DISINTEGRATION
Things fall apart
PART OF THE HYPE around Disintegration has centered on the presence in the game director’s seat of one of the co-creators of Halo. Disintegration takes an odd approach: This is a shooting-management game, where the manager has a big gun.
Positioned up to 15m above the battlefield on a "Gravcycle," shootermanager Romer Shoal has a couple of guns, a healing ray, and up to four troopers with abilities that he can direct to move, attack, or use a special weapon.
Adapted from a racing machine, the Gravcycle is meant to swoop gracefully around the battlefield, dodging enemy fire and issuing commands, all while firing to take down heavier threats and heal allies. In reality, you spend as much time hovering in place, dishing out priority targets and manoeuvering close to green healing nanites. Your troopers aren’t mindless drones, though—they’ll attack whichever enemy is closest or is firing at them, and follow when you move on.
Your secondary role is to collect salvage dropped by downed enemies, which feeds into the progression system.
There’s a lot going on, especially as new squads of enemies are frequently dropped into battle, so keeping track of where your troops are, their health levels, and what threats are in the area become key.
Almost every character in the game is a robot. Human consciousnesses have been transferred into robot bodies, a process known as "integration," which leads to bizarre affectations such as robots wearing leather jackets and, right in the opening sequence, your character knocking another robot out with a wrench to the head. The game suffers from this lack of a firm identity throughout, though sadly the enemies don’t—their lack of diversity, especially early in the game, paints them indelibly on your memory. The enemy designs are rather good, and they explode nicely, taking the edge off their repetitive nature somewhat, so it’s a shame you only see them from the elevated position of your Gravcycle.
The tactical elements are sadly limited. Having a large robot on your squad along with two smaller members, it would make sense to send the big guy against bigger enemies while the other two mop up the little guys. But prioritize a target and your entire squad goes for it; set an objective and they all go in that direction. The closest you get to granularity is in special abilities, as using a concussion grenade, for example, means only the squad member with that ability will go in for a throw. By the time they get into range of your target, however, the tactical situation may have changed so much as to make their intervention pointless.
Between missions you can walk around and talk to your squad members, but you get no choice in which ones accompany you on missions. This sums up Disintegration: For a game in which you’re offered so much control, you end up feeling like you have very little.