YMMV / Binary Domain

• Awesome Music: The Tsar Runner's theme, just for starters. They throw in a little Ominous Latin-esque Chanting for any fight with a Grand Lancer, the Medusa Security System boss, and the final boss fight with The Major, too.
• Cliché Storm: The setting and story are what you would expect if you put a bunch of cyberpunk anime into a blender and filtered it through competent writers. Still, it is very much enjoyable.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Cain is easily among the most popular characters of the game going by online comments.
• Polished Port: The PC port plays well, flows smoothly, graphics look as good as the 360/PS3 (with an Nvidia GTX460), and most importantly, QTE prompts can be set to display as either 360 gamepad or keyboard.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The ability to use your microphone for relaying orders or replying to certain scenes would be novel if it weren't so dodgy and near-universally prone to mishearing everything you say. It's a gimmick mechanic intended for the Kinect, and it shows; most players will recommend to just use in-game input commands instead.
  • The PC port doesn't let you bind most of the keys near the arrow keys, so left-handed players are screwed. Also, switching the key bindings doesn't change the QTE button prompts away from the default. The most egregious issue, which has never been patched to this day (and the only available fix is imperfect), is how the game not only has Mouse Acceleration (a much maligned feature that PC players never use), it can't be turned off, and is inverted! Normal Mouse Acceleration makes it so slow movements result in smoother slow movements, and fast jerks give very quick wide moves. However Binary Domain is built so that slow mouse movements result in super fast aiming, and fast sweeps are sluggishly slow, making the game unplayable for some who are accustomed to more conventional aiming.
• Strangled by the Red String: Dan and Faye's Relationship Upgrade can delve into this if the player didn't choose Faye as a squad member prior to them getting separated from the rest of the team along with Cain. One moment they're discussing national stereotypes then, bam, kissing like there's no tomorrow. Not really a bad example since the build-up to their relationship isn't nearly as important as their time as a Battle Couple.
• Strawman Has a Point: It seems unfair to issue termination orders for all Hollow Children, but Yoshiki demonstrates that they can be overidden at any time, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is a Hollow Child. A Hollow Child is the ultimate Manchurian Agent, able to infiltrate anywhere.
  • That said, hybrids are a different matter: Faye makes her temporary Face–Heel Turn because she buys into the Amada A.I.'s philosophy, not because she's been hacked, and she has a very good reason for doing so.
  • Also, while Amada rightly calls out humanity for attempting to genocide the Hybrids just for being different, his philosophy also includes elements of social Darwinism and racial superiority that sound uncomfortably similar to something that might be espoused by Khan Noonien Singh or the Locust Queen, which would justify humanity in not trusting him. That's probably why, even though Dan let Faye live and was against the Hybrid genocide, he was still intent on killing Amada himself.
  • Given that Faye seems to buy into some of Amada's Misanthrope Supreme tendencies to a degree, the U.S. President is somewhat justified in fearing that she'll turn out to be the next Alex Mercer or Khan Singh.
• That One Boss: The Gorilla. Constantly makes a bee line for YOU while mostly ignoring your allies, brings squads of mooks to make things harder for you, has an obscene amount of health (On the easiest difficulty, with a best upgrades available at that point for Dan's assault rifle, you can pump well over 3000 rounds into this thing during the final confrontation, before it finally goes down), and a single hit from its leap attack can instantly knock you out; requiring allied assistance or use of a medkit.

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