Devastation Review

Written by: Darren Cartledge Posted: 7th January 2008

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First person shooter review.

Devastation Details:

	First Person Shooter
	PC
	Digitalo Studios
	NovaLogic

Out Now

N/A

A post apocalyptic setting, faceless and roofless corporations running the world and an out gunned, out numbered resistance. It sounds like the usual setting for a first person shooter, and it’s a recipe that works, well most of the time.

The setting is Earth in 2075, after a devastating war, and in the aftermath a giant corrupt corporations has taken control. Brutal police forces known as Pacification Squads, use fear, force and mind control to impose the corporations will on the people. This is where you come in; you play Flynn Haskell, the leader of a small resistance group who discover that the corporations have started to collaborate at a high level. This can only mean one thing, something big is going on and now’s the time to stop it.

The game is based on a modified version of Epic’s Unreal engine and as a result plays similar to many other first person shooters. The game is pretty easy to get to grips with, though strangely progression through the earlier levels seems to take longer then it does in later levels, as the games difficulty seems to decrease.

As in many new FPS Devastation is team orientated, you have a squad of AI controlled characters under your command. You are able to issue squad members with basic commands, such as Attack, Follow, Defend and Hold. The AI characters follow all of these commands fairly well, although there are some bugs especially with the ‘Attack’ command as the characters simply run through the level guns blazing shooting everything in sight. Nothing seems to be safe from their adrenaline filled gun frenzy, not even walls and the sky! Keeping up with AI characters in attack mode can sometimes be quite a challenge in its self as they seem, to bare no regard for their own safety.

Enemy AI in general can be fairly challenging as given the opportunity they will swamp your position, and when engaging you in gun fights they will duck for cover behind objects. An example of buggy enemy AI is that if you stand a certain distance away from them they don’t seem to notice you, but move a couple of steps closers and what do you know, they spring into life.

Devastation features a real life physics engine! This basically means when objects within the game are hit they move as they would in real life. This may seem like a nice feature but it hasn’t really been blended into the gameplay. Yes you can pick up various objects and use them as weapons, but many other games allow you to do the same without a physics engine. There are also some flaws in this area of the game, for instance when throwing objects they will land exactly how you picked them up or they will simply disappear into the ground or wall.
Devastation also has problems in the graphics department with a lot of breaks present, especially in the games early levels. If it wasn’t for this slight problem Devastation would excel as characters are well modelled and animated. Character shadows in Devastation are some of the best I’ve seen. They are very accurate and could easily pass for the real thing.

Environments in the game are highly detailed with junk, litter and graffiti every where you look. Every piece of junk on the floor is moveable in Devastation and as your character moves through the streets expect to kick bottles and cans as you go.

Sound in Devastation is surprisingly solid, voice acting is decent and most sound effects are excellent. From echoing gun shots in the street to glass bottles falling from the roof tops and smashing on the ground below. It all adds to a desolate setting that the game tries to achieve.

Devastation could have been one of the better FPS out their, its advanced physics engine gave the game a lot of potential although the game developers failed to capitalise on it, by not including any of its capabilities into the games overall play. The game tries to master many different aspects of the genre but the number of bugs lets it down badly.