Devastation is a dark and moody, realistically styled post-apocalyptic first person shooter that focuses on team combat. It throws you into this really messed up version of Earth seventy-two years from now, where you and your NPC teammates, a small group of Resistance fighters made up of gang leaders, mercenaries and ex-military operatives, go up against the menacing forces of an evil empire and mega-corporations. The main objectives are simple. You must assemble your army and travel the globe, restoring peace and sanity in a very dangerous world. Along the way, you uncover a nano-regeneration technology (nanoreplicators) that Grathius Corporation (bad guys) is seeking to use in its bid to aggrieve your rag-tag troop of fighters.

Graphically, the game is very strong. Using next-generation Unreal technology, the game has managed to craft some of the most amazing environments in any shooter to date. It moves quickly, yet there's plenty of detail and special effects like enhanced particle effects for water, smoke, and fire. Textures on most objects are well done as well (they are maybe too bland, but remember that's post-apocalyptic world). The dirty, gritty, post-apocalyptic urban warfare feel is unique and exciting. I must admit that Digitalo's designers really deserve commendation for their attention to detail. It's really pretty strange feel to see so many weird personal belongings, and little bits of somebody's life.

The Math-Engine Karma physics system allows the ragdoll effect which is used to make death animations different every time, something we've seen in Unreal Tournament 2003 and other recent games. Additionally, you can interact with just about anything on the screen, almost everything you come across in the game can be used as a weapon - either kicked, knocked over, dropped on, pushed into, picked up, carried and used as a shield, and thrown of course. Chairs, trash cans, crates, buckets, gas cans, oil drums, barrels, and all kinds of crap, even trash you find in the street. Most of Devastation's environmental objects have real mass and weight, so even the cans on the ground have mass and inertia and make noise when they're moved. Also lighting and weapons effects are top notch as well. For example, the game's laser rifle turns an enemy into flame and then into an 3D ash (pic#57) outline that falls apart after a second. And shooting at water produces nice streams as the bullets hit the surface, even little waterfalls and drainage canals. Only the animations on the characters could have been a bit better.

The weapon selection in Devastation is incredible. There's everything from baseball bats, 2x4s, melee weapons like knives and swords to pistols, two shotguns, rifles, three types of sniper rifles (remember, snipers can also rip off limbs pic#63), SMG's, heavy weapons, futuristic weapon prototypes, several types of grenades (smoke, fragmentation, gas) ,explosives, mounted weapons, drones, etc. Sadly there's no flamethrower :( But I very like Rat Drone, which is real device that lets you control a real rat via a brain implant in the rat's head. You assume the view and vantage point of the rat and see through its eyes (pic#33,44,68), as you control the rat's movement though the world. You can use it as a spying or scouting weapon, and check your routes for your teammates before you take them. It also works well to pre-plan an attack if you are not sure of the terrain ahead, or if you suspect an ambush. The best part about this weapon is the explosive charge. You can remote-detonate the charge that is equivalent to a small fragmentation grenade. What more could you want? The downside is that while you are controlling the rat you are completely immersed in the rat's viewpoint and can't see or hear what's going on around your body. Besides the weaponry, you will also have to use detpacks to blow up certain objectives and a code breaker to hack computers and deactivate laser gates and other devices.

In the game you are accompanied by as many as eight computer-controlled teammates. They play an important role if you want to progress through the single-player missions, especially on the harder difficulty settings. There is a very simple list of bot commands the give them; Hold, Follow, Attack and Defend. In some cases you can even walk up to a teammate and press your "interact" key and see if they have any suggestions to offer up, you can also trade weapons with them. A couple of teammates will always prefer to cover you, some will hang back and make sure to defend your base camp, while others have aggressive personalities and tend to head out on their own. Sadly their behaviors seem to be half-finished and can be frustrating sometime. They often will get stuck somewhere or just stop and begin firing into walls for no apparent reason. Also when they're told to follow, they hold, and vice versa. Indeed, they don't like cooperation much, especially in risky situations. I don't know if this is a purpose or bug. The enemy AI is a bit better. On the hardest setting, they're incredibly hard and nearly impossible to outsmart and outgun. However, there are moments in the game, where they just won't notice you (or they will notice you too late), even when you're facing them only a few feet away.

Devastation has a two very different game settings- arcade and simulation, and they let you experience the game in two very different ways. While the arcade mode allows you to play the game as a typical first person shooter (similar to UT2K3 but not at quite the frenetic pace), simulation mode makes the game more realistic: you select weapons at the beginning of each mission, you're not as fast, there's friendly fire, etc. Needless to say that this option adds some replay value.

The game's user interface, HUD and controls are also familiar from other FPS games and should be easy to use and understand for both veteran and new FPS players. If you've ever played any FPS ever, you'll have about a 2 second learning curve.

Single player contains over 20 missions, each map gives you several objectives to complete one. Missions include simple hacking into the computer system, infiltrating enemy bases, and if any of my team should die the mission is over. There are no stealth missions, but if you want to play through the game Solid Snake style, that's certainly possible. The single player takes about 20 hours to finish on Medium difficulty in Arcade Mode.

The multiplayer portion of Devastation is pretty much like all other FPS. It includes standard deathmatch, team deathmatch, and capture the flag, along with a new gameplay type called Territories (Capture The Flag, Domination, and Last Man Standing mix) where each teams objective is to destroy the other teams spawning machines (nanoreplicators). When a player is killed they are spawned back to the nanoreplicator, but if the opposing team is able to destroy that replicator then the game suddenly turns into a game of Last Man Standing. That's right, destroyable spawn points. There is 14 multiplayer maps with four different environments, over 30 additional weapons and 50 different players to choose from. Multiplayer is definitely fun. I bet this game will update and come out with more maps and patches and updates will be included.

Overall, I liked Devastation, I was looking for a FPS game like this for a long time - set in the urban area with real guns. I would say that Devastation feels like Kingpin meets CounterStrike with a SP mode. Digitalo's level designers definitely deserve an applause for creating fun and believable locations. Devastation feels really post-apocalyptic and pretty depressive, that's what I expected and what I like. However, the bugs and the AI problems, that's different story. The retail version could have been much better polished. I would much rather be playing a polished, refined and perfected game than one that has been rushed to meet a release deadline to satisfy the publisher. Fortunately, Digitalo now have released a patch which fixed many bugs. I strongly recommend you to download and install it as soon as possible. You can also try this earlier MP demo (177MB), though this demo gets laggy sometimes. There is no patch for the demo yet.

Minimum System Requirements: Pentium III 700 MHz processor (1.0 GHz or better recommended), 256 MB RAM (512MB recommended), 1GB HDD space, 3D card with T&L and 32 MB VRAM (NVIDIA GeForce/ATI Radeon minimum examples, 64 MB VRAM recommended)

Multiplayer Requirements: Internet (TCP/IP) and LAN (TCP/IP) supported Multiplayer. *Internet play requires a 33.6 Kbps or faster modem (Broadband recommended)