You’re not alone in the game, you’re followed by a few companions, like a chick who’s leather top barely covers her breasts, an English professor who’s companion is his own created cyborg daughter, a Native American who can do magic, a Mexican with anger management issues — all these side kicks are so horrible written and created, that it’s almost embarrassing to watch all the cutscenes, especially with voice acting that’s so bad your ears soon start to bleed. Trust me, it’s for your own sake that I stop writing about the side kicks now.

The gameplay is standard 3rd person shooter, if “standard” means total crap. You see, most of the action is just you climbing buildings, leaping of edges, sliding down zip lines etc. It’s like Tomb Raider, only in Damnation, there isn’t much to explore. Instead of simply running, you’re forced to do tedious and boring climbing and jumping, just to do the basics. And when you do meet action, which means gunfights, it’s just terrible. The enemies have no sense besides standing still and occasionally fire at you. In that case, you’ll take cover, squeeze off a few rounds, kill your foes and move on. It’s just hopeless.

As for the technical side of the game, it looks horribly outdated, despite the fact that the game runs on the Unreal Engine 3 — of all the engines out there. Low res textures, which are repeated through each level, making everything looks the same. On top of that, you have the glitches and bugs, which there are aplenty of. The sounds aren’t any better, gun sounds and ammo are almost intolerable to listen to, and the voice acting deservers a nomination for worst voice acting of this decade.

While most of the game doesn’t work, the developers did include multiplayer options; not only is there co-op, but also classic multiplayer modes like king of the kill, death match etc. I wanted to review the multiplayer portion of the game, I though to myself, “It might be a hidden gem to be found online, playing with others”.

So I logged in to play the game online on the Xbox 360 and there’s wasn’t anyone online anywhere. Anywhere! I was the only Damnation player in the world, who happened to be online at that point. This has never happened to me on any other Xbox 360 game. It’s quite an astonishing feat. Let’s see how the guys from Epic Games and Valve pulls something like that off…

How bad is Damnation? Developer Blue Omega has closed down due to the commercial failure of the game. And that’s all you need to know about Damnation, really.

The Good:
Original setting

The Bad:
Horrible gameplay
Bad AI
Dated visuals
Buggy and glitchy
Awful sounds
Even more awful voice acting

Overall score: 1/10

This isn’t just in general terms—although the concept applies there too.  I hate the thought of anyone being sent to an eternity of fire and torment.  I also hate the game of the same name, now available for PC, PS3, and Xbox 360.  And why do I bear such a beautiful hatred for this lump of interactive dung?  Read on and see why!

First, the plot—back around the 1860s, when the American Civil War was in full swing, a corporation was founded to take advantage of the situation and hopefully make a few bucks on the side.  The Prescott company, by name, began supplying arms to what seemed like both sides, fueling a massive expansion in technology.  Taking the resulting cash, and along with a couple of choice developments not released to the military, the Prescott outfit stages its own putsch against the Union AND the Confederacy bother, spreading out as the forces of New America, with Prescott—Lord Prescott—as its head.  Now, a resistance, lead by a professor that developed some of Prescott’s most valuable tech and a former Army Captain, has risen up to take back America from New America.

How massive a technological expansion, you may be wondering?  One simple word: steampunk.  Yes, Damnation is a game about steampunk, with clockwork automaton soldiers called Automen, turbine-powered motorbikes, and massive dirigible airships with outboard impeller drives.  Steam powered everything, folks, and some of it actually more advanced than what we have today—that’s the nature of steampunk.

And that’s why I hate this game.

See, Damnation may well be the second steampunk game ever, the first being a much more limited sort of steampunk called Darkwatch.  Damnation represents an amazing story, an alternate history of shocking depth.  Imagine an industrialist today—a Bill Gates, for example.  Maybe a Rupert Murdoch or a Ted Turner or even a Steve Jobs who just one day decided, hey, the government’s populated by a collection of screw-ups, halfwits, dullards and greedheads.  Maybe I should make an army and show them how to do the job right!  That’s exactly what’s going on here.

And when you start adding in fully-realized combat androids (the Automen) in the 1860s, you’ve got a lot of possibilities.  No matter who actually wins that particular conflict the entire world would be irrevocably altered.  From a literary standpoint, Damnation is a triumph.  The hate, meanwhile, comes in thanks to the miserable wreck of a game to which they’ve attached that literary triumph of a plot.  Damnation is a hellish array of horrible graphics, lousy gameplay, cheesy sound, terrible play mechanics, and a complete waste of a deep and amazing storyline.

It’s a third person shooter, that’s the worst part of it.  A third person shooter, with guns that are woefully underpowered for the job, packed with meaningless run and jump “action” segments that add nothing but unnecessary complications.  A third person shooter that looks like hell itself and sounds like the weeping of the damned.

Damnation is exactly what it says on the box, sadly for us all.  Playing this game feels like a jaunt through eternal torment.  And worst of it all, a science-fiction heaven of a storyline hangs tantalizingly over us all, forcing us to play on…or be damned.

I hate this game.

If you were hoping to get your hands on Codemaster’s sci-fi shooter Damnation you will be dissapointed to hear that the game has been delayed until early 2009, which means we probably won’t see it until mid-2009.

Fret not though, the developers assure us that the delay will allow them more time to further develop the game making for much “stronger and better” gameplay. But something tells me that they didn’t want the game to be released so close to the highly anticipated Gears of War 2, but what do I know?