While Damnation gives you a nice arsenal of guns to play with, none of them work as intended. Sometimes it takes a few rifle shots to drop a bad guy, other times you’ll need half a clip before the game figures out you were shooting this entire time. Also, the AI is borderline retarded. Most of the time they’ll just stand there while you slowly chip away at their health.

The game also has this weird obsession with linear motorcycle racing stages. You man Rourke’s ugly motorcycle and barrel through a generic canyon. Periodically enemies pop out of nowhere to try and shoot you, but you’ll be too bored or careless to bother fighting back. The chances of falling asleep during these monotonous segments are depressingly high.

Platforming tries to break up the tedious shooting and motorcycling. In between gun play segments (and sometimes frustratingly in the middle of them) you will jump over bottomless chasms, shimmy across ledges, and leap from one precarious hand hold on a canyon wall to the next. Surprisingly, this isn’t too terrible. Unlike everything else, it isn’t ridden with mysterious glitches and actually works. However, no one will buy the game for its platforming, which is unfortunate since it’s the only aspect that Damnation remotely executes well.

Damnation is probably the worst game of 2009. There’s nothing good about it. Sure the platforming mechanics don’t suck, but that’s like letting someone stab you in the eye to get a $0.99 Popsicle -- it’s just not worth it. From the bad voice acting to the bland motorcycle stages to the flawed gun play, everything about Damnation just flat out blows.