It is clear from playing Binary Domain that it is a game of from early 2012. It’s a linear third person shooter heavily influenced by Gears of War and Uncharted, with a pinch of Vanquish for good measure. Playing it is a bit more awkward than any of those games, with cover-based shooting that never really feels great and clunky enemy movement and patterns. The environments are pretty small and limited by modern standards, the bosses are predictable to the point of seeming semi-scripted, and the weapons are mostly boring and repetitive (two assault rifles and a light machine gun that shoots like an assault rifle? You spoil me.) It has a tacked on multiplayer survival “horde” mode that nobody seemed to like. You know, cover shooters in early 2012.
However, Binary Domain has some things going for it that make it an interesting and enjoyable experience despite its dated playstyle and various flaws. The first is the story. Binary Domain tells the story of an international force of operatives, called a dust crew, going into Japan to investigate a robotics company that may be producing “Hollow Children,” or illegal robots that are indistinguishable from human beings. It goes some interesting places from there, but though the script can be clunky and the characters are pretty predictable, it’s a fun and interesting story with lots of twists and turns and a heavy supply of long cut scenes that never bored me. It’s not Uncharted 4 or Last of Us quality but it makes for a fun B-movie tale that compliments the action well. If you ever wanted a mix of Terminator, Blade Runner, and Metal Gear Solid complete with people ripping off their faces to reveal the robot underneath and nanomachines, well, it’s right here. The game also allows you to choose your squadmates, and in-mission dialog and actions vary depending on who you choose, which means both that there was a lot of writing done for this game and that you can get some variety on subsequent playthroughs.
The second thing Binary Domain has going for it is its mechanical experiments. There are two major areas where Binary Domain attempts to innovate. The first is a voice-communication system that has you issuing verbal commands to squadmates through a microphone and also responding verbally in conversations. The commands are simple things like “fire,” “charge” and “regroup” like we’ve seen in many games, and the conversations are also pretty simple, though they play into an affinity system that makes squadmates more likely to follow your commands if you please them during conversation. Actually speaking into the mic feels a little silly, and the mic is mis-calibrated, at least with my surround speaker set up, often hearing characters’ own responses to your statements as your character saying something (usually the f-word) and then responding to that. This system doesn’t really work and thankfully can be turned off in favor of controller commands, but it is at least an attempt to make you feel more connected to the game characters while also echoing the game’s themes about robots vs. humans and simulated consciousness.
A system that does work is Binary Domain’s body part target system, where you can blow parts of a robot off to cripple them. You can shoot off legs and have the robot fall on the ground and start crawling towards you. You can shoot their arms off and they will drop their weapon. If you manage to get enough head shots to disable their sensors they can no longer tell friend from foe and you can make them attack one another. It’s a ton of fun and makes combat encounters much more engaging than in most games of this style because you’re constantly trying to pick enemies apart and also getting to see the effects as their armor and body parts are shredded by your gunfire.
The game still looks nice almost a decade after release, even though the levels aren’t very detailed. The soundtrack is unobjectionable, repetitive techno music. It has a surprisingly large and diverse cast of potential party members, all of whom have distinct personalities and special abilities. You can tell that a fair amount of money and, more importantly, thought and creativity went into making Binary Domain and it stands out in lots of little ways, like the fact that every time you make a purchase from one of the vending machines (you earn currency as you destroy robots and their limbs) you play a little slot machine game that has a chance of spitting out something useful for free, like a health pack or ammo.
As is often the case with games that are a little older, parts of Binary Domain have aged poorly. In addition to somewhat clunky controls and the primitive and not quite functional voice recognition the game’s frame rate plummets during encounters with large bosses, and the camera is pulled in too tight to allow you to understand your surroundings during these encounters, making the battles kind of annoying and frustrating, even though they aren’t difficult thanks to the game’s generous down but not out system. Your NPC companions often wander right in front of your line of fire while you’re shooting and then get mad because you shot them, and the whole relationship system kind of sucks in its implementation, encouraging you to give repetitive and pointless commands to grind affinity with your companions. In addition, the game shoehorns in a bunch of shoddy change of pace moments. There’s a point where you slide down a long water slide, dodging obstacles on the way, and it’s something you’ve seen and done a million times in video games, generally in a more enjoyable form. There’s also a jet ski level that’s clunky and annoying to control. There are way too many turret sequences. The game even has some quiet moments when you walk around talking to random people with the voice recognition system, but they’re slow and clunky and not good. The voice acting for the main characters is passable, but side NPC voice acting is amateurish at best and often features weird accents that don’t really match the characters’ backgrounds. Even the game’s character upgrade stuff feels primitive and tacked on, with purchasable or findable nanomachine upgrades tied to each character and offering boring bonuses like +10% base health. Why bother?
But none of these issues detract from the core strengths of Binary Domain. This is a game that actually cares about its weird anime story and treats it seriously. It’s also a game where combat actually feels different than in the billion other cover shooters from that generation because of its emphasis on aiming at body parts. It doesn’t have great visual design even compared to contemporaries like Remember Me, but it has a certain 90s cyber anime charm that gives it a real sense of place even if it does not spend nearly enough time exploring its city and far too much traipsing through sewers and manufacturing plants. A lot of B-tier shooters raise the question “why does this exist? Why did this get made?” Binary Domain had a clear vision behind it, and offers things that no other game has done in quite the same way.
I don’t know why Binary Domain wasn’t made backwards compatible on Xbox. There’s a Cup Noodle in one scene, and a Timex in another, but I didn’t see any other licensing issues, and Sega has made a lot of its games backward compatible so it’s probably not the publisher that’s the hold up. It may be that it was judged too obscure or there’s some technical issue around the voice recognition that would make it tough to implement (this seems like the most likely culprit.) I don’t think that a remaster would really work because it was janky in 2012 and is even jankier by modern standard. There are a lot of sequences that just aren’t very fun to play and there aren’t a lot of people who have nostalgia for this weird old flop from the early 2010s. I’d honestly rather see a full remake using the same plot and characters but with refined gameplay and revamped level design and gameplay, or even better, a sequel. The audience for either approach is probably too small to make it financially viable, but this is a universe that doesn’t deserve to be forgotten.
Binary Domain reminds me a lot of Spec-Ops: The Line, another squad-based shooter released a few months later. They are both a little clunky to play, though I’d say Spec-Ops is actually smoother even though the creators say the clunkiness was intentional, they’re both story-focused with something meaningful to say, and they both feature a scene where you fight an evil chandelier and then one of your squadmates bails on the next battle to go take a crap. Wait, that last part was only in Binary Domain. But both games were interesting and fun experiences despite being flawed in a number of ways. They both come from the dying days of the linear 10 hour campaign, which is a time that I kind of miss now that every game is a live service constantly changing thing that expects to soak up all your time. I miss having a game that you could plow through in a weekend, experience some fun mechanics, a cool world, and an intriguing story, and then set it aside and go on with your life. These types of games arguably weren’t worth the $60 price tag, but on something like Gamepass they make a lot of sense, just like a short Netflix series or made for TV movie.
I think that at this point Binary Domain is a dead property, but if you have a copy or can get one for reasonably cheap (I’d say anything under $20 is probably a good deal) I recommend you play it. I’ve played a lot of 360 and PS3 games this year and this is one of my favorites. It’s a clunky, imperfect, game with a lot of heart, and those are the kinds of games that develop cult followings for a reason.
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