Kombo's Review Policy: Our reviews are written for you. Our goal is to write honest, to-the-point reviews that don't waste your time. This is why we've split our reviews into four sections: What the Game's About, What's Hot, What's Not and Final Word, so that you can easily find the information you want from our reviews.

What The Game's About
Damnation puts you in an alternate history setting where the Civil War has been extended by a few decades due to the invention of steam-powered weaponry, machinery, and vehicles. Playing as Hamilton Rourke, you go in search of your missing loved one while helping to put an end to the war, and as expected, enemies and obstacles are stacked against you along the way.

What's Hot
It's quite rare that this actually happens, but there's nothing hot about Damnation. Honestly, there are times when you play a game that you don't enjoy and your knee-jerk reaction is to just blast it in a review and write it off as pure garbage, but I still feel the desire to do so even after giving the game a fair shot and a cooling off period to think about it. I guess the single aspect of Damnation that's vaguely commendable is that the setting and premise are kind of cool. After you get into the game, however, even the most optimistic and cheery of people are going to struggle mightily to find redeeming factors in the game, let alone anything worthy of outright praise.



What's Not
If I don't pace myself, the content in this section could fill volumes. Somewhere along the line, the development of Damnation took a very bad turn, and it's obvious that Blue Omega tried to save a project that would have been best left to die a quiet death. Even the announcement of the game's release on the official company web site has a typo. Damnation is what seems to be the product of an inexperienced yet stubborn developer trying to shoot a little too high for their first go around with game development.

If you want to know specifically what's wrong with Damnation, let me list a few issues that you'll notice within the first hour of playing. The graphics are plagued with horrible character models, poor textures, empty environments, and a framerate that is more up and down than the stock market. The game loads right in the middle of gameplay, and it's annoying each and every time. There are some serious issues with the physics engine which will cause collision detection bugs, twitchy objects, laughable enemy death animations, and all sorts of other oddities. Levels are too long, and you're traversing locations that are simply long stretches of plain boredom, devoid of any real action. I've had drives through Nebraska that were more stimulating.

The controls are also something worth picking at, as they're clunky and cumbersome. The game is a 3rd-person shooter that pretends to offer modern gameplay conventions, but everything feels decidedly archaic in comparison to just about any other 3rd person action game on the 360 or PS3.

I could go on about the ridiculous sound effects, the bland musical score, the throwaway multiplayer and co-op modes, and the rough around the edges presentation, but I'll stop here. Simply put, the bad in Damnation outweighs the good by a metric ton.

Final Word
I always look for redeeming factors in games and try to understand why a bad game ended up as it did. With Damnation, I don't know that it was ever on the right track. The game is a total mess. I don't want to be disrespectful to those that undoubtedly worked hard to put the game out on store shelves, but there comes a point when you need to be honest and just say it like it is; there's no reason to play Damnation either alone or online.