14 DAY TRIAL // 
The third-person shooter genre is becoming one of the most crowded in the videogame industry and, despite this seemingly saturated segment, Sega decided to release Binary Domain not just on consoles, earlier this year, but also on the PC, last week.
With the promise of combining age-old cover-based shooting mechanics with a novel story filled with all sorts of philosophical elements about robots and humans, not to mention a special Consequence System that impacts the player’s relationships with his squad mates, the game looks quite interesting.
Does Binary Domain actually deliver on its promises or are we dealing with yet another stale, sci-fi shooter? Let’s find out.
Story
Binary Domain, like many other shooters out there, takes place in the near future, where most of the Earth’s surface was taken over by water. This sparked humanity to start building robots in order to help with work and other sorts of jobs. In order to stop things from going overboard, a special directive from the New Geneva convention mandates that robots should never look like humans.
As you can imagine, some corporations don’t exactly care about this directive, so they’ve started creating special kinds of robots called Hollow Children, who are basically sleeper agents that believe they’re human until they’re turned on and must do whatever their master tells them to do.
The whole story is filled with philosophical debates about what it means to be human and in this narrative, you play the role of Dan Marshall, a special agent sent into Tokyo to find out the truth about these Hollow Children and, hopefully, stop them from taking over the world.
At first he may seem that he’s just another arrogant guy who doesn’t take things seriously but, once you spend time with him, you find out that he’s actually a nice enough guy who’s been through many difficult times.
While the game does suffer from traditional Japanese problems, like lengthy cut scenes and some cliché characters, you might not want to skip the cinematics as you’re in for some great moments, especially if you like sci-fi plots.
What’s more, the story is paced quite well, especially the exposition that doesn’t try to overwhelm you with too many facts and historical events about the game’s plot.
Gameplay
Binary Domain is a third-person, cover-based shooter and, if you played at least one game in the genre, you’ll feel right at home with this title. Environments are littered with cover and you basically navigate from chest-high wall to waist-high boxes and try to shoot at the enemy robots that stand between you and the objective.
In terms of shooting mechanics, you don’t have lots of new things, although Dan’s special rifle allows him to execute a charge attack that is handy when you’re swarmed with enemies. You also have your usual array of guns, from assault or sniper rifles, to SMGs or full-fledged machine guns, not to mention small pistols with infinite ammo. These weapons, as well as your stock grenades, can be upgraded at various kiosks throughout the levels by using the credits you’re awarded when killing enemies.
Speaking of opponents, you’re in for quite a varied experience, as the enemy robots range from conventional rust-heads to more agile ones or models with increased armor and better weapons. There are also flying drones that prove to be quite pesky, as well as big, hulking monstrosities that require special moves and tactics to take down.
Binary Domain’s biggest claim to fame is the Consequence System. Throughout the story, Dan is helped out by around three squad mates and you can interact with each of them and build a rapport, just like in many role-playing games.
You do this by either using a microphone, thanks to the voice recognition technology built right into the game, or by just selecting replies from a dialog menu. Even if you have a microphone, it’s probably for the best to use the menu, as the recognition doesn’t always work, so be prepared to repeat the same word over and over again with different accents before the game reacts.
As you interact with them and lead them successfully into battle, they’ll trust you more and will be more efficient in combat. If you don’t take care of them, they’ll be less likely to help you out when things get tricky.
Sadly, the clumsy squad mate AI doesn’t really help out players during more difficult firefights, so even if your comrades trust you with their lives, you still need to make sure that they don’t get killed and that you don’t get eliminated while taking care of them.
This is made a bit more difficult thanks to specific enemies who’ll rush your position head on, so always shoot for their legs. Seeing as how they’re robots, they won’t be completely incapacitated, as they can still crawl towards you, but their speed will be greatly reduced. When faced with groups of enemies, you might also shoot one in the head, which causes it to turn on his comrades and start creating chaos in their midst.
Multiplayer
Binary Domain, like any good third-person shooter, also has some multiplayer modes, including a cooperative Survival one and a competitive one with different game types. Sadly, they’re all quite basic and the maps on which the online action takes place are extremely small and unimaginative.
The Survival mode is decent enough, but the constant waves of robots do get tiring after a while, as do the maps that don’t provide enough room to escape the enemies.
The competitive modes, which include game types like Team Deathmatch, Capture the Flag, or Area Control, are also decent but the small levels and predictable spawn points turn the whole experience into a test of memory instead of skill.
Visuals and Sound
Binary Domain is quite a pretty game, supporting plenty of impressive visual effects. Sadly, the process of porting it to the PC has caused some problems, as the settings you choose through the special configurator aren’t remembered when you start the game. As such, you need to actually go into the game’s folder and edit an .ini file in order to customize your resolution or set features like Vsync or Anti-aliasing on or off.
Once you do these things, however, you’re treated with an impressive game that, even if it abuses the grey-brown color pallet, still looks impressive on a PC.
In terms of sound, the soundtrack is nice but a bit forgettable. Thankfully, the voice acting manages to impress a bit more, with the main characters sounding good, although the dialog turns them into stereotypes like the flamboyant African American, the arrogant American, the uptight British guy or the conservative Asian woman.
On the other hand, the game doesn’t really bring that many impressive things to the table in order to distinguish it from other third-person shooters and its multiplayer modes are forgettable. Throw in the lackluster porting to the PC platform, which resulted in some features not working properly or not being able to use a mouse in the menu screens, and it’s a bit hard to like Binary Domain. Overall, if you fancy a shooter that doesn’t rely as much on standard tropes and has a decent enough story, then you might want to try Sega’s effort.
The Good
The Bad
Conclusion
