There was a lot of hype surrounding Damnation, but I didn't really pay attention because I was too busy working and waiting gleefully for Batman: Arkam Asylam. But sadly, it got pushed back to Fall, and my local Blockbuster was fresh out of copies of Red Faction: Guerrila and Protoype. So here we are, Damnation. A game I played for about fours until I realised there was something far more interesting and enertaining in the cubbard underneath my kitchen sink. It's sad becasue this game had a lot going for it. Giant steam-powered motor cycles, platforming/parkour elements, giant steam-powered motor cycles, a ruthlessly steampunk art deco, and of course, giant steam-powered motor cycles. On paper, all of these elements sound to make one heck of a shooter. However, Damnation does the impossible and falls completely flat on it's overhyped face.
For starters, the story doesn't make a lick of sence. It approaches the player like we're supposed to know the basic story and all of the characters and their ambitions without even playing it. Like I said, I didn't follow Damnation through the hype train, so if something was exlpained in an article or video, then I guess I didn't here it, but it still won't earn any points in my book. I mean, I didn't follow the first Gears of War on the hype train either, but I still understood the basic story just fine. And that plot was bananas! The charcters range from eye-rollingly cliche(mainly the lead protagonist) to painfully annoying (mainly everyone). For a game that looks like it's all about the story and narritive, it all feels like an after thought.
Before I go on, let me say this. Developers. You want to make a steam-punk video game? Great! But before you do, watch "Steamboy" or just about any movie from Hayao Miyazaki. That is what steampunk is and what it should be. I mention this because the whole steampunk direction of Damnation was royally screwed over. The whole point of steampunk is to merge old world design/technology with modern design/technology and give it a flare of fantasy. In Damnation, steampunk means having some steam powered guns and vehicals, painting everthing gun-metal grey and depressing-uninteresting brown, and include so much grit it would make a shellshocked war veteran with no eyes break into tears. I know steampunk has a lot of different styles, but this is definetly not a good look. While some games can look good with all of the colors of the dirt spectrum, like Gears of War, "depressing grit" does not belong in steampunk.
It appears that I've compared Damnation to Gears of War twice in this review. Why? Because Damnation has a lot things that seem they were taken from Gears. The atmosphere, the narrative, the awful vehical sections, heck, I'm even gonna go on a limb and say that Damnation is trying to be Gears of War. The guns look and sound almost like the ones in Gears, the laughable "gore system" is very remenicent of the one in Gears, the friendly and enemy AI has the same (low) IQ of the AI in Gears, all that it's missing is a cover system. Which is ironic, because that's one of main things this game needs. Enemies spam almost all the time and you'll die after a few shots. Crouching behind walls will only block your aiming, and sure you can fire over ledges you hang from, but you can only use your pistol and you'll rarley find ammo for it. Speaking of which...
The only thing that I mostly enjoyed was the parkour mechanics. While they weren't as intuitive or as fluid as say the Prince of Persia series or Assassin's Creed, they're simple and get the job done say for a few problems. While games like Assassin's Creed allow you to free run all over the place, Damnation's parkour follws moslty a linear path. Also, the camera isn't much of a team player as sometimes it will be facing a direction that seriously hinders your veiw of a ledge or platform, even the ocasional bottomless pit. Most of the time moving it will help, but there will be certain cases where the camera will get caught in the geometry of the level.
I moslty blame the bad camera for the level design. The levels are a mess of buildings and structures, and it's never clear which ones you can climb or which one leads to your objective. Add the fact that there is no in-game map, and you can bet that you'll be running around a level trying to figure out where to go more than once. There are also moments where the level will kill you even if you're a tad off on your precision. There were many times were I barley miss or even see a ledge and I'd fall into a pit. This annoyance occurs both in the on foot sections and vehical sections. The game makes up for this by have a lot of checkpoints. But still, nobody likes dying over stupid reasons.
There is a word that describes Damnation, and that word is "Rushed",and the game reeks of it. An unimaginative story (if you can even follow it), bland graphics and animations, and there are bugs glitches at almost every corner. If the developers took less time on the art direction, and spent most of their time and moeny on fine tuning the gameplay, Damnation would've made a fantastic shooter. As I've said in my Turning Point review, focusing on art and art alone while making shooter is a very bad tactic that'll only end in horrid mechanics and bad AI.
While Damnation isn't a bad game neccassarily , it's faaar from a good one