From the release of the original Nintendo Entertainment System in the early Eighties right through to today, the gaming industry's entertainment giants have brought new hardware to the market on a reliable five-year cycle. Until now, the onward march of this technology clock - let's call it - has demanded no less; consoles have come and gone and big businesses have boomed and bust, all to keep up with what seemed an exponentially-increasing appetite for more power, better graphics and a damn-near farcical laundry list of other supposed must-have features. Whatever their failings, the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3 are a tech-heavy testament to how very far gaming as we have known it has come since the NES first flew off high street shelves. However, a few years ago, something very strange happened: and it was called 'the Wii'. Since its release, the continuing success of its revolutionary motion-controlled capabilities has been nothing short of incredible - once again, Nintendo has changed the videogame landscape at its most fundamental level. Unfortunately, Damnation seems not to have noticed.

We all thought that the high definition behemoths of Sony and Microsoft, built to supply the apparent demand for bigger, better and more badass, would lead the charge into this generation - and let's not feel bad about it, because we had every reason to. We are the core, after all, and what we want hasn't changed much at all, even now - but neither have the interests of the businesses who once made the very games we wanted. Critical acclaim, cult followings and a healthy Metacritic average are all well and good, but what matters most to publishers is turning a tidy profit - and the Wii, with its entry-level specs and massive install base, is where they're most likely to make it. Certainly it's cheaper to develop for Nintendo's little white landmark, as creating even the most basic games for the HD generation of consoles cost tens of millions of any currency you please - and that's not to mention the staggering expectations of next-gen software consumers. The widespread adoption of the Wii has changed much, drawing a hard line between core and casual, and with each consecutive Nintendo victory, month in and out, the division has only been emboldened. Nearly five years on from the arrival of the Xbox 360, the technology clock has all but stopped; Sony has been crowing about the PS3's decade-long lifecycle for time immemorial, but with Microsoft recently echoing the sentiment and both companies struggling as yet to turn a profit on their hardware, it seems an increasingly plausible scenario, particularly in these tough economic times, all of which raises a crucial question: what now?

With purse strings tightening and cutting edge hardware taking a prolonged beating from stale tech with a twist, can bigger, better and more badass - the very tenets by which Damnation swears - really represent a viable future for gaming? Must every experience be an intricately detailed sandbox in which you can go anywhere and do anything? While the actual product falls far foul of that mark, Damnation developer Blue Omega has slavishly aspired to it. The linear, guided experiences of hardware generations past have fallen rather out of favour lately, with every IP competing to give the player more freedom, more choices, more consequences - but creators would do well to remember game-racist film critic Roger Ebert's oft-recounted rationalisation of his disqualification of interactive entertainment as art; creators would do well to create, rather than to squander their talents on amateur if individual creations. Less can sometimes be more. Certainly, less of Damnation would have been a fine thing. Sadly, this game will try your patience for at least twelve hours - and to make it twelve hours in, you'd have to have the patience of a saint - and an incredibly tolerant one at that.

I don't mean to be cruel. I'd love to say something kind, in the interests of balance if nothing else, but there's really precious little about Damnation to recommend. On the face of it, the alternate-history American Civil War setting could have been interesting, but the underwhelming cut scene that clues you in on the premise and its steampunk inspiration immediately dampens any anticipatory goodwill. Rendered in-engine, the intro is absolute anarchy; ugly textures pop in from everywhere, inexplicable load screens abound and some truly abysmal expository dialogue is made nearly unintelligible by breakfast cereal advert calibre voice acting. The cast, up to and including your lovelorn hero Hamilton Rourke, are an appalling assortment of nobodies and nothings that look as though they've been cobbled together from the factory floor sweepings of an Unreal Engine 3 sweatshop. And then you start playing.

