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Deus Ex: The Fall Review

A fall from grace

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I don't want to begin with something so typically... well, journalistic, but today I have an anecdote for you. Just over a year ago, after watching several Twitch streams and being egged on by a friend, I purchased a game on Steam that went by the name of Dark Souls: Prepare to Die edition, and it can't be said that it left a good first impression. Alright, let's be more accurate: if the game had caused my monitor to spontaneously explode outwards, embedding a thousand shards of broken glass in my face and upper body, causing unending agony and permanent disfigurement, it still wouldn't have compared all that badly to what I actually ended up with. The controls were ghastly, the interface was abominable and the lack of video options made the whole game look like it was taking place through the wrong set of glasses. I turned it off about ten minutes in and declared it, without irony, the “worst port evarrr” [sic], vowing to never touch it again as long as the sun rose in the east and set in the west. Several fan-made patches and over a hundred hours of gameplay later, it now sits very comfortably in my internal catalogue of “games you absolutely have to play, no seriously dude”. Quite a reversal of fortune, but it just goes to show how a bad port can totally rub mud all over what is otherwise a brilliant experience. Your game could be filled from beginning to end with content so spellbinding that a mere few seconds of gameplay is enough to unlock some kind of internal epiphany in the player, but it's all effort down the drain if the version they're playing is so ill-fitting with the platform of choice that the mere act of interfacing with it is like trying to decode a Caesar cypher where the alphabet is replaced with a series of obscure button maps.

Deus Ex: The Fall

Well well well, look who it is. Hello again, Square Enix. Didn't see you there. Come in, pull up a chair. What's that? Deus Ex: The Fall ported to PC? Good. Did somebody finally break through to you with the information that releasing a Deus Ex game exclusive to mobile platforms was like releasing a series of The Far Side comics exclusive to toilet paper rolls? Actually, don't answer that. You know, it's funny how coincidences pop up, but we were just talking about ports. I was just pointing out how much a bad port can turn people off a perfectly fine game, but of course, you would know better than... oh dear.

Alright, there's no kind way of saying this, so I won't bother trying. Deus Ex: The Fall is utterly broken.

Let me walk you through a typical gameplay section. I'm approaching an area with some goons in it when my support character tries to ring me up. For whatever reason her dialogue sound clip doesn't play, and the subtitle flashes up for maybe a tenth of a second before disappearing. My reply has a similar effect. Totally flummoxed, I hit Esc to bring up the game menu, then I click on the icon for the objective tab. Nothing happens. I click on it again. Nothing happens. I let loose some choice expletives under my breath, click it a third time and it actually works, revealing that nothing significant has changed. I close the menu and continue on my way, wincing every few seconds when my camera randomly changes direction and jumps around for no particularly good reason. Seeing the goons on the radar, I hold down 'H' – no, you can't rebind the keys, put your hand down – to bring up my weapon menu, which pauses the entire game. I select the tranquilliser crossbow and return to the game, getting an eyeful of the breathtakingly-ugly view-model as I do. Pushing on through the headache-inducing camera stutters, I take cover behind a crate and watch as two guards patrol up and down with awkward, robotic walking animations. Trying for the safer option, I raise my crossbow and ready a shot against the more distant guard, forgetting that it only zooms in when you hold down the trigger and only fires when you release – you know, because that's a logical system for a PC game – causing me to miss him by several meters. Throwing caution to the wind, I extricate myself from behind the crate, sneak up behind the closer guard – whose walking animation has bugged out, causing him to skate around the room on unmoving feet – and silently take him down, with the 'silence' in this context not being a result of my secret agent skills, but rather a result of the sound dropping out again. The animation causes the camera to briefly clip into the floor, giving me a moment of disorientation that's enough for the other guard to spot me. Bringing up the weapon menu again, I take out my pistol and start firing – no sound for that either, naturally – missing every other shot because the mouse sensitivity is so sticky. Rapidly running out of health, I take cover behind another crate, at which point I go the way of the camera and end up clipping through the floor, falling into the emptiness of the void and, as a by-product, dying. My surreal outsider's view fades into the distance as I fall further away, the screen turning a sweet mocking red as the HUD breaks down. With a heavy sigh of resignation and defeat, I hit 'quick-load'. It's the fiftieth time so far today.

Deus Ex: The Fall

So, here we have a port that was quite clearly not ready for release, and absolutely wasn't ready for release a week earlier than initially intended. Quite frankly I don't know why they even bothered to port it at all if it was going to be as shoddy as this, but now this malformed spawn is nevertheless part of our world, and we're going to have to work out how to deal with it. Get it on the autopsy table; we'll see what we can do.

