Maybe I’m missing something. I’m very much uncertain. I’ve neither watched the television show Gemini: Heroes Reborn is based upon, nor have I played the iOS-only prequel no one knows exists. Maybe in this pre-established universe, people are extraordinarily cavalier about suddenly developing superpowers in impossibly convenient situations.
Cassandra certainly is. After delving into the ruins of a derelict building, she takes a nasty fall and then watches her friend get dragged away by a group of mysterious armed guards. She then, rightfully, starts to panic as one of the soldiers breaks off from the pack to examine the debris in which she herself landed. About to be discovered by an angry stranger with a gun, and with her friend lying unconscious and bleeding only a few feet away, terror sinks in. She starts to beg and plead not to be discovered. When those pleas seem to fall on deaf ears and her discovery is imminent… she teleports out of the crumbling ruins of a forgotten building and into a pristine basketball court.
And Cassandra takes it all in stride. Perhaps apathy is a side effect of obtaining super powers, because very little that happens in the next handful of hours the game takes to complete seems to upset anyone. What she quickly learns is that she has some control over time, which allows her to jump between two fixed time zones. This enables her to explore the same building in different periods: both when it was a brand new facility, and when it’s a collection of caved in ruins. It’s a clever mechanic, rendered slightly mundane by the exceedingly pedestrian reactions it generates. Any responses are more akin to the one you might experience when reaching into the pocket of a jacket you've not worn in a while and finding a small stash of money, rather than the one you would have upon suddenly realizing you now possess a super power that could change the world.
But that’s very much the kind of experience Gemini: Heroes Reborn promises you. On top of your time jump power, you soon learn to harness telekinesis. It’s not a power that unexpectedly awakens; you enter a room and there’s a syringe marked ‘telekinesis; put this in your body’, so you shrug and do so without question. Cassandra can use this ability to pick up objects with her mind and then hurl them at people she doesn’t like. She immediately starts slaughtering guards by the dozen, again without sparing a moment to question any of it. Their only offense seems to be their attempts to arrest the strange, indifferent girl who is trespassing in their workplace and killing their colleagues.
If you feel so inclined, you can grab the guards and fling them over platforms, or propel them into one another, or drag them back into the other time zone to torture them in a little bubble of safety where their friends no longer exist. It’s difficult not to feel sorry for them, but the dead, soulless way they react to Cassandra just blinking into existence a few feet away, or to suddenly finding themselves transported back in time so they can be pelted to death with plastic bins and office stationary, gives them a sentient punching bag vibe.
Staff review by Gary Hartley (January 23, 2016)
Gary Hartley arbitrarily arrives, leaves a review for a game no one has heard of, then retreats to his 17th century castle in rural England to feed whatever lives in the moat and complain about you. |
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