Deus Ex: The Fall is the follow-up game to Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Already out on iOS and Android devices, a PC port is coming this month.
While technically a tie-in game, The Fall follows directly on from the storyline set out in the novel Deus Ex: Icarus Effect. Instead of following the adventures of Adam Jensen, we are now plunged into the body of the ex-SAS cyborg, Ben Saxon. The only characters which cross over to the main game are The Tyrants, those awful boss antagonists from Human Revolution.
Before the story in The Fall begins, our new protagonist survives an ambush during the Australian Civil War. Sadly, this wipes out his entire crew, and Ben is struck with survivor’s guilt. Promised revenge on his attackers by the leader of The Tyrants, Jaron Namir, Ben joins their outfit as a gun-for-hire.
After a quick prologue mission where Namir sends you kill the person he claimed who ordered the ambush, you discover the shocking, but obvious truth: Namir was actually responsible for the ambush, and thus Ben’s squadmate’s deaths. It was Ben’s “trial by fire”, an entrance exam to see if he had the willingness to survive that Namir deemed necessary.
Feeling betrayed - and a little pissed off - by the lies and deceit, Ben attacks Namir and dives out of the airplane they were flying in. This entire prologue is being narrated to the person who rescued him from there - Ben’s friend and American counterpart, Anna Kelso. Anna, also on the run from The Tyrants, wants revenge for Namir’s cohorts murdering her best friend and superior officer, Matt, before they “took her eyes”.
In Human Revolution, we discovered that Augs - transhumans with cybernetic implants and prosthetics - need a drug called Neuropozyne (Nu-Poz) to keep their body from rejecting these implants, with Adam Jensen being the one man who could live without this drug. Unfortunately, there’s only one company which makes this drug, due to strict patent licensing and lawyers shutting down anyone trying to compete. This means that Nu-Poz is not only in short supply, but is horrifically expensive.
At this point in The Fall, sitting in a safehouse in Panama, we discover that our two ex-black-ops operatives are now running dangerously low on the anti-rejection drugs, which are keeping them alive. Anna, who has been rationing out her medication is struck with what looks to be a mild headache, but are called seizures. Ben is forced out of hiding to track down a supply of Nu-Poz for them both, in a world which already has a vast shortage, and discovers an alternative, Riezene. This new drug, which is still in its test phase with the World Health Organisation (WHO) seems far too good to be true. Obviously, it is, and Ben uncovers a conspiracy, some people get shot, and that’s pretty much how the story goes; the story is very much a Deus Ex story; the game, however is not.
To be clear, I played this on my iPad Air. If you so choose, you can play the game on your iPhone or Android device, but I’m going to warn you now: that would be a rookie error. If you still want to play it by the time this review is done, I strongly recommend the PC version. On a touchscreen, the game controls like it was made in the 90′s. It’s not quite as bad as Resident Evil Code: Veronica, but the very fact that I’m drawing parallels with that game in the first place should set alarm bells ringing.
One core theme of the Deus Ex series is that you can either choose to play lethally, or non-lethally, depending on how much of an asshole your character is. Personally, I always prefer playing the non-lethal route, unless I really suck at the game. Case in point: Dishonored. I managed to play The Fall non-lethally, but this was not easy at all. Not because the game was challenging, mind you; if an enemy sees you, they can easily run circles around you shooting you in the back while you try to spin around to punch your assailant in the face. Pro tip: save after every enemy you take down.
The enemy AI is abysmal for a game released in 2013. Yes, I know that this is a mobile tie-in, and expecting something comparable to Human Revolution would just asking for disappointment; but there is more computational power in a bloody iPad than in some satellites we have in orbit, and I can’t decide if the enemies think they are in a Playstation or Playstation 2 game.
Picture this: you’re in an office building, pinned down in the stationary cupboard. Six enemies with guns are lurking outside, and one of them has just seen you, alerting his friends. One of them creeps forward, and you knock them out. The enemy, now pacified, dissolves into little gold triangles, like you’re playing a VR Mission in Metal Gear Solid. Let’s assume that none of the other five guards saw this knock-out, so they just go back to being your normal, un-alerted guard, patrolling the area. Here’s the plan: Step 1: Run out of the room, turn around when a guard sees you and sprint back into cover. Step 2: Wait for him to come close enough to knock out, and wallop him one. Step 3: Watch him dissolve, amused that this still counts as ‘non-lethal’. Step 4: Repeat until no more guards are around to shoot at you.
