2009 – Publisher: Codemasters
When it comes to games, I love a good narrative as much as the next guy. But when I’ve had a shitty day and feel like blowing off some steam – or I’m home sick and my attention span lasts less than my orgasm – then I love me some mindless shooting; particularly if it can be completed in the span of a week. I was angry writing my first draft for this review, not the least of which because I only wanted it to be one paragraph and it was turning into a Jason Joint. I had just finished an extended session ending with the final sequence before the Big Bad Boss and didn’t realize almost three hours had gone by and it didn’t feel like I had gotten anywhere. I was frustrated with the sloppy controls and the unintuitive level design and the brain-dead AI that seemed to hamper any progress I was making, and I just wanted to be DONE.
In its defense I had an FAQ open on the computer that I kept referencing so I was being a naughty boy: reading about where to go before I had gotten there, and especially to see just how much more I had to play before I was finished (by conveniently scrolling down and seeing how much text was left in the guide. CLASSY). Truthfully, Damnation is not a bad game. If anything, it is severely unpolished. There are some noble ideas and some spectacular views and its heart is in the right place. Hell, I sat down and finished the damn thing, which is more than I can say for Crysis 2. I purged that game faster than my body purges solid foods in the morning.
Damnation can best be described as Gunman Chronicles-meets-Assassin’s Creed. Anyone remember Gunman Chronicles? Another mod-turned-full-price-retail-game from back in the day? While that used the Half-Life engine, Damnation uses the Unreal Tournament 2004 engine but the games themselves are fundamentally similar. Both are steampunk-inspired adventures where you traverse olde-age environments like Western towns and grown-over ruins defeating the half-man-half-cyborg cohorts of the Big Bad Boss Of The Week! The story is a hodgepodge of steampunk-meets-cowboys-and-indians tropes we’ve seen before, with the dastardly dictator Prescott using a chemical serum to control an army of half-human automatons, but it also turns them into bloodthirsty cannibals! You and your ragtag group of rebels – some of whom have familial connections to our evildoers – join up to take him down and they don’t like each other at the beginning but they learn to work together and blah blah blah. Lore was communicated largely through gameplay including propaganda that plays through radio channels, near-constant during-loading chatter between characters in-game, and posters dotted everywhere with easter eggs, but there really wasn’t any proper backstory to the characters in the cutscenes. The story just kind of started mid-rebellion, and then some more stuff happened along the way (including a Native American seer – a crucial player in the plot – who exists in a bubble until the game happens to mention in the back-half that he’s the brother of one of the protagonists), and then it ends. Sure, games have successfully conveyed plot through gameplay before without an overabundance of cutscenes (just look at Eric Chahi’s work in Another World), but Damnation is linear in its storytelling and I would have appreciated some more cinematic touches, such as longer and more-detailed cinematics. None of this was helped by the voice acting. There was no pathos. No drama. No reason to care. If this really is a low-budget title then these actors could have been friends of the developer, and they had to get home in time to feed their kids.
That’s fine, though: this is an Unreal Tournament clone. We aren’t here for the Oscar-winning plot. We want some finely-tuned action and fast-paced gunplay and lots of jumping around firing rocket launchers and gibbing challenging bots. Right? Well as stated before, not only is Damnation a Gunman Chronicles-clone, it’s an Assassin’s Creed-clone. That’s because the developers have built an in-engine parkour mechanic that plays prominently throughout gameplay. They even stole the “hold X to be awesome” from Creed where the X button does EVERYTHING related to jumping-onto-or-through-things and grabbing-and-holding-onto-things. This is a problem. Bottom line: the Unreal engine works best for fast action and less with exact platforming and environmental adventuring. Damnation’s level design showcases an impressive verticality that you don’t often see outside of casual 2D action games: levels are built into the sides of cliffs or mountains, or there’s an entire ruin fifty-floors underneath a city, or a huge sewer complex beneath a fortress in an icy terrain, and you’re either going straight UP or straight DOWN. There isn’t much in the way of non-linear gameplay and even when I was exploring or mindlessly hopping through a level hoping it was the right way to go it was always the right way to go, barring a couple times I had to stop and look around to find a zipline or a bridge or a ledge I had to cross to open the next part of the level. But everything looks really good for a budget title and they nailed a sense of scope. I wanted to hop through the game and explore. But here, instead of Assassin’s-Creed-style where the environment is designed for you to “hold X” and run anywhere and have the game essentially play itself, Damnation requires you to press X when you’re near something interactive in order to activate the action. And as I said, the X button is used for jumping and climbing and swinging and grabbing and EVERYTHING! It reminded me of Amiga games from the 80s where they got passed the single-button joystick barrier by mapping Up to jump. To put it mildly, the control scheme sucks for 3D platforming. Once you initiate a command on the controller, you cannot stop it. If you decide to reload in the middle of a gunfight then you cannot run away or melee attack while the reload animation is still running. You will die. A LOT. And when you are parkouring around the level you will most certainly die from pressing the X-button and then getting shot to Hell while your character keeps climbing up something you just want him to stop climbing on.
Since we are talking about control, let’s talk about Damnation’s most damning feature: the combat system. It sucks, too, especially when you take into account that combat comprises 50% of the game. AI is non-existent. Some sections require you to eliminate every enemy to proceed and I found the best course was to run around the arena triggering all the bad guys, and then camping somewhere til I picked them all off (or running right up behind them and blasting them FOUR-OR-MORE TIMES with my shotgun before they gibbed in that way the Unreal Engine is known for). 90% of the time, however, I just ignored them in favor of getting to the next objective. The reload animation takes FOREVER, and guns feel so light and sans-oomph (which you wouldn’t expect from an arsenal that includes futuristic versions of modern-day weapons like miniguns and shotguns) that the only way to know you need to reload is to look at your ammo gauge, which you shouldn’t be doing anyway in the middle of a tense battle when all you’re trying to do is run away. While we’re on running, you have limited sprint, but there’s no gauge to tell you when you’re running out of stamina. I would be running away from sniper fire only to slow to a crawl, with creepy panting coming from my speakers. Can I harp more on the arrestingly-terrible control? HOW CAN I MAKE YOU UNDERSTAND? I still don’t know how I managed to get passed any scene where I had to swing from pipes. I would hold one button (a button that, if you don’t hold it and just press it, you stop immediately and flip around in the opposite direction) and smash two others that I thought would do something. Eventually I made it. I could say that about the rest of the game.
Let’s end on the positives. There was just something awesome about the environments and their scale: I cannot stress this enough. The game looked cool and made me want to finish it. Props must also go to the numerous vehicle sections where you drive a three-wheeled motorbike SUPER-DUPER FAST through caves and caverns. They’re fast; they’re fun; they’re everything the main game could have consistently been. However, they are also very much on-rails with little opportunity for exploration and in that way serve more as interactive cutscenes than actual chunks of gameplay (you always know where to go, and you’re either chasing someone or something or being chased yourself or one of your companions sitting on the back seat is talking incessantly about how before the war they used to ride their motorcycles and meanwhile you’re careening through a labyrinth grotto at 200kph that isn’t actually a labyrinth). If they had fleshed these sections out – maybe added some non-linearity to them – they could have been a whole game on their own. They’re that good. As it stands, if you like Assassin’s Creed (or even Gunman Chronicles) then maybe this will be up your alley. But it’s less then the sum of its parts (although its sum now in the stores is probably ten cents)! Remember I told you that when you’re pulling your hair out trying to get the Waterworks running in Terra Verte!
//jf 7.22.2020
theory of a daskeman 