Reviews// Binary Domain

Binary Domain’s graphics are more than passable but fall a little short now that I’ve been spoiled by a lot of the last year’s top titles. The environments are nice enough, and you visit an interesting variety of places throughout the story. Granted, they’re all within the same city in Japan of the future, but that still covers everything from neon-lit slums and sewer systems to military bases and pristine upper-class city streets.

The character models look pretty good, but some of the facial animation during cutscenes is downright ugly and there are some bouts of over-dramatic delivery that would fit right into a Nicholas Cage movie. Occasional outbursts of hamminess aside, the voice acting is consistently decent, at least. With a cast covering a surprising range of nationalities, Binary Domain even shows no fear about tackling a wide range of different accents. There are some dubious sounding ones in there, but I’m inclined to give them points for trying.

The core characters are all well-defined and quite likeable, which is good considering the game’s focus on forging them into a cohesive team of badasses. Again, there’s nothing really ground-breaking here. There’s the jolly big black guy, a sarcastic Brit, some Chinese eye candy, a quirky robot sidekick - all the usual suspects. But while they might not have much meat to them to begin with there’s plenty of dialogue throughout the game that helps develop a good sense of camaraderie within the group and, as mentioned before, each of them is at least likeable. With conversations changing in every mission depending on which two teammates you choose for your party, there’s a lot of dialogue in this game and it’s probably one of the areas it performs strongest in.

That brings us to another of Binary Domain’s unique features, the Trust system. Each of your party members has an individual bar showing how much they trust you with their lives. Trust can be gained and lost in a number of ways, but perhaps the most prominent is simply through conversations that will activate throughout each level. Giving the right answer when prompted with a question will increase trust, answering wrongly will obviously decrease it. Making it through conversations in Binary Domain isn’t exactly rocket science - the answers you can choose from will generally boil down to ‘I agree’, ‘I disagree’ and ‘You’re an idiot’.

One of the ways you’re more likely to lose Trust is during combat whenever you put some bullets into your teammate, by accident or otherwise. Not shooting your own people sounds simple, but combat can get very chaotic and none of your allies seem to have a problem with running back and forth across your line of fire when it suits them. The loss of Trust is surprisingly low unless you intentionally go to town on them, but perfectionists will no doubt be annoyed whenever it happens. Fortunately you can gain Trust in combat simply by performing well and killing lots of enemies, so you’re always likely to come out on top.

Unfortunately, just like the voice recognition feature, the Trust system doesn’t end up having much of an effect on gameplay. All earning high trust really enables you to do is give out riskier orders without your team turning you down, but as I’ve mentioned before the command system itself is pretty unnecessary and most fights will go well without it.

Binary Domain feels like Yakuza Studio was holding back in too many areas. You might have noticed a recurring issue popping up throughout the review is that none of the unique features they’ve incorporated actually make any substantial changes to the gameplay. They’re essentially fluffy window dressing that can easily be ignored without having any detrimental effect on the game. It's a shame because there were ideas here that could have made Binary Domain a really unique experience. Fortunately the areas where it doesn’t hold back, the combat and action sequences, are enough to redeem it somewhat. But with none of the game’s unique features really working that well, Binary Domain doesn’t have much left to make it stand out.

Pros:
+ Shooting robots into pieces is very satisfying.
+ Wide range of fun action sequences.
+ Very fast-paced campaign.

Cons:
- Underdeveloped gimmicks add little to actual gameplay.
- Short campaign.

SPOnG Score: 8/10