Despite the less than stellar reviews, the trailers for Damnation kept me interested and I decided to check it out. I’m glad I did because despite its flaws I had fun playing through the campaign. Damnation is a third person shooter with a steam punk theme. I really enjoyed the aesthetics of the game even though graphically it was not great. The character models looked really good, but the backgrounds and building look a little little generic and out dated. The bid feature of the game is the vertical scale of the environments. The levels pretty linear but they are huge both in height and square footage. I’m not sure exactly how long the single player campaign is but I would guess somewhere around 8 hours since I completed it in less than a week on Hardcore difficulty. The game only has Casual, Hardcore, and Insane modes, but no Normal difficulty setting. The Hardcore setting I played on was a bit rough at points because you can only take about 2 shots before you get killed. They did a good job of making steam punk styled weapons. There is the normal sniper, shotgun and assault rifles like most shooters have, but there were some really fun unique guns. My favorite was the arrow rifle that just decimates enemies.

The main gameplay focuses on getting around the vertical environments while taking out enemies. I actually played it a lot like a shooting gallery and them a platform puzzle because I would snipe every enemy I could and them work my way though the level until there were more enemies to snipe. It was actually a lot of fun to play like this because I could figure out the vertical platform puzzles without having to worry about enemies sneak up on me. Early in the game they give you the ability to see where enemies are through walls so this combined with the sniper was a lot of fun.

The gameplay mixes in some driving sections as well. You have a motorcycle with a turbo boost. The driving sections were frustrating at first because at times you have to make jumps and run up on the side walls, but once I realized that you don’t have to boost to stay on the side walls it was much easier. The driving sections are actually very forgiving because they give you a lot of checkpoints and you stick to the walls when you drive on them as long as you do not stop. My biggest complaint about the driving sections was that you can’t adjust the camera angle and it sits directly behind the bike making it hard to see what is right in front of you. This made it hard to time jumps properly.

I did like that you can use the cheat codes available to unlock power weapons and big head mode. Even with the cheats turned on you can still get achievements so I recommend turning the power weapons and custom weapon load-out as soon as you start the game.

The biggest complaint I had while playing was that the game would randomly pause and pop up a “Loading…” message. However, there is no progress indicator and the loading times seemed to occur randomly. I never know if I was going to have to wait 2 or 40 seconds for the loading to finish. Most of the loading was on the longer side and since it would just pop up randomly mid-level I never figured out how to tell if a load screen was coming or how long it would be.

I’m not saying this is a great game or anything. It has flaws. A lot of them. The graphics are date, the loading is long and random, and the achievements are really few and far between. But, I went into playing Damnation with low expectations and I was pleasantly surprised with the vertical platforming and shooting gallery sections. If they were to make a Damnation 2 that is up to the standards of games like Gears of War 2 and Assassing Creed it could be a really great game.