System Played: Xbox 360
Year Released: 2012
Year Reviewed: 2013
Binary Domain is a silly cyberpunk, anime, third person shooter romp from Sega’s Yakuza Team (who make the Yakuza games), in the familiar style of Gear of War.
The year is 2080 and three quarters of what was land is now underwater, due to global warming. Robots are brought in as cheap labour to rebuild cities and there’s a whole backstory about Governments bickering over them. Basically, a Japanese company is making illegal, human-looking robots (called ‘Hollow Children’ in a typical weird Japanese way), which have infiltrated the American Government. America retaliates by sending in an international squad of marines to shoot stuff.
You are Dan, a typical American jock/jerk marine with watermelon arms that would make Chris Redfield jealous and ‘Big Bo’ is your Ving Rhames looking mate. Before long, you’ll meet up with stuffy Brits, Charlie and Rachel (who looks like Annie Lennox, chewing a wasp), a fit Chinese bird and even the French! They all think the Americans are a couple of idiots, and they pretty much are.
You’ll pick team of three (Dan + two allies) from the available characters at the start of each section before going on a waist-high wall squatting shooting spree.
The vast majority of enemies are cookie cutter iRobot-style robots, susceptible to various forms of limb damage. You can shoot their arms off so they drop weapons, blow their heads off so they become confused and start shooting other robots or pulverise their legs to slow down their advance, forcing the determined buggers to come crawling at you, Terminator style.
The controls felt a bit stiff at first, but I got used to them.
Killing enemies earns you credits (somehow), which you spend on ammo, health or upgrading your guns at handily located shop terminals. Personally, I spent every penny just selfishly upgrading my own weapon, allies be damned, and it didn’t seem to make much of a difference to their effectiveness.
Frequent cutscenes and downtime help a little to stave off the monotony of constant corridor shooting, as do some vehicle sections and QTE action sequences, but it still gets a bit repetitive, when you’re predominantly spending hours on end shooting wave after wave of the same couple of enemy varieties.
Depending on who you pick for your squad, you get different dialogue throughout. I mostly went with Bo and the Chinese chick to begin with, so they could hit on her the whole time and goof off with each other, switching to the neckerchief-wearing French robot later because of his daft accent. It seems like a lot of work went in to writing and animating cutscenes and dialogue for all the different combinations of allies you can choose. Despite crappy b-movie level voice overs and a script that is excruciatingly groan-worthy at times, it fits with the overall campy quality of the game. It ends up being funnier than it should be, perhaps not completely for the right reasons.
One unique-ish “feature” of Binary Domain are the voice commands which can be issued to allies over the headset or (urgh) Kinect. You bark instructions like “FIRE”, “REGROUP” or “CHARGE” or alternatively just hold LB and press the corresponding face button on the controller. I personally stuck with the controller, so I can’t vouch for how accurate the voice recognition is, but I am pretty certain it adds nothing.
When not ordering your squad about, they’ll ask you random questions for your opinion on junk, with the choices of response usually coming down to ‘nice’ or ‘complete dick’. Obviously the latter is more fun, and what I didn’t know at the time is that each one of your comrades has a ‘Trust meter’ which you build up by being nice/positive towards them throughout the game. This is tallied up at the end to determine which ending you get. I don’t care! I still had awkward (fake) sex with the Chinese bird! ...and isn’t that how we determine success in video games these days?
Binary Domain features some decent environmental destruction and some especially enjoyable, large scale, boss fights. The repetitive shooting and b-movie story/production should have made for a pretty mediocre experience but it ended up being quite a bit better than I expected. Good job Sega.
7/10
0 Yorumlar