Damnation

Damnation is a Fitting Title

Damnation was and is an interesting idea. Not to many Games try to take the Civil War and make an experience worthy enough to quench the thirst of Blood Thirsty gamers of this generation. Sure, the History Channel has released their idea of a Civil War game, but the results were less than satisfactory. Who knows, maybe the Civil War is incapable of being interesting enough to carry a full game. Or, maybe no one with the right stuff has attempted it yet, and maybe one day we will get our epic Civil War Shooter.

Unfortunately, today is not that day, and Damnation is not that game. The second you put Damnation in your disk tray it will become immediately clear that you have made a horrible, horrible mistake. Right from the get go, Damnation disappoints with its archaic graphics. I was actually unsure if I was looking at a Next Gen game made with the Unreal Engine, or an early gen PS2 title. Everything from the textures to the Character Models to the frame rate seems utterly unfinished. There is a point early in the game where I found myself on the top of a mountain. Once outside, I turned around to see a row of houses far off in the distance built into the side of the massive rock formation. How cool, I thought, as I zoomed in for a closer look with my sniper rifle. But as I looked closer, I saw that all of them were sloppily thrown up there in such a rush they were glitching through the mountain, and they lacked a floor.

It is things like this that make it immediately clear that Blue Omega, the Developers, cut every corner they could find. Take the A.I. for instance. Now, I can not be 100% sure, but I think a few years ago I took a poop with better Artificial Intelligence than Damnation. Enemies often stand still and shoot at walls, obviously an over ambitious attempt to kill an annoying fly. Sometimes, enemies will kill each other for you, failing to look ahead before blasting their allies in the back of the head in a futile attempt to hit me with a shotgun from 800 feet away. This can can cause a few unintentional laughs from players, as it happens often enough to become amusing. What isn't amusing, however, is the amount of bullets the disgustingly Low Res enemies can withstand before falling down. I counted about 80 bullets from my machine gun at one point, but your character can only take a few shots before succumbing to the inevitable.

This is odd, because the pathetic amount of damage you can take before dying would lead you to believe that this is a cover shooter, like Gears of War. It is not. I spent the first few firefights slamming my character up against walls and jamming every button on the controller trying desperately to figure out which one would attach me to said wall. None of them do. All you get is a duck button, which is about as useless as the voice acting. Yes, Blue Omega must have spent all their money just thinking of a cool Civil War Shooter, because some of the lines read in this game can stand next to the original Resident Evil and say "Ha ha, I'm more cringe worthy!". Each actor delivers their lines with such wooden appeal that you wonder why they even bothered. I honestly can not think of even one spoken line of dialogue in the entire game that wasn't insultingly awful.

The acrobatic angle the game tries so hard to engulf you in just ends up falling flat do to wonky controls. This is one of those games where no matter where you adjust the sensitivity, your crap out of luck. The story is convoluted. The graphics are glitchy, low res and uninspired. The voice acting is horrific. The enemies clinically retarded. The aiming severely broken. The multiplayer community non existent, and the entire experience is lazy, unfinished, and unprofessional.

Please, do not think that Coop with a friend can help make this wreck any more fun than it already isn't. Nothing can save Damnation.