Binary Domain

This ambitious game tries to do a lot of different things and is mediocre at all of them.

I can see a certain limited charm to the story, which perhaps explains why the game has a fanbase. It's like it aspired to be a summer blockbuster action movie but only had money for C-list talent. The scope is large and there is a nice variety of locations and scenes, but around these bones is draped a cliché story with cliché characters spouting cliché dialog. The machismo, chauvinism, and dumb one-liners are more pathetic than "cool". To its credit, the game is confident within those deliberate constraints, but not enough to forgive everything else that's wrong with it.

The gameplay loop is simple: it's a linear 3rd-person squad shooter (single-player) interspersed with lots of cut scenes. There are also a few exciting chase action sequences as well as boss fights, which offer a nice change of pace and are the most fun element in the game.

I played on normal difficulty and found it too easy. Your squad mates can almost always heal you and it's actually a challenge to fail most missions. Relatedly, it doesn't really matter which squad you select for a mission: all characters seem to be equally adequate. Pick the ones you like. Maybe on high difficulty it becomes more interesting? I'll never find out because I don't enjoy it enough to try.

So, what's wrong? It's mostly that the controls are so, so clunky. My character would constantly duck behind objects when I didn't want him to and vice versa. The whole game was an exercise in frustration because of this. Healing during combat is ridiculous: there can be a bullet hell around you but your squad mate gently applies a health kit to your chest as if you're in a doctor's office. And sometimes you just die inexplicably because someone at the other side of the map fired a missile at you. No worries, your squad mate will heal you. So "dying" ends up being nothing more than an annoying slowdown. And your squad mates constantly get in your way (and they get annoyed if you shoot them by mistake).

Affordances are bad. After almost every scene I would have to play "find out where I'm supposed to go next in order to trigger a cutscene and move on".

Most disappointing is the dialog system, because it was supposed to be the game's highlight. You have few things to say and they're all useless: "yeah", "no", etc. Voice recognition is a weird, pointless gimmick that adds nothing and is mostly broken. It's best to disable it. You have "relationships" with characters, which are basically "I like you" or "I don't like you" that stem from the dialog. It's all so trivial. You can just keep saying nice things to people and have them like you. That's it.

I didn't hate Binary Domain. And I was impressed by its ambitions. But if you're itching for a narrative action game there are much better options.

Tech tip: to play with an Xbox One controller disable Steam Input in the game's properties and turn on your controller after the game starts. Otherwise the mappings are all wrong.