Science fiction often uses its far-flung settings and its big ideas as metaphors for modern life. Much like a scalpel, in the right hands, this can cut to the beating heart of important social issues with stunning precision. In the wrong hands, it can be a bloody mess. Early on in Detroit: Become Human, you know exactly what you’re in for when the game reveals the “Android Compartment” in 2038’s Detroit is literally the back of the bus.
The game’s story is organized around three androids: Connor (Bryan Dechart), a sort of police support droid who hunts “deviant” androids who develop emotions and break their programming; Markus (Jesse Williams), who runs errands for a respected fine artist confined to a wheelchair and protects him from his wastrel son; and Kara (Valorie Curry), a domestic for a single-dad drug-dealer and his withdrawn daughter. As they interact with humans, “programming errors” crop up and they “become human,” with, of course, you defining what that means. Well, to a point: Like every game with branching choices, you slam into what the plot wants you do fairly quickly, and each of the three plots leans heavily on cliche.
All throughout, the game paws at being socially relevant but can’t quite get there. The idea of androids as stand-ins for oppressed groups is limp and poorly thought out, and the game’s approaches to how androids change society are ploddingly dull and uncreative. When it does work, it’s usually in how it explores how apathy and petty selfishness towards others can be just as toxic as outright hatred, but that’s not really a theme it goes into in any real depth. For all the pretensions to depth this game makes towards social relevance, it’s not interested in delivering.
Mostly what carries it is the acting and the structure. Curry, Williams, and Dechart all deliver very different performances — Dechart’s carefully robotic performance stands out in particular. Curry and Williams frankly aren’t given much by their plotlines, but manage to make the best of it. Williams is helped by getting some of the game’s most fun moments, like a twist on the trope of the mastermind explaining the heist intercut with the heist happening. Fortunately, the game doesn’t linger on any one plotline; it’s divided into a series of vignettes, rotating between each protagonist. Each one is brief, using different mechanics to shake up the gameplay.
The big problem looming over Detroit: Become Human is that while its mechanics are well-executed, David Cage and Quantic Dream have become victims of their own success. When games like Heavy Rain came out, their mechanical novelty and branching storylines were unique. Since then, Telltale and a host of others have taken the rough formulas of those games and refined them down to a science.
This is an adventure game with fairly typical mechanics for the genre at the moment, so it struggles to stand out. The game’s control scheme takes a little getting used to, and frankly it gets a little too cute with its sequences in some places, like having to hold a bunch of buttons and fling the controller around. If you’d forgotten about the Dualshock’s gyroscope and accelerometer, Detroit: Become Human is on a mission to remind you they exist.
In the end, this is a solid adventure game, and it has the vibe of a cheesy TV show where you basically know where everything is going, but you like the cast well enough to see how it wraps up. Helping replayability somewhat is that each chapter has a flowchart so you can see exactly what other options to try, but at the same time, those options don’t feel like they shake up the entire plotline enough to be worth revisiting if the game doesn’t excite you. Detroit: Become Human might be a fun palette cleanser before the heavier games arriving later this year, but ultimately its ambitions are too grand and its execution is too slight to make much of an impression beyond that.
This review was conducted with a copy provided by the publisher.