Damn

Damn is a twin-stick shooter released in 2017, heavily inspired by classic arcade titles like Gauntlet and Alien Breed. Players control a cybernetically enhanced hero through five grimy industrial sci-fi locations, battling legions of enemies in a top-down view. The gameplay involves completing mission-based objectives such as hostage rescue, bomb placement, and timed key collection, all while navigating locked doors and avoiding deadly environmental explosives. The game features an array of unbalanced weapons, from chainsaws to homing missiles, and culminates in repetitive boss battles against large armored robots. Its presentation and punishing difficulty are reminiscent of early digital distribution titles from the mid-2000s.

Damn: A Relic Out of Time – Dissecting a Troubled Twin-Stick Shooter

In the vast, churning ocean of digital marketplaces, countless games are released, forgotten, and occasionally rediscovered. Damn, a 2017 twin-stick shooter from 7 Raven Studios, is one such title—a game that feels profoundly disconnected from its own era, a curious artifact that prompts not celebration, but a historical inquiry into its missteps and modest ambitions.

Introduction: An Anachronism in Action

Upon booting up Damn, one is immediately struck by a peculiar sensation of temporal dislocation. This is not a game that feels like a product of the late 2010s, a period defined by the polish of indie darlings and the rise of narrative-driven experiences. Instead, it evokes the rough-and-ready, often frustrating spirit of the Xbox Live Arcade’s nascent years. Damn presents itself as a “lightning fast twin-stick-shooter packed with action,” but its execution tells a more complicated story. This review posits that Damn is a fascinating case study of good intentions hamstrung by a confluence of flawed design, technical jank, and a palpable lack of budget, resulting in an experience that feels less like a nostalgic homage and more like a relic from a bygone, less forgiving age of game design.

Development History & Context: A Small Studio in a Big Pond

Developed by the relatively obscure 7 Raven Studios Co. Ltd. and published by Back to Basics Gaming on PC in 2017 (with a multi-platform console release following in 2025 by Totalconsole), Damn emerged from a landscape saturated with twin-stick shooters. By 2017, the genre had been refined to a high art by titles like Nex Machina and Hotline Miami, games that married razor-sharp mechanics with a distinct aesthetic vision.

The provided materials suggest a project operating on a shoestring budget. The studio’s vision, as per the official blurb, was to create an “easy to learn, hard to master” experience for “maximum mindless fun.” This points toward an aim of pure, arcade-inspired action. However, the technological constraints seem less about the era’s hardware limitations and more about the scope of the project itself. The game’s presentation, with its “rudimentary but interesting” stage design and recycled sound effects that critics noted were “heard countless times before,” suggests a development cycle reliant on stock assets and a need to ship a product quickly and economically. It was a small fish attempting to swim in a pond already dominated by piranhas.

Narrative & Thematic Deep Dive: The Vacuum of Meaning

If there is one area where Damn is unequivocally lacking, it is in its narrative and thematic depth. The game is described as “missing a story.” One critic explicitly states, “I have no idea why the hero is smashing a never-ending army of robots.” While a deep narrative is not a prerequisite for a successful arcade shooter, even a thin premise can provide crucial context and motivation.

A later source from Metacritic attempts to retroject a semblance of plot: “Nobody knows who put a virus in the Lab.34 LAN, but now the smartest robots produced in the lab have started an uprising against their creators! Scientists and technicians are trapped inside and surely face certain death, can you help them?” This boilerplate sci-fi setup is absent from the core gameplay experience, however. Missions involving hostage rescue, bomb planting, and data key collection feel like abstract gameplay checklists rather than part of a coherent narrative thrust. The thematic core of Damn is, ultimately, its title—an exclamation of frustration more than a statement of purpose.

Gameplay Mechanics & Systems: A House of Cards

At its core, Damn’s gameplay loop is simple: navigate top-down arenas, collect keys, unlock doors, and blast waves of robots across 25 missions with objectives that vary between rescue, destruction, and timed collection. On paper, it’s a solid, Gauntlet or Alien Breed-inspired foundation. In practice, this house of cards is built on a foundation of frustrating and unbalanced systems.

