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The gray and the gray

Devastation takes place in one of those trendy dystopian futures. You know the ones: the world is run by evil corporations, the cities are in ruins, Orwellian, bleak, blah, blah, blah. But what it all seems to come down to is the color gray. Remember what Quake did for the color brown? Devastation has a similar affinity for washed-out grays. Almost every level, whether its one of Devastation's many sewers or warehouses, seems to have been drawn from an oppressively pale gray palette, as if the world was covered in a mist of ash. At the very end of the game, as you're fighting your way up a corporate skyscraper, the gray seems a little brighter, but it's still all very gray. Devastation is the grayest game you'll ever play.

This means you need to find a key

Street fighting

Gonna zoom, zoom, zooma, zoom

The level design is largely an uninspired miasma of mazes and fake doors, cluttered and busy and devoid of personality. San Fransicso looks like LA, which looks like Taipei, which looks like Japan. The only way the developers distinguish different locations is to maybe stick a sign with Asian characters over the street or display the edge of the Golden Gate Bridge peeking over some ruined warehouse or to explain during the exposition that you're on Alcatraz. The only level where the settings break out of their oppressive sameness is a subway level in which you're fighting down the length of ruined tunnels with derelict subway cars scattered between the stations. Otherwise, it's pretty much an assortment of sewers and warehouses.

The storyline casts you in the role of a bottle-blonde punk who's a resistance fighter. He uncovers an evil corporate scheme that lets soldiers respawn after they've been killed. "During my last encounter I believe to have witnessed some new technology that I cannot explain," he says at one point, displaying his mastery of the language. He proceeds to meet various other resistance fighters in bad outfits, all of whom have either bulging biceps or bulging breasts. Together they go on missions, chasing down arbitrary objectives (Find the security codes! Rescue Duffy! Destroy the generators!) and eventually getting their own respawning machines.

Trash

Mini-robot mini-boss with a minigun

The AI tries to figure out a computer

The whole respawning machine concept is actually Devastation's best chance at being a half-way decent game. You can cut off the endless flow of enemies by destroying their machine. And once you gather the parts for your own machine, getting killed is no big deal because the level plays out like a deathmatch that you're bound to eventually win. There's a multiplayer mode, Territories, in which you have to get a key to the other team's base and then fight your way in to destroy their spawners. Devastation is onto something here: take a clichéd convention of the genre and build gameplay around it.