Dustborn review — Deus ex Vox

I was instantly sold on Dustborn. A choice based narrative about a group of outcasts trying to escape an alternate history United States in the near, dystopian future? Sign me up. And when I saw you can hit fascists with a baseball bat while using voice-based superpowers to control people? I need this game in my hands now.

The game opens shortly after our group of protagonists (mostly) succeed in stealing mysterious data from a mega-corporation that runs California after it seceded from the union. Pax, Sai, Theo, and Noam have been hired to deliver this data to an organization called The Weave across the country in Nova Scotia. In order to cross the various borders, they’re going undercover as a band called the Dust Born. It’s road trip time, and hopefully the crew can make it to their destination in one piece.

Dustborn has a lot going on in just about every aspect. It’s simultaneously a choice focused adventure, a rhythm game, an action game, at one point a turn-based RPG. They even throw in a few minigames like Pong along the way. This eclectic nature applies to the story too, it wants to have an ensemble cast with your choices affecting their personality, to focus squarely on Pax as the “chosen one” protagonist, develop a mystical, spiritual side to the characters’ voice powers, and create a world with multiple factions, rules, and a detailed history. Because it tries to do and be so much, it sadly fails at just about everything it attempts.

Before I get into the whys, I want to make something known. I’m not one of those morons who will complain and moan about diversity in media. In fact, I think the cast’s diversity is one of Dustborn’s strengths. However, just because a game is aligned with my politics doesn’t mean I can just give it a free pass. I take this job and game criticism seriously. We should strive for both better representation and better media.While Dustborn somewhat succeeds in the former, it has some work to put into the latter. Let’s use combat as our first example, since quite a lot of the game connects back to it. It takes a long time to get to an actual fight in the first place, over an hour and a half, and once you’re in one it feels incredibly stiff and awkward. Pax has a normal three hit combo with her bat and can dodge, block, and even throw her bat, which will return just like Kratos’ Leviathan Ax. While the dodge is serviceable, all other moves feel bad to use. Attacks have lengthy windup and ending times with some poor animations, the timing for blocking is far too tight, and the throw locks you in place and, again, just looks and feels super stiff and awkward.

While Dustborn somewhat succeeds in the former, it has some work to put into the latter. Let’s use combat as our first example, since quite a lot of the game connects back to it. It takes a long time to get to an actual fight in the first place, over an hour and a half, and once you’re in one it feels incredibly stiff and awkward. Pax has a normal three hit combo with her bat and can dodge, block, and even throw her bat, which will return just like Kratos’ Leviathan Ax. While the dodge is serviceable, all other moves feel bad to use. Attacks have lengthy startup and ending times with some poor animations, the timing for blocking is far too tight, and the throw locks you in place and, again, just looks and feels super stiff and awkward.

Pax also has two other abilities at her disposal, which build up as you fight: Taunts and Vox. A Taunt is nothing like the name implies, and is in actuality something like a single target super move. On top of poor animation work and often not dealing enough damage to be worth getting stuck and potentially hit while it goes off, these attacks also feature some horrendous voice work, though we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it. While Taunts build up over time, Vox – the proper name of the vocal superpowers some characters possess – builds up as you deal damage. Once filled, you can select a word to shout which will affect allies and enemies in different ways. You can increase your attack with Discord, gather enemies together with Bully, knock them away with Push, get them to attack each other with Canceled, and more. It’s a very cool idea, but Vox builds up slowly and doesn’t last for very long. When combat is this bad, I want to get it over with as quickly as possible and just spamming attacks gets the job done the best. I used Discord the most because of this, and occasionally used another Vox when I noticed the meter was full.

Playing on hard difficulty, enemies are damage sponges too, making things an absolute slog. I’d highly recommend just setting the game to easy and choosing the option early on for less combat. The worst part, however, is that there are no consequences for dying. You just get back up exactly where you left off. When I realized this, I just mentally checked out in every fight. If the game doesn’t care if I win or lose, why should I?

