Damnation

The minute I saw the lame hat-clad cowboy-wannabe protagonist blasting his way like a clumsy jackass through the game's steampunk universe, I sensed the aura of fail around 'Damnation' instantly. It's one thing to make a game unplayable or downright terrible - Damnation's neither one of them. In spite of bearable platforming and marginally entertaining action, the game fails to deliver an experience that will keep you glued for more than a short while.

The cowboy-wannabe protagonist in question, is the game's lumbering tower of lameness - Hamilton Rourke - an ex-soldier who's taken it up on himself to destroy the evil Prescott Standard Industries with help from his band of rebels who are equally lame-induced. His sorry mates are an English professor who's sure to tick the crap-monkey out of you with his terribly irritating one-liners, and a Native American dame who has more guns than clothes, which is evident by the split-up, leather handkerchief she uses to hide her ample bosom. Ever heard of Kevlar, missy?

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The game kicks off with a rather hurried, shabbily rendered cut scene showing you how the world's gone to hell and beyond since Prescott, New America's figurehead, has decided to take over the world using his Terminator-esque robot-skeleton army. That's about all there is to the plot, apart from your standard predictable twists such as betrayals and ultimate triumph of good over evil.

The blandness carries forward to the gameplay too. The best way to describe Damnation is as a cross between Gears of War and Tomb Raiders. It's an even balance of vertical platforming and gunplay. You hop around from pillar to pillar, hang on to and jump off ledges over-looking cliffs, and do all the stuff good ol' agile Lara Croft's been doing since decades, only with a clumsy cowboy in a world plagued by wardrobe-retardation (cowboy hat, breast-covering leather handkerchiefs etc.), rather than the graceful miss Croft.


These platforming segments are interspersed with dull and repetitive gun fights, where you and your brain-dead AI companions stand around without taking cover, eating bullets like they're made of candy. After they've had their fill of bullets, they'd collapse (Gears of War style) waiting for you to come and give them a hand. During this time, they actually nag the crap out of you by asking for help every five seconds! If there was a way to kill them, I'd gladly play the entire game without the badly programmed friendly AI.

The enemy AI isn't too bright either. More often than not, you'd have an enemy standing less than five feet away just staring at you blankly. At other times they'd ignore your allies that are within striking distance of them, and shoot at you from extremely far away. To accompany the AI, the level design's equally worse and offers no consolation. While the game boasts of letting you find your own way, its hard not to get it right since moving in the general direction of the objective usually gets you to your goal. The problem is, since there is no minimap or any form of navigation, if you get disoriented you're sure to have a terrible time finding your way back!

The icing on the cowdung cake, is that the game looks terribly plain, with boxy characters, badly textured environments and a whole lot of framerate drops. There are times when the draw distance is impressive, but that's about the best it ever gets visually. Even the guns look and feel like toys and have atrocious recoil.

The only saving grace is that the game's got a co-op mode that's easy to get in and out of, and ample multiplayer modes. Unfortunately, the review code we played didn't support online play.

While Damnation isn't amongst the worst of the lot out there, it still doesn't have anything to offer that hasn't been done a million times before, and in much better ways. After spending time with it, you're bound to get ticked off by its lack of polish and the terribly implemented ideas.