Around the time of The Fall's initial release, a number of murmurs of praise echoed their way down the intertubes and into my ear-holes, but they were all essentially nullified by the most common phrase, “good for a mobile game”, which inspires about as much confidence in the final product as saying that a newly-released book is “good for a randomly-selected collection of Sailor Moon fan-fiction”. Being a good mobile game doesn't mean anything. You could hack out a quick Bejeweled clone where all the sprites are replaced with study photographs from the local hospital's burns treatment unit, and it would probably still be a better game than the frankly depressing landslide of zero-effort rip-offs, dress-up simulators and Flappy Bird clones. So what has Square Enix done to ensure the quality gulf between mobile and PC is effectively bridged here? They've, erm, added some Steam achievements. Fan-tastic.

One thing that actually does make a good mobile game is an intuitive interface, and I'm sure that The Fall's interface was indeed very intuitive for an entirely touch-driven game. Lots of big icons, a bit of swiping, HUD elements that double-up as buttons, that sort of thing. Unfortunately, here in PC land, we don't use an awful lot of touch screens. We have these things called 'keyboards' and 'mice', and The Fall's interface has only the vaguest idea on how to actually utilise them. I've already moaned about the mouse movement and the unresponsive buttons, but they are only at the forefront of a whole landslide of bugbears. Where's the hotbar? Actually, where's the inventory screen? Horrifically squashed into the same space as the shop screen, I discovered, and unceremoniously stripped of its space-management mechanics. Nothing is ever done quickly with The Fall's interface, not when an endless parade of full-screen menus and game-halting quick-select bars stand between you and your goal. It would have been irritating enough even if they had worked perfectly, but the slow responsiveness – or occasional total lack of it altogether – multiplies the problem tenfold.

Deus Ex: The Fall

To N-fusion's credit, a lot of effort has gone into making The Fall look and feel like Human Revolution, and it mostly pulls it off. Heck, I'd even say it improves on its bigger brother in some respects. The abnormally-narrow streets of Panama City, the game's hub area, certainly give a far stronger cyberpunk vibe than anything Human Revolution ever pulled off. Of course, the game's mobile origins and already-established ambition to be a completely half-baked port mean a drastic graphical downgrade, but I think we can let this one off lightly given that the overall aesthetic is effectively preserved. Well, that and the fact that I feel dirty all over when I start complaining about a game's graphical fidelity.

Gameplay can best be described as 'bearable', since it's essentially a severely cut-down clone of Human Revolution, either ripping off the bigger game's mechanics or just leaving them out altogether. Sneaking around is virtually unchanged – other than the removal of the ability to drag bodies, because obviously programming such a feature was an impossibility in the days before ragdoll physics – and the level design is actually not half-bad, despite its habit of occasionally forcing you through heavily-guarded bottlenecks. Here's the thing, though: stealth is the only thing that still works. Getting into a scrap, you'll soon find that The Fall has surreptitiously stripped out the jump and sprint buttons, leaving you to bumble slowly around while wrestling with the awkward mouse controls and capricious cover system, so once again the biggest thing holding The Fall back is the ever-present fact that it was once a mobile game.

Of the paltry few additions that The Fall does make to gameplay, only the inventory's inclusion of a shop screen is worth discussing, mostly because I can't fathom why anybody thought it was a good idea. Why should I be able to buy any equipment or weaponry I choose, no matter where I am, at any time? The pertinent question is how exactly my willing suspension of disbelief is supposed to weather this unexplained capability, but worse still is how it simplifies gameplay to an almost patronising level. What's that? You didn't think to prepare for this mission? You're sneaking into a heavily-guarded facility with an inventory containing two packs of chewing gum and a dry whiteboard marker? No problem! Just stumble your way to success, you disorganised slack-jawed fool, and as long as you have credits in your pocket you can buy the right items to deal with every possible situation. I have a sneaking suspicion that this is a remnant of some kind of insidious micro-transaction scheme from the mobile game that somebody couldn't be bothered cutting out.

Deus Ex: The Fall

So, what exactly can The Fall offer that couldn't already be experienced by playing Human Revolution again with your head stuck in a bucket of half-dried wallpaper paste? Just one thing, really: story. Human Revolution was a great game, and I'm glad that we can all agree on that, but one area where it fell down was in the boss fights. Not just because they were diametrically opposed to the central philosophy behind Deus Ex – the idea that 'you don't have to shoot' – but because the bosses themselves were faceless mercenaries whose only defining characteristic was how many of their limbs they had lopped off and replaced with heavy weaponry. Who are these people? What's their history? At what point in their lives did they decide that minigun forearms were in vogue?

Well, fear not, friends, because The Fall seeks to remedy this gaping hole in the story by characterising these fearsome individuals. Our man of the hour is Ben Saxon, an augmented ex-SAS soldier who is rescued by the mercenary group – known as the Tyrants, because when you're building a terrifying globe-trotting mercenary gang you're practically obliged to give them a stupid macho name – after he is left for dead in the middle of the Australian Civil War. They never explain exactly what the war was about, but I like to believe that it'll be the out-of-control escalation of a V8 Supercars brawl between Ford and Holden supporters. Anyway, Ben gets accepted into the Tyrants, quickly realises that they're manipulating him, escapes, foils an operation of theirs and winds up hiding out in Panama City. From there, the plot dutifully follows the tried-and-tested framework of its forebears: international conspiracy, big corporations, a populated controlled via drug shortage, etcetera.

