Long term reader of this blog will know that I am a big fan of the Deus Ex series. All of it from the first entry to the misguided sequel and especially my 2011 game of the year, Human Revolution.
Adam Jensen hard at work solving the homeless problem in Deus Ex: Human Revolution
So it was with great excitement that I had heard there was another game in the series planned, Deus Ex: The Fall. And it was then with great disappointment that I discovered it would be a mobile only game. And an iOS exclusive nonetheless. Long term readers will also know my distain for all things Apple so this was a double punch in the gut. Shortly after the iOS release, Eidos promised an Android port but this never seemed to appear.
So by the time I had finished reading the book that the game follows, "The Icarus Effect", and there was still no sign of the Android port, I felt too compelled to play the game to wait any longer and had to play the iOS version.
And what a mistake that was.
I played it on my other half's iPad 2. Which is the minimum specification iPad that the game will run on. But it seems they were pushing it even to get it to run on that because it was extremely slow and laggy and very prone to crashing. Like every 7 minutes. These technical problems sadly did decrement my experience quite significantly but I still felt that I got to experience enough of the game to form a decent opinion about it.
Overall, The Fall plays almost identically to it's bigger brother, Human Revolution only you are playing a former mercenary Ben Saxon rather than security agent Adam Jensen. Ben is on the trail of his former employers, the Tyrants, and trying to bring down their schemes of world domination. It plays in the same style of first person shooter view most of the time moving to third person when clinging to cover. You move through areas hunting down objectives through the same mix of murder, stealth, hacking and so on that we all know and love from Deus Ex. You can upgrade your augmentations just like before only you can do them on the fly anywhere, anytime now rather than having to go to a LIMB clinic to have it done. You can also buy and upgrade the usual slew of weapons both lethal and non lethal. Naturally, I opted for the former as I preferred to shoot my way through most areas. And when there was too much for just myself to shoot through, I would take control of bigger guns or large robots to do the killing for me via proxy.
The gameplay is very satisfying just like Human Revolution was, when the hardware co-operates and if you can get into the flow of smoothly shooting and taking down without stalls or crashes, it's feel just as great as it did in the fantastic game that came before it. But again sadly, the hardware let me down with stalls and crashes being very very frequent. There were other minor problems as well like the game being quite short (less than 4 hours for me), but it is planned to be an episodic series with this just being the first one. The voice acting is also very phoned in, Ben's voice in particular sounding nothing at all like I imagined it to be while reading the book and it actually sounds quite weasely unfortunately.
Deus Ex: The Fall is a great game in theory being almost as good as the excellent Human Revolution, but the awful hardware let it down sadly in this case.
Even more annoyingly, the Android port came out literally days after I had finished this on iPad. I got to try this version and it is silky smooth and crash free.
And even more annoying than that, a few weeks later, a PC version was announced with full controller and keyboard support which would jsut solve every problem this initially mobile exclusive game had and make it truly great. Le sigh....
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