Devastation

What is it all about?

"The year is 2075 and Earth is a ravaged and devastated planet. Instead of a prosperous and technology-abundant society, we have little more than the clothes on our backs to keep ups alive. This is a technology dark age, and you'd have a hard time finding anyone who knew how to use even the most basic devices. Only a handful of powerful and corrupt Mega-Corporations control the remaining research and technology. These evil entities use their positions of power to enslave the citizenry and force their will upon the world. It doesn't hurt that they have the Pacification Squads - brutal police forces that use fear, force, and even mind control devices to keep peace in the streets."

Devastation takes place in the future that looks remarkably like the present from what I see. Most of the environments, while full and rendered nicely, look like run down sections of China-town or burned out hotels or dilapidated subways. You play as Flynn Haskell, a member of the Resistance fighting these evil Mega-Corporations. I cannot comment on the story much more than that as this is just a preview, but the characters sound just like something out of Grand Theft Auto 3 or the Sopranos, and dress in a standard post-apocalyptic fair of torn flannels and jeans, fishnets and tattered T-shirts. While the citizenry is apparently ill educated, they are able to wield many weapons and operate some fairly sophisticated equipment including an automated cloning machine.

Shark hunting

Ok, and how does it play?

Devastation features a pretty innovative squad based system, where you control one character but can issue commands to many. The way this works, you bring up a menu with one key, select the characters you want to give the order to, then select the order. Unfortunately there are only 4 orders, but these cover the main bases, Attack, Defend, Hold, and Follow. Your friends do an okay job of following orders too, although telling someone not in sight to follow you can result in a fair wait while they try to navigate the staircases and hallways on their way to you. This is okay since you can usually do alright on your own and your buddies there just make life a little easier.

In the preview there were two main types of missions, both fairly standard. There was the fairly linear list of objectives to complete, i.e. follow so and so to here, go blow the generator to open the door to go on and get the keycode to unlock the laser barricade to rescue the princess type. And then there were what amounted to one round capture the flag missions.

The mysterious Trooper

Most of the weapons are fairly standard fare, including daggers, pistols, shotguns, sniper rifles, and machine guns. Some notable exceptions are the Katana, the Railgun which turns folks into a flaming corpse fairly efficiently, a big and small mini-gun, some pneumatic powered explosive dart thrower, and a remote controlled rat. The later is pretty fun as it gives you the unique perspective of a rat, and there are many in this game, and can be detonated on command. This is the only way to stop using the rat.

Unfortunately there are some notable flaws with the gameplay and the A.I. is the one to blame. While both sides do use cover to their advantage, there are many situations where the bad guys should be able to see and shoot at you, but don't, and others where they seem to have super vision and pick you off with a series of impressive shots while you're standing behind near full cover. Alas, your allies seem to suffer from the former and don't get the advantage of the later. They also seem to have their own favorite weapon, and while this can be a good thing, is also what gives the other side an advantage. See, your enemies don't have these favorite weapons so they just use the best of what is available, like, oh, the Railgun. Not only that, they have those spectacular shot capabilities I mentioned earlier. Another fault, although some would not use that term, is that friendly fire is off, period, or at least this gamer couldn't find the way to turn it on. You can sit there and unload your mini-cannon into the other characters and none of them will take any damage. The reverse is also true where they can't hit you and the enemies can't hit each other either.

I would expect multiplayer to be capture the flag style or deathmatch style, in the various maps from the game. Unfortunately this was disabled in the preview.

Cute or dangerous?

Crisp and clear, or muddled and choppy?

Devastation's areas are fairly large and well rendered with high-resolution textures and many movable objects, from bottles and cans to oil drums and cars that can explode to little packs of food you can eat for health. The preview came with 4 missions taking place on 3 maps, a run down China-town, a ruined Subway system, and an abandoned office building. The latter had 2 missions associated with it and is apparently the headquarters of some organization. I feel sorry for those guys. While the environments are nice, the animations leave a little to be desired. The cut scene included used the games engine to show a scene, as opposed to pre-rendered movie. When the characters talk, the model doesn't open its mouth, but does move its jaw so it looks like they're chewing bubble gum. They also use fairly simple programmed gestures that get somewhat repetitive.

Sound wise this game isn't bad. The music is all fast paced techno that reminds me of Quake II in a way. Oh, it's also saved in Ogg Vorbis format, so you can bring 'em up in Winamp and listen to them if you want, a couple of the tracks aren't bad but they're all very repetitive. The voices are all decent but everyone sounds like they're from New York, kind of odd in a post-apocalyptic setting but not entirely out of place. On the whole the audio is nothing to complain about, but nothing to write home to 'da mama' about either.

Nice textures make for a realistic fire

The bottom line....

Devastation looks like it might be an interesting FPS with an intriguing storyline, but it also looks like it could be just another post-apocalyptic run around and shoot things while your friends tag along. Technically pretty but nothing spectacular with some good things and bad.

Peverbian - 03/13/2003

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