
Too often, these games have gigantic, awesome-looking bosses that are a drag to fight, Vanquish being the prime example. Ready, aim.Īs for the bosses, this the best gauntlet a third-person shooter has offered in a long time. But robot eyes glow red, brightly enough that they can be seen through smoke. One little touch especially delights: Binary Domain's smoke effects are excellent, dense and impossible to see through. During the next few seconds, it's your chance to hit more headshots as the enemy deals with this new threat, meaning that one good headshot can set off a chain of them and destroy huge groups with a few bullets. Hitting three or four shots in a row is difficult, but do it and that robot instantly turns and starts firing at its buddies. The great thing about headshots in Binary Domain is that you need to hit a robot's head several times before it comes off - destroying the initial layers of armour before blowing away the exposed circuits.

The game even incentivises it, rewarding you with credits the more you damage an opponent before finishing it off, and making that headshot even more key than usual. One of the common failings of third-person games is feedback, but the shearing metal and scattering components of Binary Domain's opponents is intensely satisfying - to the degree that you'll often take your sweet time over the last enemy in a fight, chopping off different bits to see what it does. Best of all, shoot off the head and it starts shooting at other robots. Shoot off a leg and the robot falls, but quickly balances with one arm and a leg while taking aim. Their destructible bodies hide endless delights - shoot an arm off, and watch the robot re-align its torso and pick up the gun with the other hand. These enemies are made up like Meccano sets, and though they lack the cutthroat threat of Vanquish's droids, they more make up for it in the details.


Binary Domain is a third-person shooter with a few problems, but everything is forgiven once you start shooting its robots.
