Product Description

Bringing dramatic third-person shooter action to huge, steampunk-inspired environments, Damnation for PS3 puts a range of unique weapons in your hands and lets you test the limits of the human body by performing acrobatic stunts to move through vertical levels. Set in an early 20th century world where the Civil War never ended, this game will have you climbing walls, commanding killer vehicles, and seeking out ways to stop industrialists with a thirst for totalitarian power.

• Take up a rough fight against the PSI in a world inspired by American history and steampunk aesthetics
• Explore huge, detailed environments that maximize the impact of vertical space and levels that each include up to three hours of game play
• Cling to ledges, hang from scaffolding, slide down ropes and climb up them, all while taking part in firefights
• Use your unique Spirit Vision ability to see friends and enemies through walls or from far away
• Experience four distinct multiplayer modes and support for up to eight players on each map
  
  

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4306 in Computer & Video Games
• Brand: Codemasters
• Model: SDAMNP3FC00
• Published on: 2009-05
• Released on: 2009-05-22
• Rating: Suitable for 18 years and over
• ESRB Rating: Mature
• Platform: PLAYSTATION 3
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: .50" h x 5.25" w x 6.75" l, .30 pounds

Manufacturer's Description
Bringing dramatic third-person shooter action to huge, steampunk-inspired environments, Damnation for PS3 puts a range of unique weapons in your hands and lets you test the limits of the human body by performing acrobatic stunts to move through vertical levels. Set in an early 20th century world where the Civil War never ended, this game will have you climbing walls, commanding killer vehicles, and seeking out ways to stop industrialists with a thirst for totalitarian power.

Make use of ten distinctive steampunk weapons and take control of any situation. View larger.

Learn to take aim while sliding and climbing in vertical worlds. View larger.

Otherworldly aesthetics add to the imposing nature of your enemies. View larger.

An Alternate History: the Peacemakers and the PSI
You'll follow an ensemble cast including the hero Rourke -- a veteran of the war that ripped the country into pieces and member of a guerilla army called the Peacemakers. These rough fighters are up against the PSI led by William Dean Prescott, a powerful and manipulative man angling to become the dictator of an industrialized empire. As the complicated, multi-faceted story unfolds around Rourke and his cohort, you'll find that he is still looking for his son and fiancee, who went MIA during the war.

The cast of characters includes native healers and seers with unique abilities. And fighters can employ a special spirit vision ability to see enemies through walls or from far away, making it impossible for anyone to stay hidden for long.

Rich, Innovative Vertical Environments
Featuring rugged, detailed environments that have been designed to maximize the impact of vertical space, Damnation follows the action as it moves though deep canyons, up shear cliff faces, into secret caverns, around towering skyscrapers, and toward PSI's factory fortress, which sprawls across the tundra. Each location offers miles of horizontal ground and thousands of vertical feet for players to explore and exploit.

This means you're movement isn't just limited to running, ducking, and driving a burly motorbike. If you want to survive, you'll have to master shooting while in the middle of climbing scaffolding, sliding down ropes, and using vehicles to jump huge chasms. And, of course, the developer's emphasis on vertical movement adds a whole new dimension to the concept of holding the high ground in a firefight, since attacks really can come from just about anywhere.

Rounding out your experience, a combination of dynamic 3D graphics and tough, steampunk aesthetics brings an iconic look and feel to the game's ten distinctive weapons, edgy playable vehicles, and bold industrial structures.

Epic Single-Player Missions and Multiplayer Modes
Damnation offers options to keep play interesting, from campaigning on your own through a series of levels that each offer up to three hours of playing time to competing with friends in four distinct multiplayer modes and support for up to eight players on each map. Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, King of the Hill, and Capture the Flag each offer distinct possibilities for you and your friends to battle each other and compete for superiority.

Product Description
For more than 20 years, the Coalition and the Nationalists fought their bloody war. With war comes technology, and it developed at an astonishing pace. The two armies fought each other with ever more powerful weapons, yet neither side gained the advantage.  Ultimately, the two sides ran out of funds, willpower, and men. As the armies collapsed leaving the country in anarchy, a new power rose.  Sweeping down on the exhausted country, PSI's forces obliterated the remaining armies and began its conquest of the East. Now, the Western territories, mostly unaffected by the civil war, find themselves suddenly defenseless against a new and quickly growing east coast power.

Customer Reviews

Oh dear...worst game of 2009 contender

Haze and Lair were both the tragic results of a developer failing to live up to expectation. It came as quite the surprise; despite the pedigree of the two studios involved adding integrity to their lofty ambitions and haughty promises, the titles turned out to be possibly two of the worst this generation has yet to see. And we all know, of course, how costly such disasters proved to be for everyone involved.

Blue Omega, on the other hand, has approached Damnation from the opposite position, with nothing to lose and everything to gain. Originally starting life as a fan-made total-conversion mod for Unreal Tournament 2004, Damnation's premise was, much like those aforementioned titles, full of promise. Its heady combination of vertical platform action and original steampunk setting was, in theory, set to offer a welcome twist to the more typical third-person shooter.

Yet in truth, Damnation's an embarrassment. Horrifically broken in almost every conceivable way, the end result is a far cry from the "exhilarating epic" originally promised. The initial shock of the PS2-era visuals is the first warning sign, as badly animated character models clumsily traverse their vertical playing field with the rigidity of a circa-1996 Lara Croft, while animations of characters beside you condense to a stutter in an attempt to reduce load. It makes no difference, of course; the game's frame rate regularly dives into a crippling single-digit figure when only a handful of enemies dare venture into view.

