With Halo heritage and curious ways to conquer your opponents, this FPS/RTS hybrid carries a punch - and it’s up to you how you deliver it

Fun fact: Halo began life as a real-time strategy game before shifting into an iconic FPS. Disintegration - from the creator of the Master Chief himself - is a sci-fishooter that straddles those two visions, letting you fight alongside your troops on the ground but also command them from above. It’s an ambitious undertaking for V1 Interactive… but while it looks the part, this game struggles to hit the mark.

Disintegration’s world is beautiful and varied across its 12-mission single-player campaign, completed with nice cinematic cutscenes. It’s got a decent premise as well, set in a future where most of humanity has ‘integrated’, a process of transferring their brains into robotic armatures. It’s supposedly a temporary survival measure, but a sinister robot superpower is plotting this to be the status quo. As a band of integrated outlaws, your job is to lead a resistance in the fight to ‘reboot’ humanity.

You’ll journey through forests and mountains to scrapyards and futuristic cityscapes, all teeming with evil red-eyed bots. You can easily be flanked by enemies from multiple sides, so combat does require more tactics than simply going gun-crazy.

Oh, and you spend the whole game piloting a ‘gravcycle’, a kind of lumbering hoverbike that lets you command your AI crew from the air then swoop in when needed. It feels a bit like controlling your own Destiny fire team, and on occasion the set-pieces do come close to matching that excitement.

But as a hybrid of RTS and FPS, Disintegration never quite succeeds as either. The ways you can lead your crew are simplistic, and you’re too often removed from the action for real shooter thrills.

You can’t fault V1 for trying to punch above its weight - and it’s risen to the challenge of creating an intriguing premise, cool designs and cinematic panache. Ultimately, though, this game falls short of reaching its potential. Its future is salvageable, but we’ll have to see if the gravcycle can be fine-tuned or is better left in the garage.

Alan Wen

STUFF SAYS

An intriguing mix of strategy and carnage, but it has serious flaws Rated 3 out of 5 stars