DISINTEGRATION
Turning to dust before our eyes
Sometimes genres are just suggestions. The heart of Disintegration is a lightweight, easy-to-understand RTS squad commanding system, wrapped in a layer of gravity-defying FPS. Ultimately, though Disintegration is neither a great RTS nor a great FPS. As a combination it does offer something fresh, but it lacks focus.
In a post-humanist future when human brains are uploaded into robot bodies (a process called ‘integration’), some of the now-integrated population struggle to hold onto what made them human in the first place. Not helping is an aggressive military force, Rayonne, and the immoral practice of introducing indoctrination into the integration process. Rather than use integration as a temporary measure, Rayonne seeks to upgrade and control humanity.
TRAINING WHEELS
The campaign follows Romer Shoal, a former famous gravcycle rider, as he escapes the floating Iron Cloud prison along with other anti-Rayonne outlaws. Taking around nine hours to play through, it’s not insignificant – and it will feel like it takes twice as long thanks to boring tropey characters and a paper-thin plot (nothing we haven’t seen before). Throughout the missions you can hunt for scrap to upgrade Romer and his squad. The campaign, though, is more or less just an extended training session for the multiplayer, so you don’t even get to pick your loadout or crew members for each mission. Each excursion is more or less obviously ‘the one where they get you to use the long-range rifle’ or ‘the sticky bomb mission’.
Atop your gravcycle, you float around the map taking part in combat using a primary weapon and a cooldown-based secondary weapon (which can sometimes be a supportoriented healing grenade or cannon). Extra cooldown skills come courtesy of your squad, who are boots-on-the-ground. Using the D-pad you can command them to use those skills, and with u you can tell them when to stand their ground, when to prioritise an enemy unit, and when to return to stick close to you. Everything, from the FPS controls to the squad tactics, is super-simple (Ghost Recon it ain’t), though this can lead to frustration when it feels like your units refuse to take cover, or run into mines, or are slow to use their skills. Enemy units dash around at high speeds, making you feel like you’re trying to hit flies, often more irritating than challenging.
As a primer for multiplayer it mostly works – you do get used to all these different loadouts – but it doesn’t allow you to feel like the campaign is really your own to master. The
“THE CAMPAIGN IS REALLY AN EXTENDED TRAINING SESSION FOR THE MULTIPLAYER.”
most it gives you are bonus challenge objectives for each mission, which are for some reason doled out by talking to characters in the hangar before you set out. These connecting portions also let you find out more about your squad, but it’s not that interesting and in this zoomed-in view everything is a bit blurry and bland.
COMING TOGETHER
Annoyances we feel in the campaign float away in the multiplayer. When it’s player versus player and everyone has a similar level of experience, everything clicks. Picking from one of nine themed crews, each with its own loadout (you can change mid-match as if they were heroes), you take part in team-based 5v5 matches. Each of the three modes is five-aside, and have you vying for control points in Zone Control, grabbing brain cans in the deathmatch-esque Collector, and playing either attackers or defenders in the Corecollecting Retrieval.
Each match makes smart use of player units, as objectives like capturing points requires them, rather than the commanding gravcycle, to make the play, but due to their simplicity the objectives never become bothersome. And, at the end of the day, zooming around shooting at enemies is fun with flight controls this easy to get to grips with. There’s not much to it that will keep you hooked, but there’s a quiet joy to its simplicity. If the campaign were flying solo we’d dock a point or two, but the multiplayer is fresh enough to give us a reason to stick around.
VERDICT
Neither a remarkable FPS nor RTS, it’s nevertheless fun to zoom around in multiplayer with your gunships blasting away. And sometimes, that’s okay.
But it’s never really more than okay. Oscar Taylor-Kent