Damnation

Revelation

We’re at the point where continuing to hark on about Damnation's failings seems cruel, but unfortunately we’ve still got a lot of problems to point out – namely the awful graphics and frequent bugs that mar pretty much every single aspect of the game.

Simply saying that the graphics aren’t very good just doesn’t cut it. Yes, the graphics in general are pretty obnoxious, but that’s not the limit of the problem and it’s worth exploring the issue further. The textures rapidly tail off into blurs, the bloom-saturated world is seemingly devoid of even static shadows for the most part and the camera is so clunky it feels like the left thumbstick has been tied to a brick.

The real problem though are the animations, which are ludicrously bad even when they work right, but frankly hardly ever work right. Turning to watch your allies climb up a wall behind you usually reveals that they aren’t actually completing the animations, just standing there and jerking upwards while parallel to the wall.


There was one zip line we had to tackle where a squad member grabbed the top of it and then just hung there no matter what we did to shift him. In the end we had to overtake him and move into the next room...where we found him waiting for us patiently.

This type of thing happened a lot, especially to your main female companion, Yakecan (or Ms. Underboob, as we called her). One moment a character would be jumping through a window or advancing on the left flank, then the next moment they’d disappear and suddenly be on top of a building or behind you. At first it was shocking that bugs this prevalent would be present in an AAA game, then it was briefly funny, but in the end it was just annoying.

Nor were the problems limited to just a single level or character either – these experiences carried on throughout the game and permeated through ever boring levels. It didn’t matter whether you were climbing a building to blow up a bridge, climbing a building to blow up a generator or climbing a cliff to blow up some artillery – the game always looked like it was being viewed through glass milk bottles and characters would continue to teleport around randomly.


Multiplayer then; the one section of the game we haven’t spoken about yet and another area of the game that was thoroughly underwhelming, with eight different game modes, none of which stand out as interesting beyond their titles. Capture the Flag, Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch and, oh look, yawn.

The single positive thing we spotted in Damnation was the co-op mode, which comes in both split screen and online modes. Even then though, the co-operative campaign doesn’t win any points because it actually fixes anything or improves the gameplay at all, it’s just that even bad games are more fun to play when you can friendly-fire your friends unexpectedly. BAM! Take that, Bindi!

Really, that last sentence would sum it up for us if we hadn’t ironically opened this article with the admission that the game can be encapsulated in a single word; Damnation is just a bad game. Bad, boring and really very ugly considering that it’s been built on the UT3 engine and launched on the PlayStation 3. There’s no sense of harmony between the different features or game elements, nor does the game actually feel at all engaging or fun to play. There’s cowboys, steampunk robots and sword-wielding ninjas, but it never feels at all cool or fantastic.

Let’s put it bluntly; Damnation, bargain-bin fodder that it is, is a game we do not like nor advise you to buy.

Score Guide