3/5 ★ – PhatBaby's review of Detroit: Become Human.

It becomes pretty apparent throughout the early hours of Detroit: Become Human that its easily Quantic Dream's best game on a technical front. For a studio known for putting out some iffy releases in the past, this is by far a significant improvement, with stunning motion-captured facial animations, thousands of complex, branching story beats and voice actors that actually don't sound like an alien species trying to replicate human speech for once. More importantly, David Cage and his primary school level writing skills actually manage to work a little bit of magic. Its three central protagonists are likeable, and the stories they weave all feel so vastly different that if you're not personally feeling one of them, there's always another that might pique your interest just a little bit more. Off the top of my head, I can list a number of scenarios in Detroit that are unbelievably memorable, and that's saying something when considering just how tediously dull Beyond: Two Souls was. That being said, Detroit: Become Human still struggles with the same core issues that make every David Cage game a cringe-ridden, narrative mess. His dialogue is horrifically on the nose, aggressively spelling out every blunt, heavy-handed emotional beat he's trying to portray, while his references to the civil rights movement and occasionally even the holocaust feel tacky and poorly thought out. If you're going to allude to two of the most painful and eternally relevant moments in human history, you have to make DAMN sure you're doing it respectfully and Cage rarely has the level of subtlety to make that work. Yet, you can tell where Detroit Become Human is aiming to excel is not in the actual craft of its story, but how well it can make you feel like your telling it. And in that regard, there are few games that do what it's trying to do quite as well. By the game's final chapter, I felt like all three of its protagonists were sculpted exactly how I intended. My Markus was a violent revolutionary rather than the peaceful one the game clearly intended, my Kara was a headstrong mother-figure who would do anything to protect her surrogate daughter, and my Conor was in a kickass buddy cop movie where he learned to stand up for his own rights. In that regard, Cage has delivered his best interpretation of the "moral compass" gameplay he's been attempting to innovate since Fahrenheit, and it's hard not to give him and his team props for that. At the end of the day, Detroit: Become Human is a surprisingly entertaining experience, and hopefully hints towards what we can expect from Quantic Dream going forward.