About the nicest things I can really say about this game is that it is playable and it has an interesting premise.
In Damnation, you play as a fellow named Rourke and along with a handful of fellow outlaws, you are on a quest to kill a man named Prescott who has decided to take over 19th century America with an army of steam-powered robots and a super-serum that turn soldiers into mindless zombies. Clearly, the problems do not lie with the premise, but rather with the design and execution. In Damnation, you only ever do one of three different things: Shoot, jump around, and ride a steam-bike. Unfortunately, none of these activities are terribly interesting.
Of the three activities you engage in, jumping around like some cross-between Spiderman and Prince of Persia is actually the most fun, which is sad because this is actually supposed to be a third-person-shooter. But either way, you spend a great deal of time climbing monstrously large buildings and ornate machines using a variety of parkour inspired moves that would almost certainly be physically impossible for a normal human. Although jumping around can be fun, by the end of the game you will almost certain grow sick of it due to a combination of overly-large levels, a relative dearth of different movements you can perform (no wall running?), and worst of all, rarely any clue as to where exactly you need to go. Therefore, although you spend the majority of the game jumping around, it is rarely more than mildly amusing and usually quite frustrating because you almost never have a clue of where you are supposed to be going.
When you are not jumping around and figuring out where you should go, you will probably be shooting. And boy, do they weapons in your arsenal ever feel weak! Not just because of the paltry sound-effects that accompany them, but also because of how many shots it takes to kill the average bad-guy. Of course, the enemies you face have no problem killing you with the same weapons. Sometimes it honestly feels as if enemies have twice as much life as you do because you need to pump so many rounds into them to make them go down, but staying in the open for more than a second will almost certainly get you killed. It also does not help that you will usually be facing overwhelming odds of enemies that have all clearly undergone extensive marksmanship training because even with less accurate weapons, they can consistently nail you from clear across the level. God help you during the parts where you are pinned down by enemies wielding sniper-rifles... The only true advantage you have is that enemies are incredibly stupid, often standing still while you pummel them with bullets, or even worse, charging straight at you without any regard for personal safety. If it were not for their stupidity, this game would be impossible even at the "Casual" difficulty setting (which is anything but casual).
After jumping around and shooting a few hundred bad-guys, you will occasionally find a steam-powered motorcycle that you can ride around for a while. Although this is fun at first, like many things in this game, you will probably soon grow bored of the steam-bikes and wonder why they bothered to implement them at all. Most of the steam-bike sections are very easy, except for some irritating trial-and-error sections, but at least they break-up the monotony of the rest of the game.
So there you have it ladies and gentlemen, my review of a game that by all rights should have been amazing, but somewhere along the line stumbled, fell down a flight of stairs, rolled into the street, and was hit by a school-bus. Honestly, about the nicest things I can really say about this game is that it is playable and it has an interesting premise. If you value the finite time you have left to live, do not make my mistake and play this game.