David Cage is one of the most controversial directors in the gaming industry. With titles like Fahrenheit, Heavy Rain, and Beyond Two Souls he’s cemented himself and his studio Quantic Dream as the developer at the forefront of creating cinematic player-driven narratives with questionable quality control.

Zubatticus: And the controversial reception of Detroit continues the streak as some players enjoy it while others feel the opposite. Hi! I’m Zubatticus and I’ll be tagging along for this video with Mighty Nifty to give a different take on this contentious title. 

Yeah, this is definitely one of those games that’s got subjective opinions written all over it, but that’s because Quantic Dream is so different than anyone else in the industry right now. After the middling reception of Beyond Two Souls, Cage spent time creating short films in an attempt to flex his creative muscles and show off some tech demos for the studio’s side job of providing motion capture services.

And in 2012, one of those short films about an android showing emotion until being ripped apart for its deviancy struck a chord prompting Cage and his studio to begin work on yet another interactive choose your own adventure story, this time revolving around 3 androids trying to find their place in the world and figure out what it means to truly be alive. 

Personally, I’ve only played Heavy Rain before and while I enjoyed the setup, characters, and cinematography there were certainly plenty of missteps along the way. So let’s take a look and find out if Cage has finally managed to overcome his own ego in Detroit Become Human.

After being introduced to the game by a fourth wall-breaking android, the player is dropped directly into the first chapter. The game is set in the year 2038, in which androids have become the hot new craze, being in more homes than the Wii circa 2007. The world itself is recognizable, but also updated with self-driving cars, holograms, and automatic doors that actually work for people walking at a reasonable pace.

This future is incredibly optimistic to say the least especially by Detroit standards. The idea that in 20 years we’ll have self driving highways and bus routes, with living AI in every person’s home is about as likely as Half Life 3 coming out by then, but it’s not a huge deal and players can either suspend disbelief or pretend the game actually takes place 50 to 100 years in the future without much issue.

This has a lot to do with the fantastic world building. While not everything makes perfect sense, such as a drunken, unemployed meth addict having access to money for a top-of-the-line android, many of the little details have been thought out and make sense within the game’s world and it’s fascinating to explore.

Zubatticus: The world Cage sets up definitely has potential, although some stuff makes less sense the closer you look. Particularly how some of these androids become self-aware. The rules don’t always seem consistent especially during the later half of the game. Also if your impatient the incredibly slow walking doesn’t make exploring this world very fun.

The story of Detroit revolves around three characters: Connor, a police android tasked with investigating deviants, Kara, an android serving an abusive father, and Markus, an android serving an artist who encourages him to express emotions. Each of these characters has their own unique personalities that grow and change over the course of the game depending on player input, but they’re all compelling to watch. 

This has a lot to do with the excellent acting by the main cast. Not only is their voice acting stellar, but the motion capture is phenomenal for these and other characters in the game and they all deserve a ton of recognition for their work, particularly considering the wide spectrum of emotions they needed to show in the same scenes due to differing scenarios.

Zubatticus: It also helps that the main cast consists of androids coming to grasp with their newly formed freewill and emotions. It can look a little awkward at times, but it makes perfect sense in the context of the story, so it feels natural to overlook something that might stick out in other games.

All of this is brought to life by some of the best graphics I’ve ever seen. The hair is a bit stringy, but aside from that, the details in each character, the textures on their faces, and the incredibly lifelike eyes make for a view that’s sure to leave people coming into the room as you play asking what movie you’re watching. It’s that good.

Not only that, but the game has a style bursting with personality that’s contextualized impressively within the world. Objectives showing up or barriers blocking a player from going out of bounds make sense for an android. The wireframe avatars when Connor analyzes a scene or Markus precalculates his parkour along with the ability to freeze time and take a look around all make for a fantastic look that’s both unique and fitting to the world.

However, not everything is up to snuff in the visual department. The animation in particular is a big issue. While usually fine, there are plenty of moments in which characters will get stuck in tiny areas, spin around in a circle, or just not animate at all. Add to this the awful lip synching making everything feel very uncanny valley and the crazy amount of invisible walls and you end up with a game that focuses too much on graphical quality while tossing animation aside.

Seriously, the game is so focused on keeping players within their bounds and not allowing them to see the slightest clipping or graphical glitch that they’d rather the animation, controls, and camera be incredibly stiff, which is just poor prioritization.

It’s almost like the team was afraid to show any kind of flaw in their system, but as of right now that’s impossible. There’s no avoiding graphical glitches like this, or this, or OH GOD WHY?!

Graphical bugs here and there are simply an inevitability with modern technology. The team definitely should have just embraced the silliness and not taken things so seriously, but we’ll come back to that. It’s not a major issue, but one that can take you out of the experience every now and again.

