So I played through Binary Domain and Spec Ops: The Line this week. Both games have been categorised as third person shooters with interesting plots. After playing both, I guess I can kind of agree to that. Binary Domain is typical anime mecha tripe, where all bad guys are robots who are bad because they are robots. Spec Ops: The Line is... apocalypse now without being as self aware about its anti-war message.
I think that Binary Domain is genuinely a pretty fun game, even if it suffers from being made by people who don't know what a shooter is. More accurately, it has the base of a shooter and then is topped with your standard JRPG menus, micromanagement, characters and design decisions. I don't know what it is with Japanese games and their square, no personality user interfaces. Where every element is a box with a single gradient, with a little drawn portrait of the characters you've met so far, with a stat screen detailing the most irrelevant, tedious over-information such as the range in metres of your gun (despite all enemy encounters being inside a little 10x10m box) and their favourite colour and the smell of their underpants.
From there the gameplay is pretty much every shitty mission trope you've encountered in a game since 1998. Forced stealth sequences, turret sections, gimmicy vehicle sequences, QTEs, balancing minigames, morale choices of "shoot one of these guys", wave based encounters where you have to wait for a door to open. These all happen multiple times across the game. Then you have this silly "trust" system where depending on how well you shoot robots in the head, your squad members will trust you and if they trust you enough you get the good ending. Because you shot those robots in the head real good. Sometimes your teammates will initiate dialog with you, where the secret is to agree with literally everything they say and then they will trust you. Big Bo wants to fuck some hookers? Tell him "yeah I want to fuck some hookers too". Charlie wants you to cover the left flank while he covers the right (keeping in mind the friendly AI isn't actually competent enough to execute their own orders)? Tell him, "yeah I'll shoot at stuff on the left" (and then shoot everything on all the sides for all it matters). I didn't have the homely rocket lady like me enough because I didn't take her on missions to kill robots, so I didn't get the best ending unfortunately. Although the best ending doesn't have anything to do with her, so I'm not sure how it was remotely relevant to have her trust me.
But, despite all of those things that are bad about Binary Domain, and despite all the other things that are worse that I can't be bothered mentioning, I think that Binary Domain is a pretty good cutscene thing. The characters were funny and kind of interesting, in a cartoony anime kind of way where everyone is a stereotype and where the plot of the game was "we have to stop prejudice by killing all of the robots so people aren't racist against robots".
Spec Ops: The Line, on the other hand, is less about the plot contradicting the plot and cartoon characters and more about gameplay contradicting plot and everyone is out of their god damn mind characters. The general gist is you go into sand-country to save people, and you do this by shooting literally every other human being you see for the next 20 hours. But that's okay because that is the plot of the game. This is not a spoiler.
So, lots of people seem to think that Spec Ops: The Line is the greatest video game story since Citizen Kane: The Video Game. I don't know. I feel like... it was overhyped a little. I guess people initially thought that it would be a game about being super military man and saving the video game day, when in actuality it wasn't that. So they hyped it up, everyone got excited... and, I dunno. It was fine. It was a fine story and it was interesting and I could have saved 15 hours by just watching Apocalypse Now. Like Binary Domain, Spec Ops: The Line felt like every other shooter since 1998 in terms of gameplay and set pieces. You shoot things in a helicopter from a turret, you shoot things from a van from a grenade turret, you shoot people with a sniper rifle from afar, you shoot people from an overhead camera thing, there are like 20000 turrets in the game that you shoot people from, you kill waves of enemies while you wait for a door to unlock. Yeah. All those things happen.
I guess I'm left kind of wondering, at what point do these properties need to be games? Your relationship to both main characters felt entirely impersonal, and the reward from playing through a level is the cutscene at the end. They're good cutscenes, and they're pretty engaging when they don't have QTEs or minigames or morale choices book-ending them. But I don't know if this is where I want story-games to be. I want more stuff like Journey, or DayZ, or Half Life, where the stories you come out of the game with are the ones you've inferred from the gameplay. Where the pure act of interaction is the story. Both games I've talked about kind of implement gameplay into story, or story into gameplay... but, I feel like I've not taken away anything from either of these games. Unlike a movie or a book, I'm never going to go back an reexperience Binary Domain or Spec Ops, because the actual mechanics and design of the gameplay are so tedious and mundane. Where as, I think, a story-driven game like Portal 2 or an experience-driven game like DayZ are complemented by how you interact with the game, and the two elements of play and storytelling aren't separated, they're the same thing.
So, sorry for the massive post of my bad opinions about video games. I'd highly recommend Binary Domain and Spec Ops at the Amazon asking price (like $35 for the two of them? Dunno if the sale's still going), and I think that they're interesting talking points for video game stories and the medium as a whole. Even if you're not into being a pretentious forum wanker, they're moderately fun to play even if you've already played them a hundred times before.
5/5 STARS - KRITZ
