I’m confused. See, when I first looked at the blurb for Damnation I was pretty excited, with it looking like a pretty enjoyable third-person romp through some kind of steampunk Wild West setting. After an hour or so of play, the excitement had faded away and I was really, really not enjoying myself at all. The game felt clunky, buggy and was visually unimpressive, and progress was slow. Then, and for reasons I am still unsure of, it started growing on me. Not much, granted, but a little.

You play the part of Hamilton Rourke, a pretty unremarkable chap who messed up a military operation a while back and accidentally got all of his men killed. With this ineptitude riding high in his mind you must dash, leap and climb your way around Damnation’s levels with him as he tries to stop all sorts of bad things occurring, whilst all the same time somehow managing to keep his cowboy hat from falling off his bonce.

That he manages this is a pretty impressive feat in itself, as for the majority of the game you will find yourself leaping from ledge to ledge and sliding around like a lunatic as you scale your terrain in order to reach your objectives. Quite why this should be given that you have a big airship often at your gang’s disposal is another matter entirely, but that’s the situation you’re left in so you’re going to have to deal with it.

Problem is, the pre-release blurb for this heralded a new kind of third-person shooter… and Damnation doesn’t deliver it. After a short enough time with the game you realise that this is the kind of thing we’ve all done before in numerous adventure/action games like Tomb Raider, Shadowman, Prince of Persia etc etc, and it doesn’t really do anything over and above what they did to suggest that it’s a step forward either.

That’s not to say that the whole scenery navigation is a write-off, as it isn’t. Hopping onto a ledge will enable you to shuffle around before either pulling yourself upward or flinging yourself back toward an object behind you. There’s also a pretty decent wall jump that can be used in confined spaces to gain yourself a bit more leverage, so hopping between things is actually reasonably good fun.

However, you are never really ever made to feel particularly clever by the level design, which does hurt the experience. Each section you arrive at does have a couple of different ways that you can clamber around to reach your destination, but most of them are all pretty obvious and hence you start treating the thing like an obstacle course rather than a puzzle, which hurts the sense of achievement when you finally make it from point A to point B. Obvious ledges, ladders and the like are all well and good, but it wouldn’t have hurt to have had to use the ol’ noggin now and again.

A similarly sour note is struck by the gunplay, which is really quite underwhelming. You’ve got the usual range of short, medium and long-range efforts that are all offered to you at various points throughout your adventure, but no gun you get ever feels particularly powerful (hitting someone square in the chest with a sniper rifle really should be a one-shot kill), and hence you end up spraying bullets wildly in the general direction of either your enemies or the nearest explosive barrel rather than having any sort of enjoyable fire fights.

To top all this off, both the game’s visuals and storytelling are rather… well… lacking. Flat, ugly textures spread themselves throughout what is admittedly a pretty vast sprawl of environments, whilst the characters themselves seem rather flat and aren’t particularly emotive. Of particular annoyance is that the game often suffers from pretty heavy frame rate issues during more busy moments of battle, which leads to the whole thing looking quite choppy on occasion.

The story itself is packed full of awkward clichés; you have the embittered, serious lead, the annoying, cocky sidekick and the chick who wants to be taken seriously but at the same time seems to feel the need to show off her rack at every opportunity. They all have some reason or other to hate the overbearing evil corporation who have turned bad and started using technology for their evil ends, and to that end you are given a somewhat familiar tale of a ragtag bunch who don’t necessarily get on at the start growing to respect each other as they get closer and closer to defeating their common enemy.

See, the really annoying thing about all the above is that – at times – the game is actually pretty fun. Hopping about from ledge to platform is decent enough, and some of the levels are good fun to navigate. A particular favourite of mine is a level set in some kind of Mexican village in which you often find yourself scaling stone dragon heads and the like, along with all sorts of shanty town buildings. The sections where you have to ride a motorcycle at breakneck speed along all sorts of tricky routes are entertaining enough, too. The option to co-op (over Xbox Live or locally – TAKE NOTE OTHER DEVELOPERS) is also very welcome indeed, although chances are you will need to find someone with quite a bit of patience lest you get left in the lurch. Thankfully, co-op games can be resumed in single player should the need arise.

Hence, you can’t really look on Damnation with too much scorn, although at the same time you still have to admit that it is not a particularly good game. With a lot of spit and polish perhaps it could have been rather more remarkable than what we’ve ended up with, but as it is Damnation treads a well-worn path despite the claims, and still manages not to do it terribly impressively. Shame.