Damnation's AI - of both the enemies and allies - is comical at best, absolutely inexcusable at worst. When they're not running into walls or getting stuck on objects, they'll fire at you with an inhuman level of accuracy or simply disappear into thin air at the drop of the hat. Which makes your life easier at least; Damnation's clunky combat is so woefully awful that Blue Omega's comprehension of the genre is open to debate.

It's just totally haphazard and unbalanced. Machine gunners can fatally wound you from miles away with a single piercing bullet, while snipers can often miss the target altogether. Get up close and personal and you're guaranteed death regardless of whether the one-shot-kill shotgunners get you the first time; the screen blur implemented to warn the player of their impending doom is so over-the-top that it simply obscures your vision altogether. The rudimentary cover system too is altogether useless, requiring the player to physically remove themselves from behind cover in order to hit their target, despite the reticule flashing red to suggest otherwise. Fire when in cover and your bullets will almost certainly find themselves lodged in the object you're cowering behind. To make matters worse, should your enemies be standing behind a low fence or similar themselves, your own bullets often fail to register, seemingly getting stuck in an arbitrary invisible wall in front of them. It turns the whole thing into a clumsy, impracticable mess, where the outcome of a firefight isn't determined by the player's skill, but whether the game decides to play fair.

Vehicle sections break up the frivolities, but again their implementation show Blue Omega up as a pathetic, and often plagiaristic developer (the similarities between some of Damnation's design and Gears of War are obvious, least of all the game's `Casual, Hardcore, Insane' approach to difficulty), merely acting as exercises in time-wasting and offering very little purpose, or indeed, entertainment. Instead, they stick to the game's unrelenting rule of being an unpolished - and clearly unfinished - mess, breaking all the laws of physics to jolt up a wall one minute, before randomly deciding to come to a sudden and unexpected halt the next. You just couldn't make it up.

It's frustrating because, at times, Damnation's level design can show a fleeting glimpse of the spectacle it should have been. Levels are large and sprawling, as tall as they are wide, and though their linearity doesn't offer the same amount of athletic freedom as, say, Empire City, their ingenuity is inviting. Overlooking a canyon and working out how to best get across momentarily raises a glimmer of hope, before the game dashes it with another insipid firefight or ridiculous design choice.

So, though still far from perfect (or particularly pleasurable, come to that), it's the platforming elements of Damnation that are - surprisingly, in fact - the game's highlight. But when they're the best part of an otherwise broken game, what does it matter? Blue Omega certainly has the vision, but evidently lacks the talent to do it.

Simply put, Do not buy it.

THE worst game EVER
Firstly I apologise for the awfully long review, it's just this game has riled me up quite a bit...
To summarize how bad this game is, I have broken up the badness into categories for easy viewing.

GRAPHICS

Just terrible, even on a 19" screen you can see how badly this game has been animated.
My first play was on a 32" and just before playing Damnation I had been playing MGS3 for PS2. I was so shocked that MGS3 actually had better graphics and it came out about five years before this game.
It just doesn't meet standards.
You can clearly see jagged lines, square textures, even big black lines in the water where it has been tiled.
I can think of many PS2 games that have better graphics than this game as well...

VOICE ACTING

Wow... I never knew it could be so bad.
The characters speak like robots being crushed at the best of times and quite often seem to sound angry at each other for no apparent reason.
A noteworthy example of this shoddy work can be found in the character "Jack". Sometimes she speaks quite like a female, other times she speaks very lowly as if she is talking in slow motion or is being possessed by a man. Just weird.
I actually believe that even I could have done a better job voice acting every single character myself and I'm not even a voice actor.
That's how bad it is.

GAMEPLAY

The first thing I noticed was the cover system - there wasn't one. So straight away the game got off on a bad foot with me.
Then I noticed that when hanging, you can't jump to the sides, only behind or above, hardly any comparison to Uncharted which it has clearly tried to emulate - borrowing a lot but leaving out many essential gameplay elements.
Another thing that you notice quickly, you can't roll unless aiming your gun.
When throwing mines they very often bounce back at you off things they haven't actually touched creating a dumbfounded expression on my face without fail.
At random points in the game you hear propaganda that repeats a couple of sentences over and over and over... Clearly they wanted this propaganda to brainwash the players too because it has driven me insane every time I bumped into it in the game(alot).
The levels are never ending, you are constantly begging it to end the only level of reasonable length was the first.
There are also strange motorbike riding parts of the game where all you do is ride to the next destination while looking at the terrible scenery. Clearly time wasting to make the game last a bit longer.
The ONLY saving grace this game has is the fact it has a trophy list.

BOTTOM LINE

This game is so bad, I can't honestly remember a game this bad before it.
Every game I ever thought was bad doesn't compare to this.
I actually feel sorry for the game's developers for making this game because I'd be ashamed to put my name on it.
I would feel ripped off if I paid £5 for this game.
DO NOT BUY IT.

Damned if you buy
I bought this game on friday the day of its release, and dropped it back saturday. It is a terrible game, the graphics are poor the gameplay is horrible, and could help but wonder if i had mistakenly bought a early ps2 game. The much hyped vertical gampelay is ok but cannot redeem a very poor game...save your money and dont buy it!