you. If you were attached to any of your characters and wanted to spend time building up an actual story, you are playing the wrong MUD. Sorry.

If you are willing to power through all of this, there's more. Your 1000 starter money? About half of that is protection money that belongs to whatever gang is prowling the starter zone at the time. If you don't feel like paying that protection money, you will get ganked by a guy who has been grinding his combat skills for several months because he is a veteran who actually knows how to play the game.

There's also brownie points which you build up on your account over time for doing things that the staff approve of, or something. I didn't play long enough to find out what warrants getting one of these brownie points, but it opens up a lot of additional options in character generation that only veterans have access to.

The roleplay is okay. That's it. Most of the people you meet will disappear before your next login, and you'll never know whether they got bored of the game, or their corpse is lying somewhere in the desert because nobody told them that the 'antidotes' sold in the game for scorpion stings don't actually work :^)

The only design choice in Armageddon that I would praise is their inclusion of something called 'The Way'. Basically, all characters have telepathy that allows them to communicate with each other provided that they know their name. It's quite convenient for knowing if someone is online, but remember that the benefit goes both ways if you are in hiding.

tl; dr - not newbie friendly, huge gaps in documentation that make the game difficult to play, questionable game design that can't decide whether it's a character meat grinder or a legitimate roleplay MUD. Don't waste your time.