If it sounds like I'm glossing over fairly significant events here, it's because I don't have much of a choice but to dutifully walk in the game's footprints. The events of the war, Ben's motivation, how he managed to foil the Tyrants and how he met his token female support character are all mentioned off-handedly in the opening cinematic, then just referenced as if we have dutifully internalised them. Hasn't anybody learned the importance of 'show, don't tell' yet? And it's doubly damning for The Fall since a lot of the plot development is wrapped up the dialogue, which, as you'll know if you've been paying attention to this review, has a nasty habit of just not showing up about half the time. Eventually I found myself just ploughing through the story, hoping that if I read enough mission briefings then I might just be able to garner some meaning from this mess. No such luck, I'm afraid. After spending the four hours needed to complete the story – yes, four – all I can tell you for absolute certain after my time spent in its buggy, badly-told company is that Ben Saxon has the personality of an old mattress lying on the grassy verge. I know Deus Ex games have always been big on letting the player fill in the blanks, but I swear they're just handing us an empty slate at this point. His only plight seems to be revenge against the people responsible for the death of his squad, but even if we let The Fall get away with one of the most tired reasons for motivation in the history of everything – more so, one that we can't sympathise with because we haven't even been permitted to witness the events that triggered it – it quickly becomes completely lost in the tangled mess of only tangentially-related story quests that go absolutely nowhere. Also, while I'm here, why doesn't Ben have a trench coat? Is he a Deus Ex protagonist or not?

Deus Ex: The Fall

And then there's the ending. As if it wasn't bad enough that the story was frustrating to follow with the numerous bugs and effortless exposition, the ending absolutely puts the final nail in the coffin. There's no resolution, no climax, no finality whatsoever. Nothing has been achieved, and nothing will result from what you have done. The game just cuts out with you en-route to Australia, spread wide open for a sequel that I will now personally ensure never sees the light of day. It's not even as if the game is trying to adopt some kind of episodic model here. This is more like what would happen if a Square Enix representative walked into N-Fusion one day and yelled “alright, we've decided to stop giving you money. Package together whatever you've finished so far and let's call it a day”.

You know what, let's just skip to the important question: who is this game for? Chances are it's not you. The relentless bugs, awkward controls, low-quality presentation and complete whiffer of a story are going to be a severe turn-off for all but the most hardcore of fans, and even then, it sits well below the standards set by Human Revolution and the original game. Maybe if you were really, seriously, achingly desperate for a few more hours of original Deus Ex gameplay, however cut-down it is, then I could see this being a viable purchase. For those of you hoping for a quality port that provides a respectable addition to the series, I can only provide the following advice: get up from your chair, walk over to the window, and gaze at the world. Gaze upon a world in which a mobile-exclusive Deus Ex sequel can exist and return to its home, the PC, in such a sorry state. Gaze upon it, and weep.

Our ratings for Deus Ex: The Fall on PC out of 100 (Ratings FAQ)
Presentation
44
Effectively mirrors Human Revolution's aesthetic, even surpassing it in some ways, but the sub-par graphics, mediocre voice-acting and completely inappropriate interface make it awfully difficult to appreciate.
Gameplay
74
It's still essentially Deus Ex, albeit severely cut-down and saddled with the bloody stupid omnipresent shop screen, but the conditions under which you are invited to experience it are so abhorrent that you might as well not bother.
Single Player
37
Starts off on a shaky base, but could have maybe salvaged itself a decent plot if it hadn't been crippled by the constant dialogue bugs and the fact that the entire second half of the game had fallen off the back of a truck somewhere.
Multiplayer
NR
None
Performance
(Show PC Specs)
CPU: Intel i7-870 @ 2.93 GHz
GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 760
RAM: 8GB DDR3
OS: Windows 7 Premium 64-bit
PC Specs

24
A never-ending parade of bugs, glitches, and general shabbiness redeemed only by its obstinate refusal to actually crash.
Overall
34
If the existence of a mobile Deus Ex game was not already enough of an insult to you, then this port is on hand to ensure a nice handful of salt is rubbed into the wounds.
Comments
Deus Ex: The Fall
Deus Ex: The Fall box art Platform:
PC
Our Review of Deus Ex: The Fall
34%
Bad
The Verdict:
Game Ranking
Deus Ex: The Fall is ranked #1943 out of 1957 total reviewed games. It is ranked #151 out of 152 games reviewed in 2014.
1943. Deus Ex: The Fall
1944. Randall
PlayStation 4
Related Games
Deus Ex: Mankind Divided Deus Ex: Mankind Divided
Platform: PC
Released: August 2016
Developer: Eidos Montreal
Deus Ex: Human Revolution Deus Ex: Human Revolution
Platform: Wii U
Released: October 2013
Developer: Eidos Montreal
Screenshots

Deus Ex: The Fall
8 images added Mar 25, 2014 19:56
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