Gameitall February was a month of sleeper hits. With the exception of Darkness 2 and Twisted Metal, there were tons of games that were amazing that didn’t receive allot of advertising or news. Amongst those games was Sega’s Binary Domain, created by the same team that brought us the Yakuza series and Super Monkey Ball.
In Binary Domain, you play as Dan; a member of the Rust Crew, which is an international team backed by the US military that handles missions involving robots, or scrap-heads as Dan calls them. Dan and his team enter Japan to arrest and question the head of the robotic firm for belief that they are making machines that believe they’re human, complete with human skin and emotions.
Entering Japan, things go bad right from the start as the rust crew is caught between a revolution between the poor people who live on the ground level (where everything is flooded) to the high pristine people of the upper city, who are fighting with robots.
The story is great, but the combat is where it really shines. All enemies that you’ll take on in the game are robots, and gameplay is similar to titles like Gears of War; however great Gears’ gameplay was, Binary Domain improves it.
Your squad of 3 will be facing dozen of robots at once, each one has it’s own means of attacking and getting destroyed. Shoot out the legs, and they start to crawl, shoot off the head and it will start firing wildly taking out other robots in your path. It’s a nice twist with the games A.I. and leads to some extremely tense moments. For those old-school gamers, there are plenty of boss battles through out the game (playing most games now-a-days, we’re lucky to get one.)
Another borrowed mechanic that the game seems to improve on is Mass Effect’s Squad Trust and Voice Commands. Using a headset, you will be able to bark orders and have limited conversations with your teammates. This is an interesting mechanic that works well. Yelling out deferent variation of fire, cover me and charge actually feels like your more involved. The more trust you gain with your team, the more likely they’ll follow your orders.
I’ve ran into some graphical glitches here and there with the game’s animation, and as much as I praise the game’s enemy A.I. Your squad is dumb as nails, sometimes pushing you out of cover or running into a barrage of bullets forcing you to use your limited health packs.
Although in a game like this the single player will get the most attention, multiplayer feels tact on, with only 4 maps to play with. While the team base areas plays great, it’s obvious that the deathmatch portion was not tested. In my test of the game, one other player and I emptied a clip at each other point blank, until we ran out of bullets and grenades and started shooting at our feet with pistols. We couldn’t even blow ourselves up!
So if your looking for an excellent squad based shooter with a great story and combat, Binary Domain is top notch. However I cannot recommend it for it’s half assed multiplayer, you can stick to Gears or even upcoming Mass Effect 3 for that.
Binary Domain – 7 out of 10
Pros – Great story, excellent use of voice commands, great use of squad combat, excellent enemy A.I.
Cons – Multiplayer feels rushed, dumb as nails Squad A.I.,
