Disintegration Review

Disintegration is a very ambitious game that is creating a whole new genre that hasn’t really been done before in games. Developed by V1 Interactive, this is their first title from the newly formed studio founded by Marcus Lehto, who co-created Halo and helped establish Bungie as one of the top AAA studios, so there is a ton of prestige behind this game.

I’m going to start off my review of this game by talking about the multiplayer aspect as my time was quite short with Disintregration’s multiplayer mode. There are three multiplayer modes. First there is Zone Control; this mode is essentially domination from the Call of Duty franchise. You are tasked with capturing flags around the map and defending them from the enemy team. Next there is Collector; Collector has you collecting as many brain cans as you can and you can do this in three ways; killing a human player on a grav cycle nets you three points, killing an AI enemy gives you one point and then you can also collect them at various spawns across the map. Finally you have Retrieval; this mode has two teams, one team are defenders and the others are attackers, the goal of the attackers are to retrieve cores from spawn points across the maps and deliver them to the enemies base, whereas the defenders need to kill the attackers ground units, after each round you switch sides.

In multiplayer there are a lot of options to customise how you look and how your AI team looks, this is mostly done by choosing your crew, but is also done through cosmetics that you can unlock through the store or by completing challenges. There are nine crews to choose from and each also offer different small abilities that affect the way you play the game. The first crew are the King’s Guard. When playing multiplayer this feels like it is the tanky crew that has a powerful weapon that can one shot but it takes a while for that weapon to charge up. The rest of the crews I didn’t really get a huge time to play with but will be trying them out when the game launches. Their names are: The Sideshows, Neon Dreams, Tech Noir, Warhedz, Lost Ronin, The Business, Muertos and The Militia.

My overall opinion on multiplayer was that I had a ton of fun playing when it was available and it does offer something that you’re probably not used to and will force you to think in different ways due to how the grav cycles operate.

Speaking of grav cycles, this game does have a full singleplayer narrative. You play as Romer Shoal, who is a former grav cycle pilot thrusted into the role of leading a small resistance team. Essentially everyone replaced their bodies with robotic parts so they could live longer and enjoy life more, but you and your group of rebels want humanity to stay human, you don’t want everyone turning into robots. The group of Rayonne does want everyone to upgrade and are capturing anyone who hasn’t changed and are killing them off.

Gameplay is the key here and is really what makes this game standout, Disintegration is a mix of an RTS and FPS mixed together and tries to make the best of both work together in a nice package and unfortunately it does the opposite and makes the game feel like a generic FPS with hovering bikes and a third person view.

So what does Disnitregration’s gameplay consist of? Well, it has you shooting people, a lot. The game lasts roughly between 10-12 hours and a lot of it is going from place to place and shooting bad guys on your way, this wouldn’t be so bad if this was an FPS game that focused on shooting and made it feel good when you shoot enemies, or if it really had some cool RTS mechanics that actually made a difference in the game or if it had AI that didn’t die every two minutes. Disintegration tries too hard to be both of these genres that it really doesn’t improve any of them and is just a generic shooter with some squad commands thrown in.

You do have three AI companions join you throughout your time in the campaign and you can tell them where to go or what to shoot by right-clicking enemies or objects while playing the game, other than this the AI will essentially follow you and shoot enemies for you. Whenever I was playing Disintegration, something about the world was so familiar to Halo that it really made me want to take control of the ground units and start shooting the enemies, but it just left something to be desired. It would have been cool if there was a mechanic where I could take over an AI bot for a few minutes to kill some enemies.

Disintegration is developed by V1 Interactive and was published by Private Division / Take Two Interactive, available now on Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and PC.