TL;DP: Damnation

Time Played: 99 minutes (official Steam log)

Sponsored by: Bonus Eruptus

[strong]850 PSI review[/strong]

A steampunk, platforming, action shooter with the worst voice acting since [em]House of the Dead 2[/em] that cannot make up its mind about whether it wants to be any good or not.

Incidentally, here's a fun fact: It was originally an Unreal Tournament 2004 mod that won second place for Best Total Conversion. And it plays exactly as well as that would imply.

[strong]4500 PSI review[/strong]

Have you ever seen one of those cars with a custom paint job that changes color as you move past it? That's what [em]Damnation[/em] is for me. I've put roughly three sessions into it, each about a half hour long, and [em]every single time I like it a different amount[/em].

Let me give you a rundown of each day.

[strong]DAY 1[/strong]
The game opens with a self-important cut-scene describing the world. Short version: Steampunk technology has extended the American Civil War by decades and destroyed the country. Oh, and there's some American Indian mysticism thrown in too, as evidenced by the fact that our self-important narrator is a swarthy, half-naked man with stilted speech and glowing eyeballs.

A second cut-scene shows you a totally bad-a$$ dude in a cloak riding a steam-powered motorcycle, completely laying waste to hordes of soldiers with a sword. He's agile. He's quick. He's relentless.

He's not your character.

You play as Hamilton Rourke, a member of one of the sides (the war has lasted so long, apparently, that different people are fighting it now — So don't expect to be shooting at steampunk CSA soldiers). Presumably he's on the good side, because the other side has better weapons. If there's anything Hollywood movies have taught me, it's that plucky, underfunded, outnumbered people are [em]always[/em] the good guys. If your victory isn't a million-to-one shot, you're not worth backing.

Rourke has a few things going for him:

  • He has a very fancy hat.
  • He has several steampunk potato guns.
  • Most importantly, he has the most amazing abs you've ever witnessed in a game.

The abs are his most important feature, because [em]Damnation[/em] is not a third-person-shooter. If it were a third-person-shooter, they'd give you better guns. No, [em]Damnation[/em] is a [em]platformer[/em]. Specifically, it's the kind of platformer where you grab ledges and leap to other ledges. One of the most impressive moves is how he can swing up to a window that is above and behind him by holding the windowsill and curling his body up to kick the window in. Honestly, I don't even know how much Pilates you need to do in order to pull that maneuver off, especially wearing the boots he's wearing and carrying three guns that are powered by steam.

Rourke is accompanied by two NPCs who share all of his animations. (I told you, the side of the war you're on is underfunded. Did you expect them to afford soldiers who moved differently?)

The first is Yakecan, an American Indian whose name is Comanche for “Epic Underboob.” I'd pass comment about her outfit, except that given the kinds of acrobatic, Pilates-based climbing the characters do, her outfit actually makes more sense than Rourke's (who is, I might add, wearing a Lycra shirt but still wearing boots that must weigh about four pounds each). Given that the armies you're facing are basically unstoppable robots, armor is just about the worst thing our plucky heroes could wear.

The second is Winslow, an inventor with an intelligent accent who tells you how to do everything. Since he basically gets kidnapped immediately after giving you the tutorial, I suppose his unpublished last name must be “MacGuffin.”

After the tutorial, when poor Dr. MacGuffin is hauled off to some torture chamber somewhere by the forces of — I kid you not — PSI*, you are introduced to Ramon Antonio Zagato. He will replace Winslow in the “male NPC with an accent” slot of your party.

With Zagato's help, you use the power of steam to blow up a bridge occupied by PSI robots. Those robots immediately rebuild the bridge, capture Winslow and force you and your band of rebels to make a narrow escape.

Fortunately the enemy forces cannot deal with the unparalleled strength and agility of a dirigible, and you escape to the mountains where you meet Yakecan's brother Akhahando, who is our glowy-eyed narrator. He's half-naked, so I guess showing off as much skin as is legally possible must be a family thing.

Akhahando tells you that poor Professor MacGuffin has been taken to a torture chamber. He also tells you that Rourke's lady love has also been captured and taken to a different torture chamber, possibly in the same facility. Who is Rourke's Lady Love? I don't know. She's apparently a nurse or something. Look, if I'm to be expected to pay attention to cut-scenes I may as well stop writing this and go be a movie reviewer.

So, having established the player's reason for continuing to play this game, we embark on what I believe is the main story part of the game.

On day one, I am finding the combat to be unsatisfying, and the weapons are flat-out terrible. When I started the game I picked the easiest difficulty, which the game designated for people who “are adept with a squirt gun.” Since most action games mock the player for playing on easy, I didn't mind the insult. What I do mind is that they seem to have [em]actually given my character squirt guns.[/em]

The guns are about as accurate as one of those squirt guns you get in four-packs at the grocery store's seasonal aisle, and are only slightly less powerful. It's easy to see why the new steampunk technology has extended the war by so many years: [em]It's nearly impossible to kill anyone.[/em]

There are two exceptions: the sniper rifle, and the railroad-spike gun. Unfortunately, you can only carry about 10 rounds of ammunition for either of them, and their reload times make them useless in actual combat. The rail-spike gun is actually pretty cool, despite being a single-shot weapon, because you can charge your shot to make it more powerful.

The real focus of this third-person-shooter is traversing the environment — which is to say "platform jumping." The levels I encountered on day one mostly required getting to the top of something. To do this, you can wall-jump, cling to ledges, climb ropes and ladders, and generally get around like a [em]Cirque du Soleil[/em] performer who makes his living in the off-season as a mercenary. (It's the perfect cover! He has to travel around all the time, and who'd suspect a Canadian acrobat of killing people for money?)

