Damnation is one of those third-person shooters that captures the imagination in all the pre-release PR and then manages to disappoint expectant gamers by overloading the hype too far. What's most annoying about it is that it's nowhere near as bad a game as a lot of early news had suggested, yet it fails mostly because it feels incomplete on so many levels.

The storyline sounds quite promising. It's an ‘alternative reality' scenario with the American Civil War continuing well into the twentieth century thanks to the arrival of steampunk arms dealer William Dean Prescott, who's armed both sides with advanced weaponry and let them virtually grind each other into the dust. Now Prescott's own PSI robotic army has taken over the East and is marching on the West with total domination in mind.

You play Captain Hamilton Rourke, a soldier with a dark past, looking for his lost fiancée and hooking up with the Peacekeepers resistant movement to somehow defeat Prescott's ambitions. In reality your guerrilla compatriots are a small band that includes a talkative Spaniard, a tough Native American babe in a leather bikini, another Native American seer plus an English professor and his prosthetically enhanced daughter.

The much vaunted vertical gameplay is essentially a combination of Lara Croft and Prince of Persia acrobatics, including wall-bouncing, shimmying down ropes and hopping across ledges while sometimes firing weapons. It all works fairly well but it's far from innovative and you're greatly helped by having a quick preview panorama which basically traces the route for you to take.

The views from the highest vantage points are often spectacular but because there are frequently several ways to your destination, tracing your path is never too arduous. On the other hand, you're sometimes required to ride powerful motorbikes through canyon style rock formations where the absence of any kind of mini-map or direction indicator is sorely missed.

Not to worry, though, because the major irritation is that the enemy AI can either be brushed aside or often just wait in the open for you to shoot them. If you need any more help you can call on ‘Spirit Vision' which is a sort of thermal imaging technique to spot where the enemies are before you waste them.

And talking of shooting, the weapons need considerable bursts before anyone falls over (even sniper rifles require two shots most of the time), apart from the exploding mines which reduce anyone to bloody body parts within a very generous radius.

If that wasn't enough, there are considerable clipping and debris-floating-in-air issues that occasionally require reloads. Some attempt at longevity has been made by adding drop-in, drop-out co-op and multiplayer options (with up to 8 players in a game) but player apathy may have set in long before that stage.

Verdict
Damnation should have been a dynamic, full-on rollercoaster ride to Hell with the vertical platform combat providing an endless source of Unreal engine battle challenges. Instead it's ended up being buggy, unfinished and damned frustrating.

Company: Codemasters

Tags: race and ethnicity in the united states census american civil war lara croft damnation prince of persia spanish people united states spaniard