Disintegration - Review

Every few years I try to convince myself that, yeah, I’m totally into strategy games. I like Age of Empires. I like StarCraft, Halo Wars. Heck, I even like Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds. And from that list, you can probably tell I’m not really into the genre as much as I think I am.

Enter Disintegration, the  first-person shooter/real-time strategy hybrid by V1 Interactive and published by Private Division. The game is set in a dystopian future where integration--the process of removing a human’s brain and implanting it into a machine’s body--has become the new normal, as a means to address humanity’s decline thanks to earth’s waning resources. A militant organisation called the Rayonne emerges and forces most of humanity to integrate, enslaving them in the process. You play as Romer Shoal, an ace gravcycle pilot who pulls together a ragtag group of integrated to escape the Iron Cloud, a Rayonne stronghold, which leads them to joining a resistance and taking the Rayonne head-on.

What makes Disintegration stand out is its aforementioned FPS-RTS hook: unlike a typical strategy game of clicking around a map and waiting for units to do their thing, the player is an active participant. Shoal, flying around the map in his gravcylce, is able to shoot up enemies, as well as order allies and heal them. While a traditional RTS will involve base building and platoon management, here the FPS element draws you right into the driver’s seat of the action. 

For the most part, this gameplay hook works. It feels pretty great being able to whiz around, shoot everyone up, and direct the action on the fly. As battles got intense I’d sometimes wake up and realise I spent the last five minutes in a trance-like berserker state. The game does well to introduce its mechanics in a coherent manner, pacing itself with new enemy types and character abilities. Where it often falls short, though, is how ineffective your allies seem outside of these abilities, while trying to direct their more general attacks. Enemies can only be marked one at a time, and after that your allies kind of meander and ineffectively attack at random. It’s also not possible to direct only one ally; it’s all or nothing, which makes health management or any broad kind of strategy an issue if you want to lean heavier towards a real RTS experience.

Battles can get heated real quick, especially in the harder difficulties. Disintegration is best enjoyed in its easier settings, where it can still be a challenge without overwhelming you. I played most of the game in its recommended “normal” setting, and got way too frustrated in some missions’ climaxes as it fell into the RTS trope of battling wave-after-wave of enemies, to the point where I was worn down so often that it took up to 2 hours to complete a single level. After switching to easier modes I was clocking missions between 25-35 minutes, which felt way more satisfying and less aggravating. 

The game includes challenges in its missions to vary up the game’s structure a bit, outside of plowing on and shooting everything. Some challenges even get you thinking of new strategies by combining allies’ abilities, whereas others are just ‘destroy x amount of enemies’. But even the challenges have problems: if you die, the mission ends and those kill counters reset with your last checkpoint. That’s fair enough. Some challenges, though, require you to finish a mission within a time limit, and dying doesn’t reset those timers. Coupling these with the harder difficulties creates a thick blend of frustration. But trophy/achievement hunters can rest assured that there’s only one you need to complete a mission on its hardest mode, and that can be earned by beating the first level. Otherwise there really isn’t any reason to go above Recruit mode (the game’s “easy” setting, which is a step above it’s “story” difficulty for those wanting to just breeze through).

When you’ve settled into Disintegration, though, the game is a fun romp. The story is pretty thin and incomprehensible (even when the credits rolled I still didn’t know who anyone was, why anything happened, or what bearing any of the events had on the plot), but the presentation is top-notch. V1 Interactive prides itself on being a smaller studio--roughly 30 employees--while delivering a game that looks, sounds, and feels like a AAA-tier title. Character designs look fantastic, and environments are expansive and varied. Apart from the vapid moments between missions, where you wander around your sterile base and listen to each ally’s line of dialogue or two, I was engaged in the game’s action and look forward to the inevitable sequel in the hopes V1 will expand on everything it’s put into this debut title. (But in the meantime, I hope there will soon be a patch that fixes Y look inversion during these base scenarios, where for some reason it just doesn’t work despite toggling it on/off in settings.)

At the time of writing this review, I wasn’t able to find a single multiplayer match, which is disappointing. I returned every now and again, including after its official launch, to no avail. Hopefully a lively community forms around the game, and the developers support the title with some content going forward. Alas, we’ll have to wait and see.

Disintegration is an enjoyable experience that I’ll return to check out its multiplayer and try cleaning up my remaining trophies. It’s got some caveats and bugs that need fixing (two levels failed to load their last wave of enemies, and another just straight up crashed me back to the PS4 menu), but for a first release, V1 Interactive have started out strong and I really look forward to what their future plans for the game are and what they’ll put out next. If you’re interested in a genre-bending strategy-shooter, you should definitely consider giving Disintegration a go. Just don’t expect an incredibly fleshed out story, this time around.

The Score

7.0

Review code provided by Private Division

The Pros

+Good fun when you get the hang of its mechanics

+An ambitious first release that comes out swinging

The Cons

+Its “normal” difficulty is way tougher than it should be, and can get pretty frustrating

+Buggy and incoherent campaign mode