Detroit Become Human is the Corvette C8 of video games. Sure, it looks fancy, has that nice shiny coat of glossy finish on it, and can go fast, but it will never compete with the foreign sports cars in any capacity.

Story can carry a video game. It did it for me in Read Dead 2, it did it for me in God of War 2018, and it did it for me here. But, the story only gets a game so far. At some point you need to pause and think if you enjoy this game, or if you just enjoy the world. Detroit would function better as a playable DVD. I hate saying that, because developers have worked so hard to advance games this far; to the ability of practically putting yourself in the world as realistically as possible, but why have it watered down this much?

There is no “gameplay.” I have no idea why there’s a difficulty setting asking you about gameplay, since the only thing you do in terms of gameplay is QTE. That’s it, you press some buttons for 12 hours. Why build this beautiful world with this amazing, customizable storyline, just to have it go to shit when you do anything outside of the story?

It is funny how this very emotionally impactful story is just racism but to robots. I’m not sure if Sony thinks that’s what it’ll take to open the eyes of the racists, but any exposure to POC liberations is better than none I suppose. I just wish the dialogue options weren’t so misleading at times. The specific example I could use is when I was trying to explain to Hank (as Connor) that I do think we’re on the wrong side, a dialogue option that I thought was agreeing was actually disagreeing, saying we’re machines made by humans, and can’t have any self awareness.

The little time you aren’t doing QTE or picking dialogue paths, you’re frantically trying to figure out why the fuck you keep walking all over the place. This is not a 1999 horror game, why are these camera angles and character movements practically tank controls? So many times I’d be walking forward and the camera angle would shift, causing my once-forward movement to go in a completely different direction. After the 3rd hour this becomes incredibly irritating.

Unfortunately, Detroit Become Human falls flat of anything outside of storytelling. This game is everything I dislike about the modern Sony IP. Focusing too much on identity, and too little on what makes video games fun. The constant QTE, the confusing dialogue options, the bad movements, this is the type of game I always refer to when I explain that Sony needs a change of pace. It’s lucky that it’s almost exclusively focused on story, otherwise I feel like it would warrant harsher criticism of all its other parts. I’m pretty indifferent on this game overall. 5/10.