Buy Damnation

I played this game a long time ago on the xbox when it first came out thinking "this is the ♥♥♥♥!" But it's really not it's stiff not fun little feedback when shooting and the graphics are blande. Also the voice acting is pretty damn ♥♥♥♥

This game made me drink bleach and wake up covered in excrement.

wallracing allowed

This game was quite unknown to me and probably is to most people. It's a game released in 2009 by Blue Omega Entertainment and published by a bit more known company, Codemasters. Damnation is an Gears of War style game where you proceed in a linear environment and shoot people from behind cover. You regenerate health to recover and you have your sidekicks whom you also must keep alive. You can carry 3 weapons and different kinda cartridge based weapons is given for you right from the start already.

The start is completely weird, you have this guy in some cave who starts telling a story and soon you're being showcased some war at bridge without really knowing what time it's set in, why they attacked and most importantly.. when your team arrives.. why they arrive, who they are and where the heck they came from? This game doesn't explain alot of the reasons it also doesn't seem that interesting either. Forexample on this bridge scene there ends up being some guy who slaughters armed men with a sword because for some reason after these guys see how their fellow soldiers were just killed in closecombat, instead of them just shooting the sword guy from distance, they decide it's a good idea to confront this guy and go and die :D Alotta stuff in this game really makes no sense.

The game offers platforming, faster running and in general more agile character when compared to GoW. This is also where things start to go wrong. Reason Gears of War gameplay succeeds, is because it focuses on only one aspect, covershooting and all the effort was put on that aspect only. Damnation tries to do alot of things without really excelling on anything. Forexample the platforming feels very clunky and just bad because the controls aren't really suited for that kinda gameplay because they're tanky and yet at the sametime somehow also still overly sensitive. In Tomb Raider when you turn, it doens't instantly turn, in Damnation your character does instantly a 90degree turn and this makes very confusing to control your character on some very narrow space. Gunplay feels also bad because the character's handling just totally doesn't fit for a shooter kinda game because it also was balanced for the platforming style but apparently the movement doesn't really work that well with either gameplay style. So you are left with a goofy game that feels cheaply made.

The game is a very much handhold game. It heavily holds one's hand because if you don't do some act your sidekicks tell you to do (ie. shoot this object), they just do it themselves then. Aka game plays itself. Map design is also very non-challenging because everything is just so obvious and completely linear. Enemy AI isn't also good because sometimes they just stay still looking at you without taking any actions against you, so you'll just have to end their life because you can't stand looking at that brainless enemy.

Now some of the good things.. This runs on Unreal Engine 3 and due to that, it's also very configurable thanks to the .ini files and because it's an UE3 game it also runs pretty well. As a aesthetic style choice, this game had potential kinda because it tried some weird steampunk cowboy thing and from what I know.. that kinda stuff hasn't really been done.

Main menu works pretty well and loading screens are fast. But then you have this audio side of it.. when characters speak, it sounds as if it was said up in the space. Aka there is absolutely no spatialization. The voices totally do not react to environment in anyways (no echo, no reverbation..) they just come and disappear, sounds really odd. I tried to see if that thing would be fixed if you use hardware accelerated audio and so I switched from the .ini file the game to use OpenAL API but that didnt' fix anything. The game still suffered from the horrible environmental audio where the panning/location of sound also was still completely off. Forexample if you stood right next to your sidekick, on leftside of her, the sound would come from the backright instead of from just right. Like wtf?

Visuals aren't also that impressive because as I soon noticed, the overly bloom and postprocess filled world was put for a reason. So that you cannot see the dated look of it. Once you disable those effects from the config, the game ends up looking really barebones. You see all the low res textures that the background environment has and also the actual area where you play doesnt' look that nice either.

Not recommended even from a sale because nothing in this game feels good, nothing.

This game shocked me at how bad it was. I played it for a couple hours and couldn't stop giggling from the brain dead AI and the whackadoo glitches. Well worth the 2 dollars if you have nothing to do and need a decent laugh.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvmxz4TLiV4

Damnation more like abomination

Well it's Codemasters so I was expecting a bad game before even playing it because besides their awesome racing games, including the Dirt games and Grid 2, they don't know how to make a good action game. Their Overlord games are pretty good (OL1, Raising Hell, and OL2), but those aren't really action games. However a couple of other semi-well known action games that they attempted, the Operation Flashpoint games, totally suck. This game is no exception.

Graphics
The first few seconds of the opening cinematic had me actually lol'ing at how bad the character models are, even for a game from 2009. The rest of the game is ugly as well. The color selection is very good, fitting the steampunk setting very well, but it's like putting lipstick on a pigs ♥♥♥♥. Level taxtures are ugly and they repeat on themselves like old games used to do (the same big ugly blurry texture block for the side of a mountain repeated over and over, for example). Effects like explosions are laugh out loud funny as well.

Sounds
Weapon sounds are painfully bad. It just sounds like someone throwing pieces of metal at a tin wall which is probably how they actually recorded it while laughing their asses off then had to edit out the laughter in post. Voice acting is fine but the thought that something this bad deserves any kind of story whatsoever is insulting. In the first 30 minutes I played, I was treated to multiple overly long, drawn out, unentertaining, crappy cutscenes. I eventually started hitting escape to bypass them, like how a fart bypasses a turd on the way out, making it smell extra bad.

Gameplay
A very generic game that reminds me of two similarly generic games like it, Dark Sector and Velvet Assassin. It is better than those games, but that's not saying much because I gave both of them I think a 3 or 4 out of 10. This game I would maybe give it a 4 or 4.5. The gunplay isn't "weird" like some other reviewers have said, it is just very generic. Weapons have no visible recoil, enemies have almost no reaction to being shot, the platforming isn't fun at all, just tacked-on unfun nonsense, and regular movement is sloppy when not crouching or aiming.

After less than an hour of play, I can tell that it is going to be really tough for me to play through the rest of this game. I got it for $2 at indiegala because I thought that the gunplay would be at least somewhat decent, but the entire game is just lacking in every possible area.

5/10 still better than several other games I can think of, but that doesn't mean it deserves any attention.

Man! Does this game have potential. Man! Does this game mess it all up. I love the setting, and the design, and a lot of the artwork and everything. This game has a mind-boggling amount of potential. The main issue is...it's a pretty poor game. The shooting is strange, the animation is laughable, the graphics are pretty poor, and the controls are awkward. So sad. I'd love to see this game get a remake, because it could be an amazing game, if it didn't have so many issues in the gameplay itself.

My video review:
https://youtu.be/Fg1_qXID-8E