You join Devastation's world on the side of the resistance fighters as you work to subvert corporate efforts to control and effectively enslave what's left of the world population. This makes for an interesting game, as the developers successfully mix in real world modern weapons along with some high tech gizmos for a total of forty weapons. In 2075, not much of civilization exists anymore and in the ruins of cities, sometimes a baseball bat, a 9mm pistol or a nail gun is all you'll have fighting off the what the resistance fighters call 'pac' squads.

Devastation, however, is not merely a sterile team competition game. By now, I think we've seen enough Counterstrikes, Global Operations, Battlefield 1942s on the PC. Digitalo puts some meaning into these matches by instilling a storyline into the game itself. The first half of the game involves more traditional first person shooter mechanics. You're asked to find mainframe computers and hack into them for security codes. You're also asked by the resistance to destroy infrastructure crucial to the corporate syndicate. These might involve finding explosives and then arming them at the designated site. As simple as some of these objectives might sound, they're pretty fun to tackle; only because they're given some justification by the cinematic cutscenes that appear periodically to flesh out the story.

The AI works well but so does the motif in Devastation. True to its namesake, 2075 on Earth in Digitalo's vision is not a pretty one. A lot of attention has been given to creating that apocalyptic future feel, down to the resistance symbols and the pop cans and garbage that is strewn all throughout the levels. At times, playing the resistance side in Devastation inspires a kind of Deus Ex, The Matrix or Dark Angel type of feel, as you dodge authorities against insurmountable odds. The fact that all of the enemies you come across look and dress in an institutionalized manner helps promote this sort of feeling. While Devastation is simpler and more focused on pure action with respect to those franchises, it also proves that having a sensible plot certainly does not hurt.

The character animation is also fairly good. You aren't looking at stiff robots during the in-game scenes and you aren't fighting against inflexible automatons during the action sequences. It's clear a lot of care was put into this. Enemies slump over convincingly in the game, managing to avoid the pre-rendered 'death animations' of Rainbow Six or Soldier of Fortune. The resistance is also filled with some unique characters, some of whom are female. Like the landscape, they aren't perfect either. This is one of the few first person shooters where the men and women don't look like they rolled off the assembly line of Estee Lauder, Guess or Calvin Klein, without freckles, pimples or discolorations; a very refreshing touch of realism.

At the end of the day, Devastation is able to do something that other developers have had trouble doing in the past. Digitalo has taken team competitive mechanics unique to multiplayer and some stock first person shooter action, turning both into a compelling single player campaign. In Devastation, the apocalyptic setting and resistance storyline gives credence to what you're doing. This leads to believable objectives on the maps themselves. When you come up against a sealed door, a teammate will actually pipe up and suggest a way for getting around it. That type of intelligence is sorely lacking in prior attempts at combining a team game and making a single player product out of it. People laugh when you mention a single player version of Battlefield 1942, Counterstrike or Tribes. It's not that it couldn't be done. It is done but why bother playing it since it either ends up being vapid or a pale version of the actual multiplayer action. The intensity of a team competitive game and the intimacy and allure of a strong single player campaign are both presented here simultaneously. From what's been shown so far, it is a convincing fait accompli.