by dkpatriarch

©2009 David Hilton

With a name like Damnation some might wonder if the game is based on some sort of hell… either for the developer in making the game, the gamer playing it, or perhaps both.

Codemasters and Blue Omega have certainly set their sights high with this new IP that aspires to create an open acrobatic vertical gaming experience that mixes a Wild West look with a steampunk flavour.  The question is does the game hold together strongly, or does it crumble and completely fall apart.

The last couple months my family have sat around the TV over dinner to watch taped episodes of Australia’s MasterChef, so inevitably it has bored itself unpleasantly into my brain.  What this means is that I’m going to make a ‘half-baked’ attempt at using cooking imagery every once in a while in this review.  Sorry in advance.

• Damnation Trailer

Served hot or cold

The theme song to the show, for those lucky enough not to be addicted enough to know (I have Coeliac disease which means I can’t eat most of what they are making anyway, but I still find it fascinating) is Katy Perry’s Hot N’ Cold.

This game is very rarely hot and all too often stone cold.

It has some creative ideas and some, for the first while jumping around in them anyway, interesting environments but on the whole the game felt like a series of vertical mazes with some poorly implemented shooting diversions added here and there.

It’s like being promised a fantastic new and exciting dish full of exotic flavour, different from previous experiences, and then getting a bunch of clashing ingredients drowned together into a big overly thick soup.  Not very exciting or palatable and very frustrating.  It’s what the judges of MasterChef would have called “disappointing”.

So what ingredients are in the mix?

Well first of all it has a story using basic plot points but with a zest of unusual.  In an alternate reality there is a different devastating Civil War  in America that has made, as we find in most games these days, the scenery all half destroyed.

America is in chaos and with a new dictatorial power rising a small rag-tag band of rebels (sigh) resist against what seem like overwhelming odds to save freedom and the steampunk American Dream.

• Damnation Developers Diary – Vertical Gameplay

You are a self-appointed bossy-boots called Hamilton Rourke, a veteran of the Civil War, fighting against the oppression of the corporate power rising in the land called Prescott Standard Industries (PSI), aptly named after the megalomaniacal leader of the enemy, William Dean Prescott (who has three names to denote self-importance of course).

During the game various other characters join you to (barely) help and have their own personal agendas.  That’s okay, because so do you: you want to find and rescue your lady-love (a la Dom in Gears Of War 2…).

The story has the aforementioned kidnapped girlfriend, a healer turned into Xena Warrior Princess, a bitter abandoned lesbian daughter (she presumably became a lesbian after her ‘daddy issues’), evil corporate forces with obligatory heavy breathing static, who enjoy running against walls, jumping around back and forward in a loop, and shooting at you with better accuracy than you could ever hope to have.  There is also experimentation on the spiritual American aboriginal population.  So all original stuff then…

The creative ‘re-imagined’ mix of Wild West and the whole mechanical steampunk anachronistic world with terminator-like enemies, fancy Harley-inspired hover bikes, and even a Mech (which sadly you don’t get to use) is certainly an interesting mix.

Add to that a serum that turns people into zombies (as they are so popular these days), Killzone-like troopers, or werewolves and it starts to display a little too much creative licence and ends up throwing almost everything into the game bar the kitchen sink (they were presumably all destroyed in the Civil War along with much of the architecture).

The Menu Sounds Great

What they’ve put on the menu sounds great but what they serve just doesn’t seem to come together well.

The sound ingredient, which can add atmosphere, is poor here.  Exceptionally badly written and delivered dialogue, inane banter from your AI pals and totalitarian speeches like “Nature stands in the way of progress” constantly drive you nuts.

At one point one character states: “You make my head hurt from all the crap coming out of your mouth!”.  Yeah me too, I thought.  The soundtrack seems to be the usual epic stuff looped over and over. Gunfire and explosions sound (as well as look) weak.

The control ingredient doesn’t fare much better.

Admirable Aspirations

This game admirably aspires to take the usual restrictive horizontal shooter and merge it with a seemingly more open vertical style.

Like Prince Of Persia or Assassin’s Creed there is  lots of jumping, swinging, flipping, and wall double leaping.

The problem is that both the shooter aspect of the game and the free-running acrobatics just don’t play or control as well as they could.

Both the shooting controls and the actual movement are very twitchy and you’ll find yourself often stuck against the environment and expending most of your ammo just trying to kill one guy- near or far.

There is no Gears Of War cover system; it is just hit ‘B’ to duck and then try not to get stuck on the environment you are hiding behind or killed when you leave it to actually try and hit an enemy.

The same awkward movement and an odd controller scheme applies to the free-running and jumping.  You need to press more controller buttons where it could have been intuitive like Assassin’s Creed. The buttons also don’t always seem responsive.

Fluid or acrobatic – hmm

This jumping aspect simply isn’t as fluid as the other games that go acrobatic.