To crib a little from the publicity puff-piece, Damnation aims to "evolve the shooter genre with its unique and exhilarating combination of fluid action and combat," and thereby one-up the company that it might in its wildest dreams keep. Evidently, it does no such thing; the action is stilted and artificial and the combat is weightless and unsatisfying. Sure, you'll do plenty of shooting, but your arsenal is breathtakingly inadequate and any feedback from your actions so fruitless that you'll come to begrudge every uninspired metal-man the time and effort it takes to aim your finicky crosshairs and fire until he ragdolls limply to the ground - although not, assuredly, because the other play mechanic is any more fulfilling. When Rourke isn't firing interminable rounds into unresponsive enemies, you see, things take a turn for the Tomb Raider. Our forgettable hero can shimmy along ledges, wall-jump from one carbon copy floor of a building to the next, and climb very tall lampposts; these are just a few of his myriad skills, each as mindlessly derivative as the next.

Damnation's singular claim to fame is that each of the stages are "vast, breathtaking landscapes... covering miles of distance and thousands of vertical feet". Oh, they're a long way from breathtaking, but they are very large indeed. The press release touts "up to three hours of actual gameplay" per level, and for once, the publicity isn't too far off the mark, although it won't be long before you come to wish it were. The trouble is, we're talking the insipid hub-worlds from Angel of Darkness-era Tomb Raider, here, a far cry from the classic arenas that our Lara once scaled (and to a degree has scaled since). There's a whole lot of level, but precious little in each one that's worth the sheer force to reach its end. For all their quantity, the quality just isn't there in the design throughout Damnation, and the calamitous graphics and lifeless animations make watching Rourke lumber around the new, improved old West a very long and lamentable experience.

Frustration soon sets in; either there's no challenge at all or the challenges are so outrageously unfair that you begin to question what on God's green earth you're fighting to achieve. You regularly get turned around and outright lost in the meandering hither and thither of one super-sized environment or another, while the mess that Damnation tries to pass off as a plot will have you seriously questioning your mental faculties. In all honestly, the endlessly repetitive assets, each as unappealing as the next, mean that you'll have far more fun playing Texture Snap the DIY drinking game than Damnation itself. Not in the least surprisingly, Blue Omega's dire debut also offers "a selection of awe-inspiring vehicles, from motorbikes capable of launching across seemingly infinite chasms, to huge, armour-piercing marvels that will induce mayhem with every huge shell." This is just a lie, a fib, a fabrication; the nicest thing you can say about the vehicles in Damnation is that there are vehicles in Damnation. Most players won't be able to stomach the experience long enough to actually see them, though.

Damnation is assuredly bigger than your average game, but the better for it? Oh my, no: its scale only exacerbates its innumerable deficiencies. Perhaps it's just inexperience on the part of Blue Omega, who very responsibly named their studio after an hallucinogenic concoction of ecstasy and 2C-B, or perhaps the grand scope of the developer's vision proved more crippling than freeing. In either case, Damnation is more interesting as a symptom of an industry in turmoil than as a game; the clean dividing line that the Wii has drawn between the casual and the core has left the marketplace so vital to the games of tomorrow in something of a strange state. To succeed, it seems that developers must either make a motion-controlled collection of mini-games or an upscaled open world epic in which you can climb every mountain, ogle every star. How else to rival Gears of War, Halo, Killzone or Uncharted? How else to approximate the staggering sell-through that next-gen game-makers must achieve to cover the exponentially increasing costs of the creations themselves? Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, come to think of it, represents the logical conclusion of every ill-executed mechanic that Damnation counts as its box-quote bread and butter. Already eighteen months old, Naughty Dog's bleeding-edge PS3 debut leaves Damnation looking borderline unplayable in comparison - and the technology clock has been ticking ever onwards during that whole time. Uncharted has in spades all the things Damnation that flubs: polish, production value, design, narrative, satisfying gunplay, exciting adventure and damn it, a little charisma, which, the final nail in its coffin, Damnation fails even to approximate. Then again, better to have aimed for the heavens and missed than to have hit a more down-to-earth target... right?

Reviewed by Niall Rough for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).