All eyes have been on V1 Interactive, as its head is one of the co-creators of Halo, which is quite the pitch to sell the pedigree of your studio and debut game. And while Disintegration most definitely delivers on being a sci-fi first-person shooter, its strategy element leaves you wanting more.
Disintegration
Developer: V1 Interactive
Price: $49.99
Platform: PC, PS4, and Xbox One
MonsterVine was supplied with a PC and PS4 code for review
Disintegration places you in the role of Romer Shoal, former gravcycle pilot who lives in a future Earth where people have transferred their consciousness to robot bodies. As expected of the setup, a group of robots called the Rayonne aren’t too fond of anyone who didn’t move on to shiny metal bodies and are determined to make the robot race the only race. You quickly join up with a group of rebels to fight back and you pretty much know where the rest of this is going. Where the game makes up for its done before setup is with the interactions between your crewmembers. They’ve got some decently interesting banter between one another that’s unfortunately juxtaposed with the jarringly quiet Romer. He only ever speaks during cutscenes and can only think of maybe two or three moments when he pipped up for a second during actual gameplay. It makes things feel like you’re less of a ragtag group of rebels and more of you’re the silent observer from the sky as you (silently) command your troops. It just isn’t as fun watching your crew goof around with each other as you jealously watch from above.
Disintegration pitches itself as a first-person real-time strategy game which is accurate, although it’s less “strategy” then you would want. In the game, your character Romer flies around on a “gravcycle”, basically a floating bike, as you issue orders to your crew on the ground. This in concept is very good, you get the top-down RTS action and can also jump into the melee whenever you want. The issue here, as someone who has a deep love for RTS games, is that the level of strategy offered isn’t much.
Romer himself can fly around the area to issue orders or shoot one of his two weapons. Flying this thing during a fight feels genuinely great, as there’s this really weighty feel to it as you dip and slide around corners to flank enemies and pepper them with blasts before zooming away. You’ll get a variety of different main and sub-weapons to use with Romer’s bike that for the most part are fun to use, particularly the shotgun with its chunky blasts. Admittedly while it does feel great to control during fights, it somehow feels slower when you’re out in the actual world. There are brief moments of respite as you travel to the next zone, or just exploring for hidden caches, and the bike feels like a slog. So while the game feels fast when you’re in actual combat, the moment you step out of it you come to the sudden realization that the bike isn’t actually all that quick. I almost wish the bike picked up speed when the game recognizes that you’re out of combat to make traversing some of these moments not feel like you’re moving through molasses.
Now while Romer can be fun to play as, it’s his comrades I take some issue with. As you play through the game you’ll unlock various squad members to take into missions with, and basically babysit them as they can’t think for themselves. The orders you can issue are incredibly simple: go here and stay. You can also order them to open supply boxes for you or focus their fire on a particular enemy. This just isn’t the level of strategy I would want from a game like this. You can’t individually assign members to move into spots, instead of having to control the entire squad as one whole unit which would be fine if you had multiple squads to deal with but it’s just the one. There were a few moments where I was being assaulted on all sides by incoming enemies and in a normal strategy game I’d assign certain squad members to cover specific sides; in Disintegration’s case it was more of a circus as I just had to plop my squad in a spot and hope for the best.
There’s cover, which the enemy makes very good use of, but your teammates seem almost allergic to it. Romer has a “scan” ability that helps highlight important objects in the environment for more info; cover is one of those objects but you can’t interact with it in any way. If you want your team to take cover you have to tell them to move in the vicinity of some cover, and just hope they get behind it. Not only that, but they’re prone to wanting to leave cover just as soon as they get into it. This comes in contrast to the enemy units who you see move in and out of cover expertly. Your team also seems antsy when it comes to being told to stay in place. I lost count the number of times I told them to stay in a spot during a fight as I would fly to another part of the battlefield to cause a bit of background chaos only to see they decided to follow me when I got too far. It’s all incredibly frustrating and makes you wish the game was given the time to develop the strategy side more.
Part of the crew commands is the unique abilities each member has. You’ll see things like concussion grenades or mortar strikes and the idea is to mix them together for maximum effectiveness. The issue here however is that the overall strategy becomes the same: whichever squadmate has some sort of stun ability on a group of enemies and then hit them with another member’s more damaging ability. That’s the format that’s done ad nauseum. While it’s cool to hit a crowd with a slow field and blast them to oblivion with a mortar strike, when that’s not just the most viable strategy, but the only one, you start to wonder when the “strategy” is going to kick in.
Using said abilities can also lead to frustrating moments when they flub due to no fault of your own. Since you’re usually fighting enemies in these decently large zones, it’s hard to exactly predict which direction they’re all going to go in since while your team acts as one independent unit, theirs doesn’t. This means when you tag a spot for a mortar strike, hoping to blast the five guys hiding behind cover, many times they’ll begin to scatter in every direction and you only ending gup hitting a single guy. Of course, you might say “well Diego, obviously hit them with the slow field so they don’t scatter”, well buddy it’s hard to trap everyone in a slow field when they scatter like ants before the grenade hits them; which also leads into my next point. It’s also worth noting that you’re not allowed to choose what gear/squadmates join you in the current mission. If you’re given nothing but grenade guys then that’s what you’ve got.
You can upgrade yourself and your squadmates in-between missions with chips you find, but that’s the most sort of customization you’re offered. One mission you’ll be given a machine gun, the next the shotgun. Obviously, V1 Interactive has high hopes from their multiplayer mode (as evident from it having a real-money shop), which gives the campaign the feeling that it’s shuffling you between all the class types in preparation for that part of the game. In doing this, however, it takes the fun out of being able to craft your ideal team or play with certain matchups and instead forces you to deal with whatever cards you’re dealt.
In regards to the multiplayer, the game features three modes of play: Collector which is your deathmatch mode similar to Kill Confirmed in Call of Duty where you have to collect the dropped head of an enemy to actually collect the point, Retrieval which is your basic attack/defend mode, and Zone Control which is pretty self-explanatory. On top of this, you have a variety of “crews” to pick from each with their own specific set of abilities and weapons. For example, there’s the Sideshow crew that has an emphasis on explosives and is clown-themed. Or maybe the samurai styled Last Ronin with their more offensive setup is more your taste. The game thankfully features a 1v1 training mode with an AI to let you test each crew out, but I do wish you could pick what crew the AI used to test matchups. Now I wish I could tell you how the actual multiplayer mode felt to play, but despite jumping into the designated multiplayer sessions for my time zone I was unable to ever get into a game and the same happened when I moved to the PS4. I’ll try to give the multiplayer a look once it goes live for the public and update the review accordingly.
I’m not really one to talk about performance, but when I do you know it’s bad. I started playing the game on PC and experienced near-constant crashing. Each mission would suffer a crash at least half a dozen times before I could finish it, and the worst part is that when you start the game back up you’re not tossed at your last saved checkpoint: you have to start the entire mission over again. Crashes seemed to always occur around certain points of a mission, but not always, and the cause (from the troubleshooting guide supplied with the review) seemed to stem from the fact that I’m running on an i5 processor. I was left with the vague “expected to be fixed before launch”, which isn’t comforting considering it’s the most common type of processor. The PS4 version, while not crashing, didn’t feel as smooth to play. The game is clearly better on a mouse/keyboard and when the action picks up it starts to hitch; not to a severe degree, but noticeable enough to where if the PC version is fixed I’ll likely move back over there.
The Final Word
Disintegration held a lot of potential, and while its gravcycle is novel, the rest of the package doesn’t live up to the strategy it promises.
– MonsterVine Rating: 3 out of 5 – Average
