I'm calling it now, Binary Domain is the best shooter I've played, period. Whether that speaks volume to my own personal tastes, or the game itself is up to you to decide, but I'll try my best to explain. Ryu Ga Gotoku Studios added something really special to this game, from the writing being both corny and endearing, to the slower non-shooting segments of the game where you walk down some pretty densely detailed environments filled with NPC's to listen to and teammate conversations to participate in. There's a lot in this that reminds me of the best parts of Final Fantasy XIII right down to the neofuturistic world design, font choice for subtitles, menu ui, and the upgrade stations being little shopping kiosks sprinkled throughout the linear level designs. While the story wasn't all that original, it really leans into the tropes of the genre with complete sincerity. This is all carried by the characters. It really struck me during the opening mission that Dan and Bo have such a natural way of speaking to each other. Dan himself is just very charismatic which is such a breath of fresh air for one of these military man type-main characters. I think Charlie and Rachel were the only 2 characters I didn't care too much for only, especially come the last couple chapters where everything gets a lot more serious and predictable in-fighting starts happening.
Speaking of talking, this game has voice commands that work some of the time. There's a huge plethora of voice lines that you can shout out mid-combat to varying degrees of success and functionality. While I did ultimately turn it off part-way through, it did provide a lot of entertainment when screensharing the game with friends. It's completely unnecessary since turning them off still allows you to communicate with your teammates with the 4 most vital combat commands, showing just how irrelevant pretty much all of the others are.
Something about the combat that felt really good was the almost Resident Evil 4-like interaction you can have with enemies. Shooting different parts of them can lead to different interactions, like if you take out their legs they'll start crawling toward you, taking our their arms makes them run up to you to melee instead of shoot, and popping their heads makes them turn into a very temporary ally. By the end I was pretty much always aiming for headshots, but it was nice knowing if someone or a group was too far away I could spray and pray my way through most combat scenarios.
The bosses were pretty much all great too, I loved their designs especially the huge ones. They really make you use your primary gun's blast attack since it provides a temporary stunned state to the boss, most of which have very aggressive melee attacks that can knock you down in one to two hits so getting those stuns as windows to move away or have your squad riddle it with bullets is essential.
The only things I didn't really like were the Mad Max / Gears of War outfits that you have on the entire game. They are just a bit too generic looking for my liking, especially after the really cool sci-fi scubagear wet suits Dan and Bo had on in the first chapter. Also like I mentioned earlier, a lot of the charm in the writing is lost toward the end of the game.
I liked this one a lot. I might even say that I loved it.
Speaking of talking, this game has voice commands that work some of the time. There's a huge plethora of voice lines that you can shout out mid-combat to varying degrees of success and functionality. While I did ultimately turn it off part-way through, it did provide a lot of entertainment when screensharing the game with friends. It's completely unnecessary since turning them off still allows you to communicate with your teammates with the 4 most vital combat commands, showing just how irrelevant pretty much all of the others are.
Something about the combat that felt really good was the almost Resident Evil 4-like interaction you can have with enemies. Shooting different parts of them can lead to different interactions, like if you take out their legs they'll start crawling toward you, taking our their arms makes them run up to you to melee instead of shoot, and popping their heads makes them turn into a very temporary ally. By the end I was pretty much always aiming for headshots, but it was nice knowing if someone or a group was too far away I could spray and pray my way through most combat scenarios.
The bosses were pretty much all great too, I loved their designs especially the huge ones. They really make you use your primary gun's blast attack since it provides a temporary stunned state to the boss, most of which have very aggressive melee attacks that can knock you down in one to two hits so getting those stuns as windows to move away or have your squad riddle it with bullets is essential.
The only things I didn't really like were the Mad Max / Gears of War outfits that you have on the entire game. They are just a bit too generic looking for my liking, especially after the really cool sci-fi scubagear wet suits Dan and Bo had on in the first chapter. Also like I mentioned earlier, a lot of the charm in the writing is lost toward the end of the game.
I liked this one a lot. I might even say that I loved it.