The developers responsible for making the Yakuza series have completed their latest game, Binary Domain. It’s out in Japan, and it’ll be out in the rest of the world by February end. While you wait, the demo is a great way to figure out if this new third person shooter is up your alley. Or if you’re really lazy, you can just read this article. Binary Domain plays a lot like other third person shooters (like Gears of War or Mass Effect) with similar cover mechanics, squad-based combat, etc. It definitely has a more arcade-y feel to it.
Robots of various shapes and sizes pour down on you while you navigate your squad through a linear, war-torn Tokyo. You can choose from a variety of squadmates, each with their specialisations, like sniping, close-combat, etc. The game is supposed to allow you to build trust with your teammates, although the first thing my (male) teammate asked me to do was to check out the other (female) teammate. So, I’m not sure how deep this trust system is going to end up being.
The commands you can give them are pretty basic: “attack!”, or “cover me!” or so on. Maybe the final version will surprise me, but as of now it’s looking like the story and relation-building mechanics are going to be very basic. This puts a considerable amount of pressure to dazzle on the gameplay. Does it dazzle? Not particularly. It’s a fun experience but from what I’ve seen there’s not much to set it apart from other third person shooters, and certainly nothing novel enough to elevate it above ME, GoW or Uncharted. But let’s wait and see.
