This weeks game is a robot shooting bonanza published by Sega in 2012. Set in a dystopian future ravaged by global warming, Binary Domain is a surprisingly dark look at the conflict between man and machine. The story revolves around Hollow Children, androids that look, act, and even think they are completely human, and the vague unspecified threat they pose. Our heroes (?) are members of a Rust Crew, a paramilitary squad dedicated to hunting down Hollow Children and wrecking up any mechanical foe that gets in their way.

The actual shooty bits of this shooting game are pretty solid all around, and the game’s voice command/squad loyalty gimmick, while totally ancillary, works fine. Where this game starts to get weird is in its themes, namely the central “robots=oppressed minority” allegory. It casts the protagonists actions into a severely different light, and drastically changes the entire premise from “basic sci-fi shoot-em-up” to “really heavy stuff”. Does it work? Well, that’s what we’re here to discuss.