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Full Review
It's like a mixture of Rainbow Six Vegas, and Fallout - the duck and cover system is almost button for button ripped from the Tom Clancy classic, and of course the RPG element resembles Bethesda's and many other RPGs. The style is very much lifted from Blade Runner, and from the few hours I've put in, you're very much in between a battle of morality between a biologically enhanced society versus a pure one. it's certainly going to tide me over until Skyrim comes out, very playable with a real choice between run and gun and stealth combat
Long stretches between cities are notably absent - and the game has a feel closer to The Darkness in terms of it's faux-free-roaming capabilities. It's actually quite a linear experience when you boil down to it, which in my opinion makes the game suffer - but only slightly.
As I said, the setting is lifted straight out of blade runner but ultimately more apocalyptic settings aren't really there at all save for some dodgy backstreets. The game has one of the best intro/training levels I've seen - which helps you learn the game's controls without bamboozling the player but also giving enough freedom to get used to the controls and enjoy the gameplay on offer. Too many games start you off in an inauspicious shooting range, or assault course, or VR representation of the world you're about to experience - but with Deus Ex, you're thrown headfirst into a scenario which plays out as a major situation in the game's storyline - and allows you to progress nicely past the first mission feeling confident and not as though you're needing to experiment to find the best method of playing.
Stealth is probably the way to go on Hard mode, which I'm playing it on, so all my experiences have been based around stealth play - but there's more than ample room on Normal to play the classic "run and gun" style, if you want to.
With regards to enemy AI, it's still pretty bad as almost every game's AI is. If you alarm an enemy he'll look for you, but only to a point - you can pretty much always just duck behind a crate or doorway set back from where you caused the alarm and the NPC will never look there. He'll also get spooked on his own, and won't signal to his team mates in the room that something's up. I dunno about you, but it feels more logical for an NPC to call a couple of mates over to an area to do a complete search - but as it stands you can pop off a few bad guys with the silenced sniper rifle and after 20 seconds they'll forget their best mate just took it in the eye and died in front of them.
the settings are beautiful - long neon city streets are divided by fairly large internal areas such as hotels, police stations, etc etc - but to "shop" for weapons and upgrades requires you to find a black market trader, who are dotted around the world in central city "hubs".
side quests seem to be a bit of an issue but I'll get to that after talking about the linear/non-linear style of play. So far the game seems to be subdivided into cities, meaning that once you leave one city, all chances of completing side quests (and even returning, it seems) have vanished. So if you complete the main mission on a certain city, you'll be asked at the helipad whether you want to leave any unfinished side quests uncompleted.
This can be tiresome especially if you're waiting for certain upgrades to become available before attempting a mission. But to be honest, you won't because it seems the side quests are very easy indeed, and don't shoot out far past the sort of objectives you'll be completing in the main quests - so for instance, there's no side quest involving you going bowling or shmoozing or whatever. Rockstar should be turning in their graves.
Side quests however, are weird. So far I've only found about 4 of them and there only seems to be 1 or 2 per level! The in game loading screen advises to search them out and talk to the right people - and once you've been up and down the streets of Shangai you may find that there's f**k all quests available save for the hooker in the hotel. Side quests seem tacked on in this environment, to give it a more non-linear feel - but this betrays the main quest's linear style.
However that's the slightly negative - let's talk about the positive!
The game is massively playable, the stealth is fun and there are some great upgrades to achieve. It seems however you can max out your character without having to choose which upgrades you feel are better than others, so throughout the game you'll probably find yourself "augmenting" your character in order of preference. Some of the abilities gained include being able to jump up to a height of 9 feet, not dying no matter how far you drop off a ledge (get this one early, comes in handy for the multi-levelled china map) a radial explosive short-range weapon, better hacking and whatnot. There's loads, and most of them make you spend a good few minutes deciding each time you earn a "praxis point" to spend on upgrades.
Story wise, it certainly beats puerile shite like Bulletstorm. it doesn't pretend to have a great scifi story - but luckily something just works. The Blade Runner feel to the whole thing adds massive weight to the premise of augmentation - a surgical process which allows the user to upgrade themselves. On one side are the purists - and you, Adam Jensen, fully augmented and working for Sarif Industries, is the security manager for the coporation. After a bit of a horrible hoo-ha at the start, you find yourself almost robocopped - and from then on it's up to you how you feel about it.
Some of the first interactions you have with other characters confronts the player with this question and this is your earliest taste of the clever social interaction contained within the game. Usually you can choose between three options depending on what's being said. These can range from empathy, sympathy, dismissal, confrontation, appeasement etc. Depending on the person you're talking to, your response very much dictates how the game plays out - however I'm not qualified to tell you what kind of effect this has on the overall outcome of the game. It would be nice if your choices of both action AND dialogue can lead you to a different ending. I usually play these games as a total arsehole, but someone who always comes down on the right side - it would be great to see an ending based on my personality within the game, that reflects my dialogue and actions equally.
Only time will tell on that one - but I'm certainly enjoying it enough to recommend it onwards. It would have been better to have a free roaming environment in true form, however - and that's probably the hardest thing I'm dealing with.
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Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. [click for more]
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Originally Posted by CoinReturn
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