DETROIT: BECOME HUMAN
These aren’t the droids you’re looking for
released OUT NOW! Format Ps4 Publisher sony
Detroit never does things by halves. In the first scene you control Connor, an android assisting in crime scene investigations. It involves talking an android down from shooting a little girl and jumping off a skyscraper.
It’s set in 2038, where people own androids like we do smartphones; coming in numerous variations, they’ve replaced humans in many jobs. From the detailed settings to the stunning mo-cap, it is beautiful to behold.
Preoccupied with telling a story, Detroit limits your interaction to a few button presses. For much of the game this means picking things up and putting them down. In the latter half you get to wildly press buttons in quick-time combat. Thanks to the possibility of messing up, scenes that limit your time to make decisions are the best part.
After the action-packed start, the game introduces us to Kara and Markus. Kara’s storyline is about Alice, a small girl she saves from her abusive father. Writer/ director David Cage has a
weakness for emotional fast food, using subjects and imagery to shock, only to never address them again. Kara and Alice regularly end up in traumatic situations, but Kara always seems to come away unscathed. Markus, meanwhile, leads an android revolution.
This is where things turn sour fast, as language and imagery from the segregation era and Black Lives Matter are appropriated. Sequences like one in a concentration camp make for horrible experiences. Punishing the player for not pressing X at the right time cheapens the horrors people had to live through.
The game throws these heavy punches without adding anything of value to the questions it poses. And Cage helps himself from movie greats like he’s at a buffet; what at first feels like cool homage quickly becomes lazy. A technical marvel with cinematic appeal, this is another game brought low by ham-fisted writing. Malindy Hetfeld
Detroit: Become Human had a shooting script of over 3,000 pages. It took around two and a half years to film.