DISJUNCTION Review for Xbox One

Starting 20,000 leagues under the sea and extending all the way to replicant detectives in 2049, a dystopian future has long been one of the best ways to critique the present. This has lead us to blockbusters, cult classics, and even games where you can live out all your deep seeded cyberpunk fantasies. We look at the problems we live through every day and take them to their wildest (or eerily familiar) conclusions. Disjunction, by Sold Out and Ape Tribe Games, takes this Sci-Fi mantle and builds a crime ridden and corrupt dystopian RPG with the gameplay of a classic arcade. 

Disjunction opens in a familiar setting for its genre, a once thriving city that has descended into chaos and corruption with the help of corporate greed. You start the game as a tough private detective hired by a local official to investigate the seedy connection between an upcoming city contract to shift to a robotic police force and the death of a detractor. As you progress, you unlock other playable characters with specialized skills such as improved stealth or damage. However, the actions you take during the game affect the course of the story and the path you take. This is an unusual but very welcome feature in Disjunction, and it adds an immersive level to a rather traditional arcade game. 

If you look back fondly on the days of playing Namco arcade games in the movie theater lobby waiting for show time like I do, Disjunction will be your time machine. The gameplay focuses on relatively flat maps and simple mazes populated by all manner of guards and robots. Each enemy has a flashlight that serves as the area where they can detect your presence and start attacking. The detection isn’t instant, but it’s pretty fast and I learned that the hard way. Your employer encourages you to sneak around the guards to achieve your objectives without killing the guards through smoke grenades, a stun gun, and some limited melee attacks. However, I never could make it through a level without alerting a guard and ended up using the revolver more than anything. Needless to say, that upset my informant and pretty soon I was getting calls from any sketchy character in the game. 

In addition to your normal abilities, you can add cybernetic enhancements to your characters to improve their attributes. This ended up being one of my favorite and the most useful feature of the game. In the early levels, you can sneak around and kill most enemies but that doesn’t last long as the game ramps up in difficulty pretty quickly. Overall, I really enjoyed the tone and the gameplay itself, but the saving method got inconvenient quick. The game has pads scattered throughout the levels where you stand to save your progress, which was fine in the early levels, but led to some lost progress that could’ve been avoided in later levels. The pad method is fine for aesthetic purposes, but more should be spread through the map. 

There isn’t much more I can say about Disjunction other than you should add it to your Xbox One library. With a combination of classic arcade gameplay, extensive combat and stealth mechanics, beautiful artwork, and a compelling story, it’s hard not to spend hours playing this game.   

8/10 

Check Out the Disjunction Trailer:

For more information on Disjunction, visit disjunction-game.com, follow Ape Tribe Games on Twitter, or join the discussion on Discord. 

Taylor Tyler

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My first console was the original Playstation and I would play Twisted Metal every now and then but games didn't hook me until I played the original Halo at my friend's house. As soon as I picked up that controller, I knew I needed an Xbox and I had to have that game. Since those early Halo days, I've branched out and played any game I could find with a great story and memorable characters but Master Chief is still my favorite. @thenotoriousTGT on Twitter

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