What is a Man?
The Yakuza team heads to the future with Binary Domain and helps bring back proper cyberpunk. We go hands-on.
Published: December 12, 2011
If there's one genre, perplexingly, that has somehow fallen by the wayside despite the massive advancements to technology that this generation has offered, it's cyberpunky sci-fi. Sure, there's been plenty of sci-fi, but as we march ever-closer to the worlds guys like Philip K. Dick and William Gibson dreamt up, games themselves have side-stepped the more thought-provoking ideas of the future in lieu of countless bald space marines and mindless laser blast shootouts.
Maybe that's why we were so pleasantly surprised to see, of all development teams, the folks behind the fantastic Yakuza series (led by Toshiro Nagoshi) aping the basic "stop 'n pop" cover-based mechanics the Gears of War series made so popular and wrapping it around a dyed-in-the-wool cyberpunk story of mega-corporations, dystopian Lower Cities and the idea of identity as it pertains to being human. If we think we're human -- or more to the point, if we don't know we're not -- does that truly give us a soul?
We're getting a little ahead of ourselves, of course. For a proper start, let's instead delve into the opening moments of the game -- or at least the moments as they were presented to us when we sat down to check out the game after a brief intro by Nagoshi himself explaining the game's attempts at emotion and a brief primer on the game's included voice command system (more on that in a bit). Unpausing the start of a cutscene, we were immediately dropped into an action sequence that had main character Dan Marshall and partner Roy "Big Boy" Boden hurtling down a pipe-strewn, rain-slick sea wall. Sliding down the wall on our backs, we had to navigate a snaking lattice of pipes before finally landing on solid ground.
Almost instantly, we were thrown into a shootout with robotic foes, and with no option but to slam up against some cover and unload with an assault rifle (sound familiar?), we quickly whittled away at the enemies one at a time. Most of the opposing force were tinted in green, but a few more aggressive red-toned enemies would actively charge our cover and took far more hits to dispense. Thankfully, a couple melee strikes helped dispatch them, but the reload button could also be held to dispense a powerful blast wave that could take out multiple enemies as needed, though ammo for it was extremely scarce save for one particular stand Dan and Roy had to make.
In terms of gameplay, one would be forgiven for initially seeing Binary Domain as yet another attempt by Japanese developers to Xerox a Western formula without really "getting" what makes those games good. Dan isn't especially agile, but nor is he particularly burly either (that distinction definitely belongs to Roy), meaning his normal walk speed is barely a trot, necessitating a held-down cover button to sprint between bits. Again, at first blush the game seems like little more than a clone of something that's been done for quite a few years now.
Maybe that's why we were so pleasantly surprised to see, of all development teams, the folks behind the fantastic Yakuza series (led by Toshiro Nagoshi) aping the basic "stop 'n pop" cover-based mechanics the Gears of War series made so popular and wrapping it around a dyed-in-the-wool cyberpunk story of mega-corporations, dystopian Lower Cities and the idea of identity as it pertains to being human. If we think we're human -- or more to the point, if we don't know we're not -- does that truly give us a soul?
We're getting a little ahead of ourselves, of course. For a proper start, let's instead delve into the opening moments of the game -- or at least the moments as they were presented to us when we sat down to check out the game after a brief intro by Nagoshi himself explaining the game's attempts at emotion and a brief primer on the game's included voice command system (more on that in a bit). Unpausing the start of a cutscene, we were immediately dropped into an action sequence that had main character Dan Marshall and partner Roy "Big Boy" Boden hurtling down a pipe-strewn, rain-slick sea wall. Sliding down the wall on our backs, we had to navigate a snaking lattice of pipes before finally landing on solid ground.
Almost instantly, we were thrown into a shootout with robotic foes, and with no option but to slam up against some cover and unload with an assault rifle (sound familiar?), we quickly whittled away at the enemies one at a time. Most of the opposing force were tinted in green, but a few more aggressive red-toned enemies would actively charge our cover and took far more hits to dispense. Thankfully, a couple melee strikes helped dispatch them, but the reload button could also be held to dispense a powerful blast wave that could take out multiple enemies as needed, though ammo for it was extremely scarce save for one particular stand Dan and Roy had to make.
In terms of gameplay, one would be forgiven for initially seeing Binary Domain as yet another attempt by Japanese developers to Xerox a Western formula without really "getting" what makes those games good. Dan isn't especially agile, but nor is he particularly burly either (that distinction definitely belongs to Roy), meaning his normal walk speed is barely a trot, necessitating a held-down cover button to sprint between bits. Again, at first blush the game seems like little more than a clone of something that's been done for quite a few years now.
