Just beat Binary Domain. I had played a bit of it on the 360, but not too much, so most of this was my first time going through it.
So some quick impressions.
I like it! I honestly think it's a steal at its sale-reduction price of $3.74. It's got fun gameplay, it has an interesting story with characters you come to like, it has good music, and it's not a bad looker either.I'm not saying it's the most amazing games ever or anything, but I felt it was a very confident third-person shooter, and better than a lot of other third person shooters I have played. Lasts about 9-10 hours, took over 10 myself but I was playing on the default hardest difficulty.
Gameplay is mostly typical third-person shooter fair. You have cover, you have guns, you have enemies... But there's a few fun twists introduced here. One sort of staple one is the roll dodge, but I liked how they executed it. You aren't invincible, and it isn't so fast or moves you so far its cheap. It's fairly balanced, and definitely useful when you master it, but takes a bit of practice to get it down. The enemies in the game are robots, and as such they are can be and are shot to pieces, usually involving you shooting their 'armor' and then their 'core'. Headshots aren't death for most robots, and instead will just make them 'mindless' so that they start shooting their comrades. It can be fun to cause enemies havoc by turning various enemies in the room in 'mindless' robots so that they all start attacking each other. There's 10 bosses in the game, and I had fun with all of them. Some of the later ones are kinda bullet-sponges (at least on hard difficulty), but I had fun regardless.
The game also has mechanics involving your team. You have various team members, and various times in the game you are allowed to pick who you go into a level with. But this doesn't just change things on a gameplay level, but also changes the complete dialogue and look into the characters you get into that stage. You can give commands to your team, either through voice commands with a mic or prompts you can choose between. And each team member has a certain liking of you, which is decreased or increased by how you respond to them, how you treat them, if you shoot them in gameplay, if you get headshots with them near, if you help them out, if they suggest an idea if you follow it or not, etc. This is also effected by choices that happen in the story. These Team Choices ultimately can make different characters and events transpire, change dialogue in stages (which is well done, in my opinion as they seem to have dialogue for every possible combination of characters), and change you between the game's three endings.
The story is also nice. I ended up liking every character, most of the cutscenes felt like a treat to watch, and there were some good funny moments and dramatic moments throughout. The story gets a bit hammy quite often, but in such a way its enjoyable, B-grade fair with some more intelligence and tact to it.
I'd say even if you have only a passing interest in third-person shooters to buy the game when it;s on sale for $3.74, it really is a steal for that price.
