Binary Domain

I really didn't plan on playing this.

I played this on PC, for reasons I'll go into below.

I suppose I should explain why I'm doing this. Binary Domain, if you weren't aware, was a PS3-era shooter developed by Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio. While it may have no direct ties to the Yakuza series, playing through Dead Souls made me immensely curious about the studio's other shooter. Dead Souls was rough to play and I felt like I needed to know whether they'd be able to turn things around before they released another game.

So why did I play it on PC and not PS3? While I was tempted to play it on console where it'd almost assuredly run far worse (and be a better comparison to Dead Souls), a friend convinced me to try it on PC because of a certain feature this game has. You see, this game is a shooter that feels evocative of Gears of War and Mass Effect but one of the novel things it tries is voice commands.

While Mass Effect lets you give basic orders to your squad via a weapon wheel, Binary Domain attempts to cut out the middle-man and let you dictate commands yourself. In theory, you can tell your squadmates to move up or regroup, and can even say (certain) specific phrases to raise or lower your affinity with them. You can ask them for help when you're downed and thank them after they rescue you and, impressively, you can even respond to in-game dialogue options with basic answers. Answering "yes/no" questions or saying "sorry" in certain contexts, for example.

All of this sounds very ambitious and impressive for a game from 2012 and in many ways it is. The thing is, it barely works. While I could reasonably issue "fire" and "retreat" commands and could generally answer "yes/no" questions, any word or phrase more elaborate than those was effectively impossible for the game to recognize. I'll admit that this is partially a personal problem as my voice is... hard to understand at times due to some speech issues I have, but even (seemingly) clearly dictated words sometimes wouldn't register. I would say "thank you" to an ally after they revived me and the game would interpret that as "idiot" and I'd lose reputation with them.

I eventually disabled the voice control system and switched to button-prompts to answer allies, and while you lose access to a majority of issuable commands, actually being able to reliably answer questions and control allies in the heat of battle was worth the tradeoff. It becomes a much more traditional cover-shooter at that point, and it does feel less impressive without the novel technology, but the game is decent enough as a shooter that it's still fairly enjoyable.

For the most part, it's a pretty straightforward third-person shooter from the era. You've got a cover system, you've effectively got a roadie run, and you can carry two guns and a handgun. The thing that makes it a bit more fun is that enemies are (somewhat) destructible. You can shoot an enemy's legs out from under it and cause it to crawl around, you can shoot an enemy's gun arm and cause it to drop its weapon, and headshots will cause an enemy to lose its head and target its allies. For the entirety of my playthrough, seeing enemies fall to pieces never stopped being fun.

There are a number of boss encounters along the way that are... well, they're fine. It might just be because I was playing on the "Hard" equivalent difficulty, but these mostly just felt like damage sponges that could one-shot me. Getting revived was simple enough, but most bossfights consisted of getting knocked down a whole lot with very little I could do to prevent it. They were generally big robotic monsters with obvious weakspots and a fair amount of destructibility so destroying them was usually enjoyable enough, but the road to get there often felt awkward and imprecise in an annoying way.

The story in this game is a bit of a mixed bag. On one hand you've got some fairly interesting sci-fi concepts being thrown around along with talk of extreme inequality and a changed futuristic world order, but most of this takes a backseat to the hoo-rah soldier dynamics that'll occupy most of the narrative. The cast of characters is extremely generic and forgettable (outside of a pretty fun French robot) but part of that may be because the voice cast is exactly who you'd expect from a game of this era. Travis Willingham, Laura Bailey, Troy Baker; while I like these actors they certainly oversaturated the video game market for a time and that may play into why these particular characters feel so uninteresting.

I mentioned it earlier, but there is a "Consequences" system to this game that feels evocative of what Bioware was doing around this time. Certain dialogue options and, more interestingly, gameplay choices can impact your relationship with your squad members and this can in turn affect how they'll act in combat. Allegedly (as I have no way to verify this), higher trust with someone will cause them to listen to your commands more readily, and there are additional cutscenes and even endings that are dependent on your relationship with your team.

Oh, lastly, there was some sort of multiplayer mode in this but I didn't engage with it. If I had to guess, it's probably your standard deathmatch/team modes you'd expect from a game like this from this era, but I frankly didn't care enough to investigate further. Maybe it was okay, I have no idea.

There wasn't a clear or completion screen to this game, but according to Steam it took me about 15 hours, and I got the "best" ending (I'd gotten everyone to "Very High" trust).

Binary Domain is a more interesting game than I expected, but it's still pretty generic. It's not bad, and I'm glad I played it as I remember hearing about it a bit back when it came out, but it mostly just feels like a relic of an older era of video games. Back in 2012 even the Yakuza studio wanted to get in on that Gears of War action and, because you can kind of feel that it's the result of some clout-chasing, compared to a vast majority of the Yakuza games this is simply less memorable. I think it's a better game than Dead Souls (it's certainly more fun to play) but I'm not sure how much that matters to me. Even the worst Yakuza game might be more engaging to me than an alright third-person shooter, and I'm not sure I knew that about myself before I played this.

This was a refreshing detour from my Yakuza journey, but I'm eager to get back into things with Kurohyou 2, hopefully fairly soon.