“But wait!”, I hear you cry. “This is a Deus Ex game! You have guns. Some even knock people out!!” True; there are three guns which you can use for non-lethal takedowns, one of which costs that much in in-game currency that you need to pay real money to unlock it.
Of the two more realistic guns, your pistol-like stun-gun would gave been more useful as a melee weapon, and your tranquillizer-crossbow only only guarantees success with a headshot. Take a second to think about that; you can tranquilise with a headshot from a crossbow. Hell, in real life, police don’t shoot rubber bullets at the head because they know that that is lethal. I don’t know if the good people at Eidos Montreal have ever seen a crossbow, but the last one I saw would not perform a non-lethal takedown with a headshot: It would go through someone’s skull and pin them to the damn wall.
The upside to this lack of useful weapons is that if you want to buy a new gun and just shoot people the old fashioned way, you can do just that. You don’t have to conserve ammo like every other Deus Ex game, because in order to shoehorn in microtransactions, you just buy guns and ammo from the black market. You don’t even have to go somewhere to you make the transactions - you open your menu in the middle of a fight, drop some credits and boop! It materializes in your hand, so you can shoot as many non-lethal bolts as your wallet sees fit. The last boss is a fight against a quadrupedal tank. I just spawned EMP grenades in my hand until it died.
This is just one of the many, many ways that the game lacks polish. It’s as if the design team sat down and said “Fuck it, this is a mobile game, let’s just half-arse it and move on”, and then went and did just that. Some of the areas lacking finish are in the little things, like the fact that the menu titles and the loading screen titles don’t match up properly. In other ways, it’s things like the fact that I had better looking games on my Playstation 2. At one stage, Ben gets an injection of Riezene from a back-alley doctor. Despite being told to raise his arm by said doctor, he stands there like a brick wall, saying how much the needle hurt going in. Sadly, the dialogue never gets much better than that, and is somewhere between dull and plain boring. The real issue here though, is that HUD is so cluttered that your buttons overlap on the screen; so good luck if you bought this to play on your phone. You never know if you’re about to knock someone out, or change which wall you are hugging. Fortunately, this is something you can address if you go into the menus and rearrange your HUD manually, but the basic HUD should not be that bad that you have to redesign it yourself.
While we are still on the topic of useless, the upgrades in this game lack any real point, with the exception of hacking and the invisibility augmentations. I barely used the guns because they were useless; hell, they were that bad that you can’t even unequip them easily: something thankfully improved in the PC port.
I dropped all my Praxis Points into hacking and batteries. The hacking however, is insanely easy - despite not being able to zoom out far enough to see the entire map. You can upgrade your stealthiness while hacking, setting off less alarms as you work, but by the time you unlock Hacking Capture Level 5, you barely trip anything by divine providence. I can’t tell if that is deliberate, or just poor quality programming…
Speaking of which, I kept a tally of the number of times this game crashed on my iPad. 10 times. One of those involved the game freezing after I alerted a guard a who insta-killed me before raising his weapon.
Deus Ex: The Fall took me about 6 hours to complete, but that’s due to me playing stealthily. You can probably halve that if you go in guns blazing; you have regenerating health which takes you from 1 to 100hp in about 15 seconds, and as long as you use my pro-tips above, you’re sorted. You really don’t need to be stealthy at all. On top of that, nobody seems to care if you break the law, unless they are armed. I crouched in front of a hotel receptionist and hacked her PC while she told me that she was out of rooms, because they had a VIP upstairs. She had a guard in front of her - did she report me? Nope! The AI can’t think that far ahead.
Beyond all this thought, the most irritating thing about this game is the tiger roar sound effect you get when you knock out an enemy you want to dissolve into the ether. Ben is British. Little known fact about Britain: we don’t really get tigers here. When Ben punches a guy - and he punches a lot of guys on non-lethal playthroughs - you’re treated to this macho roar which I guess was supposed to make you feel big and strong. It was just annoying, like almost everything else in this game.
At the end of the day, Deus Ex: The Fall is an interesting story with hideous game mechanics. It basically comes down to this - if you have played Human Revolution, and are a hardcore fan of the franchise, this game may have something for you. It probably doesn’t, but it might. On the surface, it’s Deus Ex, but at its core it lacks everything that made Human Revolution such an enjoyable experience. If, after reading all of this, you are still curious enough to throw money at it, don’t. If you’re still set on it, don’t buy it on anything smaller than a PC. The touch mechanics don’t lend themselves well to this style of gameplay and the resolution on the mobile version is appalling by comparison. You’d need to be a masochist to buy it for the iPad and enjoy it.
Nic Bunce
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