4.5/5 ★ – pinksteady's review of Detroit: Become Human.

A fantastically immersive choice-based story of android sentience As is my favourite way to play games, I knew almost nothing about this game, other than it was a bit ‘on rails’ or something. Turns out that meant it is based on quick time events, where you have to press a button at the right time in order to succeed in, say, a fight. QTE-based games get a lot of stick, but Detroit: Become Human uses them brilliantly. Also, they are only one small part of it. The primary game-mechanic is actually the choices you make. Unlike other choice-based games I’ve played, the choices you make here will dramatically and irreversibly affect the outcome. You can get entirely different endings through the choices you make, and entire story paths will not be shown to you (but others will). The knowledge that my choices would have such an impact made making them so much more meaningful and tense. A nice touch is that after each chapter you get to see a flowchart of your choices, with greyed-out boxes representing the other choices and outcomes that are possible (without actually revealing them), reminding you how many different ways things can play out. You play alternating between three main characters - an Android tasked with hunting down the other ‘deviant’ androids (those that have become self-aware), a young carer android who is protecting an abused girl, and the android resistance leader. In my first playthrough, I managed to basically get the worst ending possible! Everyone died, and the Android uprising was quashed. This happened despite me making decisions I felt were ethical and felt right, and this is the only thing that I didn’t like so much about the game. Some routes / endings are simply so much better and more fun than others, and these are not tied to anything you can know in advance. In one example, I had the choice of returning a bus ticket I found dropped by a family with a baby, or keep it for myself. I ‘did the right thing’ and gave it back to them, and was then promptly executed by the police and that character’s path was then permanently over. There were a few times for me where I ended up with a worse ending despite playing the way I wanted to play. In other words, there are certain ways of playing that are more rewarding than others - if you just play it the way you want, you won’t necessarily get the best experience. To account for this, the game lets you go back and replay chapters, either as a test run or by wiping your saves from that resumed point and letting you replay afresh. After my disastrous ending, I restarted from about 2/3rds through and had a completely different experience. All my characters lived, I got so much more gameplay, and it was much more fun. And yes, in that playthrough I kept that ticket and the baby probably died! Interestingly, and something I failed to appreciate the first time through, for one of the characters your choices actually represent something different. For the two deviants, they are already ‘awake’ and your choices are just helping them achieve whatever they are trying to achieve. Whereas for Connor, the police android, you are not yet ‘awoken’ and so your choices as the player serve to either amplify his software instability or reduce it. So you can in affect choose whether to awaken him or not. I didn’t quite appreciate this, and so I often just answered in the way I thought he was supposed to answer, and ended up with him staying a robot, not helping the deviants, and dying. Again, to actually get his good ending I had to play a certain way, not just the way I wanted. What else.. well the acting is absolutely excellent, as you’d expect for a big budget Sony exclusive like this, and the video capture and graphics are perfect. You can tell exactly how characters are feeling and reacting based on tiny expression changes that are all really accurately and appropriately done. The whole realisation of the dystopian future is excellently and believably done, and doesn’t feel like the same genre re-hashed again. Oh and also its got Lance Henrikson in it! So despite my reservations about playing a QTE-based game, I really enjoyed this one and was totally immersed in it, so much so that I went back and played part of it again just to experience more of it. I thought the decision-making and QTE were great, and was in awe of the breadth of story paths that had been created. Highly recommended!