(Originally posted at Crush! Frag! Destroy!)

Steampunk - the term conjures to mind images of brass gears and bustled skirts, monocles and machinery, Victorian finery in a head-on collision with mad science on an airship bound for lost civilizations. However, what people sometimes forget is that steampunk encompasses more than just these romantic notions. For every mutton-chopped gentleman explorer questing for adventure or clockwork man searching for what it means to be human there is a grittier, more tarnished side of the cog. That other side is Damnation and, sadly, the tarnish goes more than concept deep.

Set in an alternate timeline where the American Civil War lasted for decades, Damnation is a sad case of a good concept struggling inside a confining, broken and incomplete framework. I want to say up front that, going into it, I wanted to like this game. I'm a fan of both steampunk and alternate history scenarios but, no matter how much you try, it's hard to ignore a game that is this fundamentally flawed.

Before we get to those flaws, however, let's begin with an overview to bring you up to speed. Damnation is a third person shooter mixed with large amounts of platforming. The game was marketed as being a "shooter gone vertical" and the tagline is apt. Levels are sprawling and filled with multi-storied buildings and ruins connected with ladders, bridges and zip-lines. This is actually one of the elements of the game that I enjoyed and felt showed great potential. You can approach each encounter from multiple angles and directions instead of being channeled down a series of corridors. Sadly, the execution doesn't do the concept justice because of the game's controls.

If I had one main beef with Damnation, the controls would be it. You spend almost as much time fighting the controller as you do the game's generic, brainless enemies. From movement to gunplay, there isn't really a single element that works cleanly and, infuriatingly, there is no option to remap the layout. This forces you into a trial-by-fire to learn and adapt before you find yourself throwing your controller at the nearest wall. One particularly frustrating example is the mapping of reload to the L3 stick-click. There's little more maddening than dying because your already fragile character decided to enter an animation that leaves you vulnerable while rushing an enemy. A game focused on gunplay and platforming needs precise shooting and an elegant traversal mechanic and this offers neither.

A decent, engaging story could have redeemed sub-par controls to make the experience more worthwhile; Damnation's setting certainly has enough potential to allow for the possibility. In this alternate America, the Civil War dragged on for decades instead of years. Both sides of the conflict, fueled by steam-tech weaponry from Prescott Standard Industries, wore each other down until such time as PSI's namesake, William Dean Prescott, swooped in, decimating the weary remnants. Declaring himself sovereign of New America, the self-styled "Lord" Prescott conscripted the populace into working as virtual slaves, providing the grist for PSI's industrial millstone under the guise of the "greater good". The magically gifted Native Americans, where they couldn't be converted, were exterminated. The player takes on the role of Captain Hamilton Rourke, a former military man turned leader of a band of freedom fighters pushing back against PSI's yoke of tyranny.

Sounds like the seed for a good tale, doesn't it? One potentially full of dramatic action, some pulpy one-liners and maybe even a little pathos; three of the story's rebels are each trying to re-unite with a lost loved one. However, you get none of this. Instead you get lines like "I did not betray my father. I did what I had to in a world gone mad." delivered with reads as flat and dry as the Southwest hardpan the game portrays. Such a line would also stand a working chance if the character delivering it didn't sound as if they were switching voice actresses (and sexes, for that matter) every other line in the game's fourth act.

Most of the spoken dialog feels like it was pasted together from takes done months apart. Only Prescott's brainwashing propaganda, broadcasting ubiquitously in the game's urban areas, feels right - the droning, near-emotionless quality actually works in this case, sapping the player's will much as it did the world's inhabitants. But even that doesn't make up for cringe-bombs like "It's time to try the gift my brother gave us. Rourke, try the gift my brother gave us." I honestly wish I were kidding there.

So if the controls are broken and the story and performance flat, can at least a good set of visuals placate the graphics aficionados? Sorry, wrong again. Damnation is built on the Unreal Engine and bears many of the usual visual hallmarks of that tech. However, it looks like the team never bothered to move past early placeholder graphics. Faces are emotionless and wooden, animations stiff and clunky and the framerate stutters and chugs. NPC models overlap, blink into existence and teleport across the map at a moment's notice. The steam-powered motorcycles in the superfluous padding of the bland vehicle sections don't even seem to be touching the ground most of the time. Needless to say, abundant technical glitches make for a jarring visual experience.

Overall, Damnation just feels unfinished. It looks, sounds and plays like a late alpha build that somehow got pushed out the door without anyone noticing. In the light of what happened during the game's development (and the subsequent aftermath), I feel bad being as harsh as I am. It really does have some interesting concepts that would have been excellent, had they been better polished. Perhaps it would be worth a rental if you're a hardcore steampunk fan or maybe if you want to team up with a friend to tackle the campaign in co-op. Beyond that, it only stands as a sad testament to wasted potential.