The climbing mechanics are actually not that bad, and the levels offer a lot more options for traversal than, for example, [em]Enslaved[/em], which was fun but really funneled you through the levels pretty tightly. There seem to be three or four ways to get anywhere from anywhere else, which is kind of refreshing.

I leave day one with a sigh and a vague notion that my reputation as an iconoclast is at risk.

[strong]DAY 2[/strong]

Now this is more like it!

Day two is much more fun. I'm starting to get into the acrobatics, and I'm noticing there are a lot of ways to get from point A to point B. The levels really do offer a fair amount of traversal freedom.

Combat is still terrible, but despite the fact that my submachine gun does virtually no damage and sounds like someone farting into a wet sock, I'm starting to get the hang of it.

The real star of the show here is the dialogue. Jinkies! It's [em]awful.[/em] Entertainingly awful, though.

Zagato and Yakecan are clearly going for gold in the world “would you two just get a room already so we can stop listening to you bicker?” competition. But here's the thing: The voice acting is so atrocious that you can't take any of it seriously.

Have you played House of the Dead 2? It's like that, except the voice actors in [em]Damnation[/em] aren't even [em]trying[/em] to emote. I'd accuse them of hiring non-English speakers to read words phonetically off a page, but that would be an insult to Ouyang Lianzi .

My favorite voice acting moment is actually a bug enhanced with bad dialogue — sort of a synergy of bad, if that's not redundant. At some point Rourke is climbing a rope, his massive arms pumping while his legs dangle uselessly below him, and I encounter Zagato above me on the same rope. He's not moving, so I just climb my way up, figuring I'll either spur him into action or clip through him. As soon as the brim of my hat touches his boot, Zagato vanishes from the screen and I hear Zagato's voice murmur, “Sorry.”

I paused the game, and when I stopped laughing I thought to myself “Well, at least they apologized for it.”

The real star of day two, however, is the motorcycle. At some point you have to drive a steam-powered motorcycle through a mine. At certain points (which are clearly marked on the ground with tire tracks) you get to drive on the walls. It reminds me of nothing so much as Stun Runner .

It's fun, and quite frankly if the game were nothing but traversal puzzles and motorcycle sequences, I could give this game high marks in good conscience.

Then I met Andy Serkis!
IMAGE(http://i337.photobucket.com/albums/n369/pat3ot/2014-09-10_00001.jpg)

All in all, a good day.

[strong]DAY 3[/strong]

Blurg. It's bad again.

The combat is not entertainingly bad. It's just bad. And the horrible voice acting isn't making up for it anymore.

At one point I actually managed to sneak up on a bad guy by climbing around behind him. He didn't see me, and just stood there dumbly while I unloaded my SMG at him from two feet away. It did boost my accuracy: At least two thirds of the bullets actually hit him at this range.

I've also noticed that the developers really tried to be clever about how headshots were handled, but got bored and gave up. If you successfully kill an enemy with a head shot, his head will drop off.

Not explode. Not fall off. Drop off. His head will simply pop loose and drop like a vase on a wobbly plinth, regardless of which way the enemy was walking or running when it happened. A tiny splash of blood, such as might be expected if someone loaded a Windex bottle with red ink, is the only other indication that something pretty gruesome just happened.

I think the dialogue is starting to grate on me now because the difficulty is ramping up and I'm spending a lot more time retrying sections of the game. If I hear Zagato boast about his marksmanship followed by a response from Yakecan about the size of his gun one more time, I will [em]seriously[/em] begin to wonder why I'm playing this game.

So, two out of three days agree: This is a bad game. The core combat mechanic is abysmal, and cannot be compensated for by the entertainingly bad dialog and legitimately fun climbing and driving mechanics. In that regard it reminds me a bit of [em]Mirror's Edge[/em], except the developers of [em]Mirror's Edge[/em] knew their combat stank so they made you do very little of it.

It's too bad, really. There are the seeds of something pretty cool here. But it just runs out of steam.

*GET IT? 'Cause it's, like, STEAM!

[strong]Will I keep playing?[/strong]

IMAGE(http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lpist3gU7T1qbn4o5o1_500.gif)

[strong]Is it the Dark Souls of its genre?[/strong]

It depends on which day I'm playing it on, but on average I'll say probably not. The game isn't really hard unless you get impatient and start trying to plow forward. Can I fault a game that has boring combat for getting too difficult when I try to get through that combat more quickly?

You bet! Just watch me!

On a good day, 3 out of 10 SDSUs (Standard Dark Souls Units, pronounced Sud-zu). On a bad one, maybe 5.

Comments

Now I really want to play a game about a Canadian Cirque du Soleil performer who makes his living in the off-season as a mercenary...

I imagine him/her leaving a note at every assassination scene.

It reads, simply, "Sorry."

Nice article! I got this game when it came out, played it for maybe two hours, gave up frustrated and annoyed, and sold it back to Amazon for only slightly less than I paid for it. Wish I could have those 2 hours of my life back...

Picked up on the last Steam sale. I wanted to like it. I like how other, better games like Van Helsing handle the 19th century steampunk setting. I like the idea of highly vertical levels - some of my more memorable gaming moments came from the massive, vertigo inducing structures of the early Dark Forces games.

The combat is just too awful, the platforming controls are non-intuitive, and it is all just too ugly.

I played through this entire game.

There are nights where I don't cry myself to sleep, now, so I'm getting better... I'm getting better...