10.2 hours played
Written 17 days ago
This is a fascinating one. Binary Domain is a linear action shooter which deals with some surprisingly relevant themes - namely, the rise of artificial intelligence and the discovery of "Hollow Children", robots that do not know that they are robots and live out human life wearing, effectively, skinsuits; being in violation of the "New Geneva Convention", they have to be stopped. And you're the one to stop them.
What you can expect is a linear team shooter with a bunch of interesting characters, some fantastic dialogue, excellent set-pieces and engaging story-moments, albeit with some strange design decisions peppering the whole experience. If you like PC-NPC team dynamics, good shooting, beautiful art-design, futuristic environments and cyberpunk themes, you'll love this one.
What I liked -
a) The shooting. Gunplay is fluid and fun.
b) The characters. Cain is absolutely best boy.
c) The dialogue and banter - the game is very well-written, though awkward at times (more on that later).
d) The story - it's surprisingly fun! Avoids some cliches, falls prey to others.
e) The cyberpunk feel. The Adam Jensen Deus Ex games are some of my favorites of all time, and this one really scratches that itch. The setpieces are FANTASTIC, the environments are beautifully made, and the art direction really gives you a brilliant feel of the dilapidated lower city contrasted with the sanitized and clean upper city.
f) The reactivity of the enemies. Fire their heads off, they start attacking their allies. Fire their legs off, they fall and start crawling towards you. It's cool!
What I wanted more of -
a) Guns. Weapons. For a future that's so far ahead you'd think that there would be more interesting weapons beyond the standard SMGs, LMGs, Shotguns and Pistols.
b) Clearer decision moments. The game world has a decent amount of reactivity based on the trust system, but no really pivotal decisions were put in my hands. I would have liked for the story to influence the gameplay, e.g. including stealth sections, introducing new weapons, abilities, etc.
c) Reactivity in the game world itself. Maybe destructible environments, at least in some edge cases?
What I did not like -
a) Excessive banter e.g. you're getting pummeled into the ground by a mechanical gorilla, and one of your squadmates shouts "don't be irresponsible" or something like that.
b) The squad communication system - the voice recognition straight up doesn't work, and the dialogue options are straight up bullshit. Imagine being told that you have to start picking up the slack, and your dialogue options are "Sure", "Shit!" and "No way". What the heck?
c) The controls scheme. It took me a while to get used to it, but even then the controls felt not only floaty, but excessively so - I often had to run my mouse multiple times over my table to turn the character, and it turned out that using the keyboard to control the camera was better. Strange stuff.
d) ARCHAIC game design. Controls cannot be changed from in-game; they can only be changed from a separate configuration tool. That's what games in the early 2000s were like, not from 2012.
e) The more tank-y boss fights. There are some that just absorb a hell of a lot of damage, and there's no clear healthbar to speak of either. There's very little indication of how much damage you've done, and that lack of feedback creates a lot of uncertainty in the gameplay, which makes for even more tonal dissonance with the dialogue.
All in all, if you don't mind the occasional frustrating design choice/in-game moment and the list of what I liked appeals to you, this might be worth trying out. It's usually dirt-cheap and for 10 hours of gameplay, not half-bad.
