Damnation

Review from George and George - Thursday, 09 July 2009 @ 11:35pm

Hey, how cool is this picture?

Well Damnation is the exact opposite. I don’t have much to say about this game because I played maybe 3 hours of it. And those three hours were 50% dying and starting back from the checkpoint.

Ah the checkpoint, you either love it or hate it. In games such as Outrun, a car racing game, getting to the checkpoint is your goal, and the satisfaction you receive from hearing that tiny blip sound once you pass it is almost as good as nachos with extra cheese. But the other side of the stick, the opposite of happy chocolate covered checkpoints, is the ‘Once every 20 minutes’ checkpoint, which means fighting through almost half a level for a good 15 minutes then say, dying, meaning you restart all the way back at that distant checkpoint and then take more than half the time you took last time getting back to where you were, as you don’t want to die and repeat it again.

And this game is very unforgiving. You will die and retread a long path. A lot.

I haven’t even mentioned what the game's about actually. It doesn’t matter that much, because I didn’t pay attention at all, but for a review's sake, you play a handsome chap named Hamilton who teamed up with fellow freedom fighters to try to fend off an evil CEO of an industrialist company who wants to turn their steam powered utopia (think Western America if steam wasn’t replaced by electricity) into a industrialized planet inhabited by zombie workers controlled by a drug which makes them work harder.

So basically you’re on Steampunk planet, where everything, including vehicles that can scale walls, are powered by steam. The game is basically the long journey, spread over a few very large levels, to this CEO. Along the way you encounter his minions, angry zombie workers. Simple story, not too much back story and flashbacks really.

Kicking arse, taking names and not wearing bras

Firing a gun… can be fun. If you like having to stop and watch the 3 second animation of your character getting their gun out, then painfully slowly zooming in and finally trying to kill enemies that seem indestructible. Indestructible unless you cheat like I did, and unlock and assign all the explosive weapons. Unlocking the cheat to assign explosive weapons is something I’d highly recommend. Being a Westernish-type game you have a lot of modded revolvers and rifles and actually a lot of modern modded guns which look pretty cool but do little damage. These lame guns pose really no threat to any enemy and makes trudging through enemy filled checkpoints tiresome and tricky. Characters also lack the ability to fire their weapons while moving, a skill obviously drawn from real life. You never see a soldier firing while moving. No, they stop in front of their enemies, pause to take their gun out, then shoot.

Now this is something that ruined the game for me.

Most games with regen health adopt the same tactic to show how wounded you are, which is the screen turning red, becoming more blood spattered the closer you are to dying, fading as you regain health..

This game does adopt the basic idea, to go darker the more hurt you are, lighter when your less hurt... But it does it in possibly the most annoying, distracting way possible. It makes the game almost non playable due to you not being able to see anything.

One of the game designers, I think, happened to accidentally open Photoshop for the first time, mess around with the blur, dodge, smudge tools and decide how revolutionary it would be to bring that same experience to gaming.

When you’re dying, the screen turns black and white, becomes very contrasted, everything smudges together and the screen also blurs. Although it could be an accurate representation of someone’s brain messing with our senses when we die, it makes moving undercover to regain your health almost impossible. It makes those situations when you’re killing enemies and one guy is lightly shooting at you, but you can continue because you’re health is fine, impossible. Because while you’re hardly being hit, your screen will still morph into black and white blurrsville, and make trying to gun down enemies so difficult you need to lean closer to the screen and squint your eyes to make out what each blob on the screen is.

Insane wall jumping

Verticality was the huge selling point for this game. Walls, buildings, cliffs are all scaled by means of jumping from beam to beam, climbing the supports of bridges, or jumping from windows to hanging ropes and pipes. Although you can do that in most games, you can change your camera angle and have gun battles with someone above you, as though you were firing from behind cover. I really enjoyed this. Fighting enemies on walls and changing the camera view to make it look as if you were on the ground, not scaling walls… I wasn’t very good at it. I died a lot.

The misty, beautiful atmosphere of the levels was, I thought, pulled off wonderfully. Being my regular self and not paying attention to the story, I was still able to pick up from the environment that I was in a post American Revolution/futuristic environment. The vehicles, which included Zeppelins, were fantastically designed. I just wish more emphasis was put into game play and overall enjoyability of playing instead of graphics and pretty reflections.

And there we go, I played it for almost three hours. Then turned it off. I wouldn't pick this up, save if I really needed cheevos. And even in this game, they are tiresome to get. The attention towards Damnation was actually quite large before its release. It's very odd. It was seemingly unheard of when finally released, as websites and gaming magazines threw their arms up in the air and starting fapping at it's E3 demo. This brings me to believe copies of the game were sent to magazines before its release, and they disliked it so much they barred it from any mainstream media. I should probably conform to this unspoken code of not talking about bad games, but here I am reviewing it.

Overall I'd rate this game: a lemon.

Pros

The vertical 'mode' of the game made for some interesting fight scenes and pushes you to think of the box in certain situations. The Steampunk, western theme of the game is something I haven't seen in games and really enjoyed. The very large levels, dotted with small towns, ruins of mines and huge guns really added to the aesthetics of the game. However not being able to smash those beautiful objects up, say with a big hammer like in Red Faction, made me sad.

Cons

Oh gee where do I start? While the aesthetics and idea of the game were fantastic, the gameplay, the sequential element of any game was terrible.