Occasionally, you’ll get the chance to explore certain areas of the game in stops on your road trip. During these sequences, you can collect resources to upgrade your bat’s skill tree, play a ghost capturing mini-game to unlock new Vox for use in both combat and dialogue, pick up souvenirs or gifts, and of course talk to characters. It’s fun to explore and find all the little things in nooks and crannies, but they don’t really do much. I didn’t need combat upgrades aside from increasing my combo from three hits to four, and while getting new Vox for dialogue is, again, a very cool idea it feels like every time you do, the story planned around it. You are forced to use it and it either solves the problem, or doesn’t work and you do something else.

That’s not to say your choices are entirely discarded, just mostly. Some of the characters who join the crew have what the game calls Codas, with each character having three. A Coda is basically their mindset, for example Theo’s Codas are OK Dad, which has him act as a mentor to other characters, OK Boss, in which he’s the distant authority figure, and OK Buddy, where he’s equal to everyone in the group and more personable. Your choices will add or subtract points to these Codas, with you seeing the changes explicitly on the UI. When dialogue is affected by a Coda, the game will clearly show this as well, which is neat. Your choices also affect an invisible Coda for Pax which determines her ending apparently, though I didn’t care much for the plot by the end. Still, this is a very cool system and by far the best part of the game.

Since the gang is undercover as a band, you’ll have to actually play some venues. This brings us to the rhythm minigame, which is decent but has some problems. As the song progresses, notes will move towards the center of a circle from four cardinal directions representing the face buttons. You want to press the corresponding button when its icon reaches a smaller circle surrounding the big one. The big circle will fill up when you do well, and once it’s full you can activate a mode that I don’t think was ever explained but presumably gives you more points for its duration.

This minigame’s presentation is excellent. Just like the Coda system, it’s all clear and laid out well. However, when you enter your super mode it turns everything blue which makes it difficult to see when a button wants you to hold it down. The music you play is catchy, but I personally wouldn’t seek it out to listen to it again and I got kinda sick of some songs by the end of the game. Part of that is because the lyrics are just so heavy handed with the game’s messaging.

That heavy handedness applies to the story too. I was excited to see a game not conform to the mold of straight, white, cisgender, able-bodied dudes as the main protagonists, but it feels like some characters are just there to be tokens. For example, there’s a woman who joins the crew literally in the game’s climax who you learn absolutely nothing about. She’s also a wheelchair user and has an asian accent. I appreciate the diversity, but this speaks to the actual issue at play here: there are too many characters.

When I first started the game, I was excited to get to know the four main characters the game presented to me. Pax is a somewhat unreliable narrator and clearly has walls between her and her best friends. Theo is set up to be the outlier of the group, either growing closer or remaining distant. Sai is a friendly ball of anxiety and the glue holding the gang together. Finally, Noam is aloof and cool, with some romantic tension between them and Pax. It’s a cool setup, especially since we don’t see the heist and only begin in the aftermath of it. Then Pax’s sister Ziggy is introduced. She’s also cool and introduces a bit more tension in the group. Then you recruit Eli. Less interesting, but I like the romance budding between him and Ziggy. Then your robot driver awakens to her previous identity as a caretaker robot. More interesting than Eli and technically she was with the group the whole time, so I can live with this cast even if it feels a little bloated. Then a little girl joins the party. Then a woman from Eli’s past. Then a member of the resistance group. All culminating in that lady who literally does not matter. By the end, it’s a clown car.

There are just too many characters. You could cut them back down to just the core four and the game would be much better for it, but the game seems more interested in just focusing on Pax. The game asks you to care about many of these characters without actually letting you get to know them first because absolutely everything revolves around Pax. You don’t really get to see, say, Noam and Theo interact because every conversation needs to have Pax in it and be at least tangentially about her. The game feels like it leaves so many threads dangling with these characters, and even with Pax herself that the ending doesn’t feel like it wraps up anything.

The moment to moment writing is good, but the plot as a whole is messy, bloated, and with so many terms that it’s hard to care about. Likewise the voice acting is mostly good, though some reads sound like they lack proper direction for the scene. That is, except for Pax’s voice, who varies wildly between believable and completely checked out. Her combat lines are universally terrible, and that unfortunately creeps into other dialogue occasionally. There’s a lot of dialogue and some lapses in performance are understandable, but it happens often enough that I started to wonder if that was really the best take they got.

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