• Damnation Single Player Experience

At least when you fall (as you will…) you don’t go back to your check-point as you do when you get killed, you return to where you jumped.  A few bugs in the game can see you stuck though, constantly falling and returning to a spot where you immediately fall again.

The spirit vision button comes in very handy to see where enemies are and more importantly where the hell your AI or co-op player buddy has disappeared to.  You can also revive your mates from this view when they typically do something stupid and get themselves downed.

The environmental ingredient provides both its strongest and weakest points.

Presentation of the meal

Interestingly each new area looks a lot like a deathmatch map to be honest.

At the beginning of each new area the play stops so that the camera can make you very dizzy while it spins around the vertical landscape, attempting (I think) to show you the way you could go.

I was too busy rubbing my eyes to avoid vertigo to remember the routes.

It is amazing how vertical the maps- oops levels- are.  In fact I worked out that the smart way to avoid being stuck in a quagmire of battles that took forever was to try and jump up the various buildings as high as I could go and then look around stumped for a way to go.  Sometimes that meant backtracking though and having to fight.

The design initially gives you a variety of directions you can choose but inevitably you still have to find your way through the vertical maze, occasionally doing some trial and error jumping.  Sometimes your AI mate will give you a clue by standing near the next bit to go up or by going ahead of you, but in co-op you will get lost.

Some of the environments initially look well designed and pretty but upon closer inspection or after the same repeated building type they lose their impressiveness.  I really liked the stone pueblo ruins and the Italianate mansions sections but the whole area ended up looking the same, like the samey buildings in Battlefield: Bad Company.  At least you could destroy those!

Other environments were not so attractive: the tin buildings, mining town, and industrial complex were full of empty characterless buildings and you have to spend way too much time in them.  So some really great art direction and variety but each area becomes a bit samey after awhile.

The character animations and enemies really are not that detailed.

Gorillas and monkeys

Your character climbs and jumps clumsily like a lumbering gorilla rather than a graceful monkey.

Then there’s a lot of cut and paste trees and grass clumps, hazy distance view, unimpressive lighting and glitches everywhere from bad clipping (I drove a bike through an indestructible wall), to frame rate stutter, to lots of pop-up, to blurry or flickering pixilation, to people and bikes that disappear then reappear, and even to a bit of screen tearing.

Sometimes clouds actually moved in the sky, which was impressive as most games have painted ceilings, but then that seemed to stop.  Glass windows can be shattered but nothing else, except the explosive barrels (painted yellow instead of the usual red) that are littered everywhere…even where it doesn’t make sense.

How does the meal fare

It’s all a bit raw and underdone.

The token vehicle sections on bikes reminded me a lot of the N64 game Star Wars: Episode 1 Pod Racer, except you aren’t racing anyone, just crashing into or falling off of the environment.

I hated that pod racer game, so you can imagine what I thought of this attempt at breaking up the climbing, jumping, and shooting in one big vertical map at a time gameplay tedium.

To add more colour to the plate, the developers even add toward the end a Tomb Raider-esque series of water puzzles!  It was a different motivation to jump all over the place but in the end you are just trying to get to the next section and so this just added to the “throw everything into the soup” feel.

The AI is terrible…both your friendly AI and the enemies.  At one stage my idiot companion shouts at me: “Look out for hostiles ahead.  Be careful!”  He then runs full steam into a horde of enemies and promptly gets himself killed.  Then they all homed in on me as if they could see me behind cover where I was cowering (being careful like I was told).  With friends like that who needs enemies.

The multiplayer ingredient is of course included even though more time on the single player might have helped.  Still it generously includes both split-screen (rare these days) and online play and a co-op as well as the usual deathmatch, team deathmatch, king of the hill, and capture the flag.

Maps maps maps

It’s odd there are so few multiplayer maps considering the single player levels all look so map-ish.

• Damnation Multiplayer Experience

Unfortunately, though co-op is more fun with a mate than with your dumb AI buddy, the same problems plague all multiplayer modes.

At one stage of the game a not-so-friendly AI says: “Give it a try Captain, if you’ve got a pair!”  To be honest you need balls to finish this game.  It feels really long and drawn out because the loose clumsy gameplay just becomes less and less fun. I would revive myself each new area with the fresh look, only to be dragged back down into boredom by repetition and blandness.

It may be filling but the mix just isn’t done right. In the end it lacks the all important key flavour: fun.  If this were MasterChef, the judges would say with regret at the lost potential: “I’m sorry, your dish is the least impressive…”

© 2009 David Hilton

“4.5/10

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Filed under: Console gaming, New Xbox 360 Games, Xbox 360, Xbox 360 3rd Party Games, Xbox 360 Game Reviews, Xbox 360 News Tagged: | "Blue Omega", "Prescott Standard Industries", 360, American Civil War, Civil War, Codemasters, Damnation, Katy Perry's Hot N' Cold, Killzone, megalomaniacal, review, steampunk, Wild west, William Dean Prescott, Xbox 360, Xena Warrior Princess