H
ave you heard of
Sisyphus? I bet you
have. He’s the lad
from Greek
mythology who twice
cheated death, so Zeus, king of the
gods and occasional horny swan,
cursed him to repeatedly roll a big
rock up a hill for all eternity. Every
time he reached the top, down the
rock would roll back down and
Sisyphus would start again. Which
is bad. But what if, let’s suppose,
Sisyphus secretly loved rolling
rocks? What if rolling rocks up hills,
however repetitive, was as fun as
shooting robots in Binary Domain?
What then, Zeus?
It’s perhaps not a question that’s
troubled classical scholars, but it’s
relevant here. Because my memory of
Binary Domain is vague and
hallucinatory, like something from a
Michel Gondry music video. I recall a
game that scored 7 0%, lost 5 points
for repetition and another 10 for
shitty boss battles, then clawed 20
back in hindsight for being a
laughable cult classic. But I
remembered it wrongly. Actually, the
rock-rolling element of Binary
Domain is simply magnificent. If
Zeus cursed me to shoot olive robots
in neo-Tokyo for the rest of time, only
for a fresh dropship of enemies to
arrive at the end of every level, I’d
pretend to be sad so he didn’t find a
more upsetting punishment.
The base game of Binary Domain
is deeply satisfying – a burly,
competent cover shooter with an
infectious central gameplay loop. It’s
wonderful seeing glittering shards of
scrap metal going flying off your
robot foes. Most standard enemies
are the right kind of slow and stupid,
just agile enough to make you feelgood about yourself when you
explode their shiny metal heads. It
makes me realise the only thing
wrong with Binary Domain is that it
tries to do too much, fussing and
fluffing like an anxious vicar about to
meet the head of the Women’s
Institute. But instead of offering an
unnecessary proliferation of iced
buns, Binary Domain insists on
execrable boss battles and broken
squad comms.TURRETS SYNDROME
It’s like a TV Tropes page for
third-person shooters. It’s not enough
that there are turret sections; they
have to happen during boss battles
and also incorporate a tedious
reloading mechanic and blundering
NPC interaction. There’s a bit where
you have to fight poison gas and
security droids in a futuristic
cannabis farm, shooting shit you can’t
see while your suffocating teammate
shouts at you. You even get to ride a
Jetski out of a sewer, like TerminatorBINARY DOMAIN
I have wasted years not shooting robots. Time to fix that. By Matt Elliott
NEED TO KNOW
RELEASE
April, 2012PUBLISHER
SegaDEVELOPER
Devil’sDetailsLINK
sega.comEXTRA LIFE
125
NOW PLAYING (^) IUPDATE (^) IMOD SPOTLIGHT (^) IHOW TO (^) I DIARY (^) I WHY I LOVE (^) I REINSTALL (^) IMUST PLAY
Talk to me when
you have a real
name, ‘Man’.