• The Peril of Explosives: The most consistently criticized element is the game’s handling of environmental explosives. Stray bullets can trigger massive, screen-shaking chain reactions. Worse still, these explosions can occur off-screen, leading to instant, unavoidable deaths that feel profoundly unfair. As one reviewer lamented, “Nearing the end of a five-minute stage only for a wayward bullet to accidentally hit a bomb, killing you instantly, is almost guaranteed to make you swear. DAMN indeed.”

• An Unbalanced Arsenal: The game’s weapon system is a central pillar of its failure. The arsenal—including a shotgun, flamethrower, redirect laser, chain gun, and mine layer—is theoretically diverse but practically broken. The chainsaw is suicidal for close-range combat, the shotgun’s spread is a liability near explosives, the homing weapon is unreliable, and the mine layer is useless against single foes. Crucially, there is no way to revert to a default weapon, often leaving the player trapped with a poorly suited tool. This is compounded by “unclear” weapon icons, adding a layer of frustrating guesswork to combat.

• Repetitive Structure & Lack of Challenge: The campaign is structured across five worlds, each culminating in a boss fight against the same “large armoured robot resembling a Roomba.” This lack of variety in key encounters highlights the budgetary constraints. Furthermore, while the early game is manageable, the later levels swell in size while still granting only “one life per mission,” making failure punishing. Paradoxically, other critics found the game “too easy” and not challenging, pointing to an inconsistent difficulty curve that fails to satisfy either camp.

The Arena mode offers a reprieve from the campaign’s structure but, according to critics, quickly succumbs to the same repetitive flaws. The core mechanics are functional—the controls are praised as “tight”—but the systems built upon them are fundamentally unsound.

World-Building, Art & Sound: Aesthetic Austerity

The world of Damn is a generic, “grimy industrial sci-fi” landscape. The aesthetics are repeatedly described as “simple,” “rudimentary,” and “understated.” It is a world devoid of personality or unique visual identity, evoking the feeling of a Unity engine template project. It gets the job done but leaves no lasting impression.

The sound design fares worse. The audio is described as “loud, uncomfortable, and in-your-face,” with weapon effects that “make your ears hurt” and are seemingly lifted from a 1993-era sound library. The soundtrack is “upbeat” and adds energy, but it fights against an audio landscape already brimming with abrasive, unpleasant feedback. While the game performs technically well with “no performance issues,” the artistic and sonic presentation is a significant net negative, contributing to the overall feeling of a cheap, dated product.

Reception & Legacy: A Faint Echo

Damn’s reception was muted and mixed. It exists in a critical vacuum, with very few professional reviews available. The scores that do exist tell a clear story: Games Asylum awarded it a 5/10, while Movies Games and Tech gave it a 6.5/10. The consensus is that of a flawed, repetitive, and frustrating experience that squanders its potential.

Its legacy is virtually non-existent. It did not influence the genre nor did it find a cult audience. It is a footnote, a game that serves as a cautionary tale about the importance of balancing ambition with execution, and how a lack of polish and playtesting can sink even the simplest of concepts. It is remembered not for what it achieved, but for how it exemplifies the chasm between inspiration and implementation. The existence of tangential sequels like Damn Virgins and Damn Dolls suggests the IP had some minor life, but these too have faded into obscurity.

Conclusion: The Verdict of History

Damn is not a good game. It is a compelling artifact for game historians and critics, a perfect specimen for analyzing how a genre’s basic components can be assembled incorrectly. Its failures are educational: it demonstrates the importance of weapon balancing, the need for fair and predictable environmental hazards, and the value of even a minimal narrative framework to engage the player.

While it was built with “good intentions” and a desire for “mindless fun,” its myriad small annoyances—the unfair deaths, the unbalanced weapons, the repetitive bosses—”coagulate into something bigger and more problematic, removing any potential fun and enjoyment.” As the review from Games Asylum perfectly surmised, it isn’t “old skool cool”; it simply feels “out of time from a simpler and far more punishing age.”

In the annals of video game history, Damn’s place is secured not as a classic, but as a reminder that solid mechanics are the bedrock upon which fun is built, and without that foundation, even the most well-intentioned project is doomed to fail. Its final, definitive verdict is that of a missed opportunity and a lesson learned—for everyone but its developers.