Gameplay-wise each character has a different feel to their chapters, but the mechanics are consistent throughout. Connor is a cop and so his sections tend to be about chasing down and interrogating suspects, tense action scenes, and piecing together a puzzle. His chapters are usually fun due to their high octane set pieces and the ability to reconstruct crime scenes to get an idea of what happened.

This slow investigative style may seem similar to the Batman Arkham series… Because it is, but it’s when you have to perform these investigations under a timer that things get really interesting. Thinking about which suspects to interrogate next or which path to take on your crime scene analysis is much more compelling when there’s no guarantee you’ll reach the end goal in time.

Zubatticus: Connor’s story was easily my favorite as it was the only one I liked. The gameplay reminded me of a futuristic LA Noire as you look for clues and interrogate witnesses. For a game that’s short on gameplay, this is easily the highlight of Detroit.

Even still, it does have its flaws. Mostly stemming from the untimed sections. These pretty much railroad the player into solving a case and as long as they’re paying even the slightest attention to what’s going on, they should have little to no issue executing each investigation successfully, which is disappointing.

Markus’s story is about starting a revolution, so the interactivity is subdued. Instead, this shifts focus onto how one goes about changing the minds of a populus that sees you as less than human, making choices on the plans for mission approaches as well as on-the-fly decisions during their execution.

And while most games would leave this to the question of peaceful or aggressive protesting ala MLK or Malcolm X, this game...does exactly that! I mean, yeah, there are other options, but the game tries its best to steer players toward one of the two extremes and almost always comes down to the same result. Just another illusion of choice.

That said, the mission execution is really cool and feels like being the lead in a heist film. Sneaking around without getting caught and preconstructing parkour sections before performing them is a creative way to make use of the game’s limited controls.

Yet once again, the downside here is the inability to fail. When pre-constructing the parkour, there’s no way to screw up no matter how many times you analyze the wrong path, meaning it’s just a slightly longer way to get from point A to point B, without much in the way of gameplay or novelty. Even the timed sections give players way too much leniency, taking something that could have had decent stakes and making it a chore.

Kara’s plot is about protecting Alice from her abusive father. It involves a lot of questioning who to trust and how to get away from the numerous threats the two face. It’s a more personal journey, full of suspense and asking the player whether to open themselves up to risk in exchange for the chance at increased security in the future.

Unfortunately, there’s a disappointing failure of this story in that it feels completely separated from the other two. Connor and Markus are on opposing sides of a revolution, with each of their actions affecting how the other’s plot unfolds, while Kara’s entire story might as well be in bumfuck nowhere save for a chase scene and a short meeting with Markus. Combine that with the numerous plot holes exposed by a really stupid twist towards the end of her story and it actually ended up being my least favorite of the three.

Zubatticus: Just to play a bit of Devil’s advocate, I think Kara’s story gives a more personal view to add some real weight to the decisions made in Connor and Markus’s plotlines. It starts off really strong when Kara and Alice are essentially homeless, but you’re right about the plot twist. That is one of the dumbest fucking story moments I’ve ever seen and manages to rob any good will you had leading up to it. If we’re talking least favorite stories, I’d give that to Markus. The poorly handled racial parallels are the strongest with him. Combine that with awkward character development and the love side plot that comes out of nowhere and I was rooting for the humans by the end of the game.

Oh don’t you worry, we’ll be getting to that. When it comes down to it, each story has plenty of strengths, but there are a lot of flaws present as well. When breaking them down, I’d say there are three main components to a choose your own adventure story- the overarching plot, the interactions between characters, and the internal conflict within characters, along with how each of these is influenced by the player’s input.

And it’s here that the three stories shine brightest while also shining a light on their flaws. Connor’s story has interesting internal conflict and a compelling overarching plot, with a fantastic relationship forming between Connor and Lt. Anderson, but it’s bogged down by shameless use of cliche after cliche. I was seriously expecting Anderson to mention how he was close to retirement at some point.

Zubatticus: Aww man, Anderson was my favorite character. Cliched sure, but his dynamic with Connor was the most interesting and added color to the straight-laced android. That and I’m bound to like any character who curses a lot, cracks jokes and has great taste in music.

Oh no, he’s a great character and he and Connor are hands down the best pair to ship in the game. It’s just that while their interactions are entertaining to watch, Anderson doesn’t really bring anything new to the table in terms of the overall plot.

Speaking of which, Markus has a somewhat interesting arc that’s probably got the strongest plot structure of the three and some interesting introspection, but leaves player choice down to a simple A, B, or C route represented by his three blank slate friends.

Kara’s got a journey full of suspense and high stakes, needing to protect her owner’s abused daughter, but it’s so disconnected from the other two stories for nearly the entirety of the game that it almost feels pointless a lot of the time.

