Games Booth

Binary Domain – An epic battle or a playground fight with friends!

Binary Domain is SEGA’s latest first person, squad shooter and your first impressions will see you say ‘’Oh this is a bit like Gears of War’. Well it is and it isn’t.  While a lot of design and storyline work has gone into Binary Domain, it lacks a little something – although what it was I wasn’t quite sure.

You play as an American soldier named Dan Marshall, who alongside Big Bo ‘Roy Boeteng and the rest of the Rust Crew fight an intense challenge for humanity in a robot invaded futuristic Tokyo.  The year is 2080 and the Asian city is teeming with robots. These robots are literally ‘taking over the city’. In fact they’re more human than some of the humans and vice versa.  Imagine ‘iRobot’ and ‘Gears’ combined – with robots instead of monsters. Getting the picture?

As the battle ensues the robots get tougher, your weapons become awesome and the fight becomes a war.

Controlling the character is pretty straight forward however there is one added function that enables you to take ‘voice control’ of your character. Using a mic, you use simple commands such as ‘forward’ , ‘follow’ etc and you can answer the questions coming from colleagues (select the answer from a list – and say it into the mic). The issue here is, it’s not a very good voice recognition control feature. I don’t have an accent and it struggled to understand me all the time. I had to repeat several times and almost had to speak like ‘a typical Englishman should’.  I have no idea how this would cope with some of the regional accents found across the UK.   Anyway in the end I got fed up and annoyed with this function and decided not to use it. But that’s a personal choice.

The campaign and storyline overall are good and a lot of thought has gone into this. Much more thought than the online campaign to be honest.  I couldn’t play too much of this game online, in fact after two games I found myself losing interest. This is one of those games that you have to buy for the campaign rather than the online factors. It’s one to be played alone and not for joining with your mates to do.

I did feel the need to complete the game, but I think that’s the end of this relationship as the online just didn’t do it for me. 

The end of the story line leads me to think that there will be a Binary Domain Two, if there all I can suggest is that SEGA work on the voice function and online co-op play in order for it be a game people will keep playing continuously