The Story

Damnation is set in an alternate 19th century America, during a reimagined Civil War era complete with steam-powered robots, weapons, and vehicles. You play an outlaw named Hamilton Rourke, a member of a rebel gang set out to take down an evil industrialist. The villian, Prescott, has taken over the country with an army of robots and serum-injected super soldiers.

Gameplay (or lack thereof)

The gameplay is very repetitive and after playing for a while, it begins to get mind numbing. The enemy AI is stupid and at times nonexistent. You can kill an enemy with just a pistol at long range. Enemies either just stand around or walk back and forth aimlessly. The only way to make up for this AI shortfall was to add ambushes and have enemies that take a lot of damage.

This does not help the game; it only makes it more annoying. The only thing that you may enjoy is jumping to and from buildings doing cool acrobatics, which, is done by only doing a two-button combo. This is fun for a while, but even it gets old. The fluidity between the battles and the acrobatics is broken apart due to the frequent ambushes.

At many points in the game, you must drive steam-powered motorcycles. It may sound fun to have vehicles throughout, but there is nothing interesting about them. The addition of vehicles was done very cheaply and feels like a driving game that was made a long time ago.

Every level has the same look and feel with not much variety. The atmosphere throughout the game is dark and gritty, with a rustic look to everything. The levels are mixed between desert and industrial looking buildings.

With all that has been done with graphics engines lately, you think that they would have used something that was up-to-date. However, problems with the graphics abound. These include ugly textures that are very pixilated and problematic frame rates.

Game Accessibility

Apart from spotty Closed Captioning of player dialog and limited remappable keys, there are not many accessible gaming options in this game. All of the cut scenes have CC, including most of the in-game chatter, but for some reason it does not work in a few areas. Did they just forget?

The rest of the game is not really accessible, which for disabled gamers is always sad to see even if the game is horrible. Targeting is not color-blind friendly. When any body part of an enemy is in the white reticule, the color turns red. For some  color-blind gamer this color change may go unnoticed.  There is no option to change the targeting color to something you can see. The keyboard and controller layouts are a bit awkward.

Having to hold down a key or button to do certain things makes no sense. The game is also twitchy, making it hard for anyone with slow reaction times, or with fine motor disabilities like CP or MS. I would not recommend this game to anyone with a physical disability unless you are able to use Voice Recognition software or have the right hardware setup.  And even then, don't bother.

F is for Failure

Many bad games come and go; Damnation is one of those bad games that will go away quickly. It is easily forgettable with no lasting value. There are many problems with this game that are too obvious and accessibility is limited. You would think the developer (Blue Omega) would have taken the time to fix them. I commend Blue Omega for taking a chance on trying something different but they took a risk and cut corners to get the game out as fast as possible.

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