The strangest thing about these three stories however, the thing I can’t seem to wrap my mind around, is that I enjoyed all of them. Sure, some parts were slow, but they built up tension or developed characters. Sometimes characters made sudden behavior shifts indicating a clear difference from their usual tone, but this was exceedingly rare to the point where it’s excusable.

And sure the game decides to compare the plight of androids with that of American slavery and the holocaust, but… actually, no. Zubatticus was right, I can’t really defend that one. Pretty bad taste there seeing as how androids actually were created to serve people unlike, you know, other people. And this is where we see the game’s biggest flaw- the pretentious nature of its development team.

Had a better team been creating a game about these topics it might have been different, with better examples being Bioshock Infinite’s portrayal of racism or Star Wars’ use of fascist imagery. 

Instead we have a game that’s so preoccupied with itself that it tries to throw all the philosophical ramblings of a stoned college freshman at the wall and very little of it sticks. The central plot and character interactions are still great, but it just can’t juggle these complex topics without falling flat on its face.

This is partially due to the railroading aspect I mentioned earlier. Not only are the player actions of little consequence outside of the fights for survival and dialogue choices, but the fact that the developers created a structured story and make it blatantly obvious that in order to get the good ending players should pick certain dialogue options over others.

This is seen by not only how obviously negative the results are when certain options are selected, but also because the game automatically chooses the worst option when the player fails to make a decision. If the game wants to portray itself as this neo-noir masterpiece with difficult moral decisions and complex topics, it shouldn’t even have a clear-cut good or bad ending.

Zubatticus: I’ll drink to that. One other thing I’d like to add is assuming you want to go back and go down a different path, the checkpoints you can load from a way too far apart, so you’ll have to replay large chunks of chapters to get back to that crossroad. It’s especially agonizing if you don’t particularly like these characters. 

Oh man you don’t have to tell me twice. I thought I lost my recordings for a bit and ended up replaying some chapters until I found my thumb drive. It’s such a conflicting feeling because seeing the branching stories was cool, but if you really want to see how your choices change things in the context of the entire plotline, the only real way to go about it is to play through the entire game again. 

Plus, the idea of androids being human is ridiculous by modern standards because we have the turing test, which this game just so happens to brush off like it’s nothing. Not to mention, no matter what science fiction wants you to believe, robots will always be acting according to their programming, even if they’re malfunctioning. 

The problem lies with how each deviant in this game is clearly alive, rather than having some ambiguity on the subject that would have made some of the moral choices actually difficult to make. I just see this as a big missed opportunity.

The endless QTEs are also indicative of this issue. The team clearly sees this game as a form of high art, in which every single interaction with the environment is sure to bring the player into their avatar’s shoes, but it’s just so excessive. Repetitive button prompts, slow walking speed, clunky controls, they all make me wish the game was just one long cutscene with my choices being the only thing making a difference.

Zubatticus: Kinda of ironic, ain’t it? The tedious interactivity actually manages to make Detroit less immersive. 

True, but they’re not all bad. When it comes to the action scenes, the constant swinging of the controller, short button prompts, split-second decision making, and heart-pounding pressure in the small number of these scenes make them some of the best portrayals of the sheer chaos that comes with fighting multiple people at once or chasing someone through the city I’ve ever seen.

The fact of the matter is that the moment to moment gameplay is exciting, entertaining, thrilling, and moving when it needs to be while the overarching story is molded by the choices the player makes, but there are some flaws in terms of prioritization and limitations of player freedom that manage to bring the entire experience down every once in a while.

In the end however, this game is gonna be a love it hate it kinda title. If you can overlook its flaws by suspending your disbelief you’ll have an amazing time with this game, but if those kinds of details bother you, it’ll probably still be entertaining, but much less so. For me, the game was somewhere in the middle, but overall a really enjoyable time, which is why Detroit: Become Human for the PS4 gets an 8 out of 10. 

I think that what Quantic Dream needs is a second director. Someone to keep Cage’s ego and ambition in check while expanding on the already solid foundation, but I guess we’ll have to see what they come up with next to find out if that’s the case.

If you want to play an interactive story, this game is probably your second-best bet after Until Dawn and I can’t wait to see what new adventure Quantic Dream brings us in the future. That being said I hope you enjoyed this review. If you did, be sure to like and subscribe to see more of my stuff and big thanks to Zubatticus for dropping by. You wanna tell the good people about your channel and sign us off?

Zubatticus: Sure! If you’re into game reviews and it’s probably safe to assume you are, feel free to check out my channel, where I, uh , well review is probably a nice way to put it. I don’t go easy when I review games so the criticism is tough and there’s tons of cursing and jokes. So be sure to bring some thick skin and a sense of humor if you decide to check out a video. I hope you enjoyed this review. If you did, liking subscribing and commenting always helps and is much appreciated! And until next time, have a mighty nifty day today.