You know, this game is a lot more fun than the marketing made it look.
Wrecking robots is a time-honored gaming pastime; robots don’t bleed, and nobody cares about their feelings, so it’s easy to pump a whole crapload of bullets into them and not feel bad. But Sega has actually turned it around and come up with a fairly interesting AI for these enemies.
For example, headshots. A few well-placed bullets between a robot’s eyes and it starts shooting other enemies. There are a few moments where with some good aim and a few well-placed shots, you can mow down entire swaths of enemies. It’s not necessary (most of the time), but it’s a hell of a lot of fun and useful for ammo management.
Similarly, the AI’s reaction to, say, blowing a leg off is to just slump over and use their arm to take the weight, while still spraying bullets at you. So you actually have to think about placing your shots.
Also, shooting these robots is kind of a hoot. There’s no gore, obviously, but chunks of metal fly everywhere.
So far, it isn’t reinventing the wheel, but Binary Domain is turning out to be pretty fun.
image courtesy Sega