Game #1076: Damnation

 Well, I'll be damned....

 I'm a lover of all things horror, and as such I always begin my Halloween celebrations on September, something I haven't properly reflected on this blog of mine. That changes now. I'll sneak in a few games with horror elements here and there to start things up before October, started with Damnation, a scarily bad third-person shooter that features steampunk pseudo-zombies. 

 Well, I'll start with the art direction... it's really good, for the most part. Female characters looked straight out of the 90's with their focus on sex appeal, but on the whole, they look really damn cool, sure, sexy first, but cool. Except for the native, Yakecan, she looks dumb. The main character is a bit boring, but makes for a barely decent steampunk cowboy, and he sorta looks like Jean Claude Van Damme at his prime. Enemy designs fare much better, and the steam-powered guns are pretty neat. Something that really caught my eye is how poorly directed the cutscenes are, as they jump from scene to scene very quickly, making every cutscene feel like a trailer rather than, well, a proper cutscene. Even the dialogue is jumpy, at least they get to the point quickly I guess.

 Well, the game is as basic a third-person shooter as it gets. The only gimmick is that you can hold down a button for a few seconds to have every enemy highlighted in red, even through walls... as long as you hold still. There's no cover system, just crouch and hope for the best and the melee attacks are downright useless, they are hard to aim and they deal very little damage, so don't even bother. You are joined by useless AI partners on every stage, buuut you can also play in local co-op through split-screen, which is pretty cool I'll give them that.

 Something that really hurt my overall enjoyment with the game is that enemies barely react to getting shot, which is very unhelpful as it's hard to tell if your shots are landing, and it's also very unsatisfying to play. But hey, if you shoot from far enough, the AI won't even realize it's getting shot. Overall, the game itself is very unsatisfying, the basics work but they lack pizzazz, and the game does nothing to add excitement to the shootouts. While the weaponry looks cool there's not enough audio-visual feedback to match their designs, so something that looks so cool ends up feeling boring.

 There are some light parkour-ish elements, such as climbing ledges, wall jumps are similar things to what you'd find in Uncharted but without the exciting set-pieces. There were a few decent moments here and there, like shooting a rock with a giant cannon to have it crash down on top of the very same gun you shot at it with, but they are very rare. The game has a few bike sections, but as with everything else in the game... it's not fun. The speed is there, I think, but for some reason they failed to make it exciting in any way. It's also a bit hard to maneuver. 

 Bugs, the game has them too. Sometimes, both enemies and allies will just spawn and stay lying on their backs on the ground. They will still shoot at you, but they are smaller targets. Sometimes enemies will get stuck trying to climb a ledge and one time, when I got a trophy, the game froze for a few seconds, I was about to restart the PS3, but it fixed itself. Somehow.

 Damnation is one of the blandest third-person shooters around, and it has nothing memorable about it... except a few of the funny glitches I came across. It's a shame, because the setting and art-direction showed some promise, but they failed to capitalize on it delivering a very uninspired end product.

 4.0