I hate Damnation.

This isn’t just in general terms—although the concept applies there too.  I hate the thought of anyone being sent to an eternity of fire and torment.  I also hate the game of the same name, now available for PC, PS3, and Xbox 360.  And why do I bear such a beautiful hatred for this lump of interactive dung?  Read on and see why!

First, the plot—back around the 1860s, when the American Civil War was in full swing, a corporation was founded to take advantage of the situation and hopefully make a few bucks on the side.  The Prescott company, by name, began supplying arms to what seemed like both sides, fueling a massive expansion in technology.  Taking the resulting cash, and along with a couple of choice developments not released to the military, the Prescott outfit stages its own putsch against the Union AND the Confederacy bother, spreading out as the forces of New America, with Prescott—Lord Prescott—as its head.  Now, a resistance, lead by a professor that developed some of Prescott’s most valuable tech and a former Army Captain, has risen up to take back America from New America.

How massive a technological expansion, you may be wondering?  One simple word: steampunk.  Yes, Damnation is a game about steampunk, with clockwork automaton soldiers called Automen, turbine-powered motorbikes, and massive dirigible airships with outboard impeller drives.  Steam powered everything, folks, and some of it actually more advanced than what we have today—that’s the nature of steampunk.

And that’s why I hate this game.

See, Damnation may well be the second steampunk game ever, the first being a much more limited sort of steampunk called Darkwatch.  Damnation represents an amazing story, an alternate history of shocking depth.  Imagine an industrialist today—a Bill Gates, for example.  Maybe a Rupert Murdoch or a Ted Turner or even a Steve Jobs who just one day decided, hey, the government’s populated by a collection of screw-ups, halfwits, dullards and greedheads.  Maybe I should make an army and show them how to do the job right!  That’s exactly what’s going on here.

And when you start adding in fully-realized combat androids (the Automen) in the 1860s, you’ve got a lot of possibilities.  No matter who actually wins that particular conflict the entire world would be irrevocably altered.  From a literary standpoint, Damnation is a triumph.  The hate, meanwhile, comes in thanks to the miserable wreck of a game to which they’ve attached that literary triumph of a plot.  Damnation is a hellish array of horrible graphics, lousy gameplay, cheesy sound, terrible play mechanics, and a complete waste of a deep and amazing storyline.

It’s a third person shooter, that’s the worst part of it.  A third person shooter, with guns that are woefully underpowered for the job, packed with meaningless run and jump “action” segments that add nothing but unnecessary complications.  A third person shooter that looks like hell itself and sounds like the weeping of the damned.

Damnation is exactly what it says on the box, sadly for us all.  Playing this game feels like a jaunt through eternal torment.  And worst of it all, a science-fiction heaven of a storyline hangs tantalizingly over us all, forcing us to play on…or be damned.

I hate this game.