win points for agreeing with
everything they say. Yes, inequality is
bad. No, we shouldn’t start shooting
up the coffee shop. There’s even a bit
where you get universal approval
from your team by not agreeing to
romance a 1 5-year-old girl, which
seems like rather a low bar, even for a
throbbing gonad like Dan Marshall.
It’s clumsy, but it does add some
welcome texture.
There’s also some interesting stuff
with Faye, an impeccable sniper from
the Chinese People’s Liberation
Army, who also acts as a love interest
for Dan. The story goes to some
unexpected places, asking questions
about machine intelligence and what
it means to be human, but it ends up
feeling like the cup noodle version of
a Kojima cutscene. Deep existential
questions are avoided in favour of
romance. Choices are made because
Dan fancies someone, not because
he’s reevaluating the fine line
between sentience and AI. And
honestly, I’m sort of fine with it. It
feels like a very Binary Domain way
to deal with debates about
transhumanism.
There are some bits that simply
don’t work. For whatever reason, I
couldn’t get voice commands to
function, so my first forays into the
game were amazingly awkward. Bo
would ask me a simple question and
we’d have an excruciating pregnant
pause while he waited for an answer.
Yes, Bo, we should shoot the robots.
In the end I had to turn voice
commands off completely, but not
before I got to try the calibration tool,
which deserves a mention just
because the choice of words – shit,
damnit, shitdamnit – is telling. Pad
integration, if you chose to live that
way, is shaky, too: onscreen prompts
are still mapped to the keyboard,
which adds an unwelcome layer of
danger when it comes to in-game
conversation. I managed to press the
wrong button after a romantic
cutscene with Faye and called her an
idiot, which felt like too much of a
jerk move even for Dan.
Other wrinkles are more
frustrating. There are moments when
you’re peppered by missiles from
unseen enemies. Squadmates strafe
into your line of fire then complain
about it. And, on occasion, ammo canbe frustratingly scarce, which feels
like a terrible sin for a game with
shooting this gleeful. The signposting
is also terrible. It eschews in-game
highlights in favour of dragging
camera focus, which simply doesn’t
work. It’s vague and frustrating,
yanking your attention away from the
action like a violent toddler holding
hair straighteners.
But despite all this, I absolutely
forgive Binary Domain. I love its
lunkheaded, clumsy honesty. I love
the crisp, metallic cleanness that you
only seem to get with games from the
early 2 010s, like a shiny, favourite
shirt that’s been ironed too many
times. And, in fact, maybe I’m looking
at it the wrong way. The misguided
diversions that stop me doing the
thing I adore – basically destroying
green robots until my PC becomes
obsolete – actually make those bits
more appealing. Perhaps there’s an
alternate version of Binary Domain
where I don’t have to fight a robot
gorilla too many times or get chased
by electric spiders, and it actually
makes me love the shooting less. The
lesson here? Maybe all Sisyphus
needed to appreciate his eternal
punishment was a day spent rolling
lots of different, smaller, more
annoying rocks up the same hill.ENDS UP FEELING LIKE THE
CUP NOODLE VERSION OF
A KOJIMA CUTSCENE
EXTRA LIFE
127
NOW PLAYING (^) IUPDATE (^) IMOD SPOTLIGHT (^) IHOW TO (^) I DIARY (^) I WHY I LOVE (^) I REINSTALL (^) IMUST PLAY
I have some bad
news foryou,
mate.
ABOVE: I’ve
christened the oneon
the left ‘Judy Hench’.
RIGHT: True love is
shooting a flying
top hat.