Binary Domain
Binary Domain is in a class of unfortunate shooters, along with games like Quantum Theory, The Conduit, and Jurassic: The Hunted -- games that are generally unremarkable, except for their perplexing failures to measure up to the specific blockbuster franchises they ape (Gears of War, Halo, Call of Duty). To its credit, the model for Binary Domain is more ambiguous, and less well-established; it's trying to be a story-driven sci-fi epic, and other contenders in this field - Bionic Commando, Dark Void, Vanquish - have had their own shortfalls. But even more so than those titles, Binary Domain trips over poor execution -- not in some, or even most of its mechanics, but in all of them.
It's a bit pitiable, because hints of an ambitious high-concept peek out from underneath the game's wreckage. I can picture an awesome pitch for this game: in a near-future, semi-apocalyptic world, rebuilt with the help of a robot workforce, the powder-keg of fear regarding robots infiltrating human society has just been tipped. You play as part of an international special-ops team sent in to Japan, itself torn apart by civil war, to investigate the suspected source of a robot disguised as human -- while the specter of a multinational corporation's plot looms overhead. You can cripple robots like Dead Space's necromorphs, taking out legs, arms, and heads to change the pace of a battle; and you can order your AI teammates with voice commands (or button presses) to effect tactical superiority. These teammates even have a relationship status with your character, based on how well you order and treat them, which feeds back into their willingness to accept your commands.
This could be a great game, right!? But none of the ideas have come out correctly. The game's script is in dire lack of writing quality, the plot is haphazardly assembled (the full backstory isn't introduced until after the first hour or so), and the voice acting is flat, annoying, and filled with bad accents. Basic controls like snapping to cover, vaulting over obstacles, and reloading are bafflingly different from every other game of this type. Enemies are easy to slow down, but take way too many bullets to finish off, even from the beginning. And the friendly AI is laughable, and frustrating, since your buddies love to run into your line of fire and then get mad at you for shooting them. (Yes, I covered this before when I tried the demo -- no, I'm not sure why I expected it to be any different now.)
And then there's the configuration application. Yeah, not "screen" -- application. It's a separate app. While it's not uncommon for a PC game to ship with a separate config binary, for making settings (particularly benchmarking) without opening the game first, Binary Domain's config app is the only way to set a majority of the game's settings: including graphics options, key bindings, mouse/stick sensitivity, whether to show control prompts with keyboard keys or controller buttons, and, yes, inverting the look axis. The in-game settings screen is basically pointless; to change anything of value, you need to exit the game and run this sidecar app, then return to wherever your last save was.
The config app itself is indicative of the number of shits Sega apparently gave about this game. At first, it didn't even exist, or was at least missing a number of vital settings (I'm not intimately familiar with the game's version history); and it's plain from looking at the thing, with generic unstyled buttons and fansite-quality background images, that the app was done by a B team at best. Evidently, getting the actual game's developers to put these vital settings in the game menus was just too gosh darned expensive.
And that's the real problem with Binary Domain, and why it falls into the "unfortunate" category. It wasn't impossible for this to be a good game. But not enough people cared enough about it to make it so.
Progress: Chapter 2