Notes on the Deus Ex series

Deus Ex

To Be Written

Invisible War

Graphics

    Not amazing, not bad.  It's an original Xbox/PS2-era game, so I don't expect much.  Using the graphics mod I use, though, the textures aren't.... horrible.

Sound

    Again, middle of the road.  I don't think I've come across anything too great or too bad.  Voice acting isn't great, but it gets the job done.

Story

    Starts at a million miles an hour.  After the first cutscene, where Chicago gets destroyed in a terrorist attack (yes, the whole city, all at once, from one dude with a vial of replicate-infinitely-nanomachines, son), you wake up in your new home in Seattle.  It's under attack, and within the first minute of play, a guy dies, but you're still not in the combat part yet.  You escape the facility and get to the streets of Seattle within 15 minutes of play.  It's too fast and sets an excessively high "baseline" (read: first impression of the game's tone and energy).

Gameplay

    The best way to put it is "simple and janky".  Where the original Deus Ex had a wide range of augmentations, a decent selection of guns, an an inventory that doesn't suck, Invisible War instead puts its skill points into having no skill points, almost no augmentation selection, and occasionally inconsistent movement, like when crouch jumping into a window or vent.

Performance

    Framerate is decent (running through WINE, so I expect hiccups) and consistent.  Load times are short.  Overall, pretty decent.

Human Revolution

Graphics

    I like it only slightly more than Mankind Divided, so I slightly dislike it, mainly from its overuse of hexes and triangles, but it doesn't go so overboard on it, so I can tolerate it.  It does suffer from being too dark a lot of the time and from having a good 2/3 of the textures be some sort of brown, grey, or yellow.

Sound

    No obvious issues or notable upsides.

Story

    It'd be easier to like if the ending weren't so bad.  Overall, I'm fairly neutral on it.  Not counting the sudden detour for The Missing Link DLC, I think it flows well enough, and the plot point for going to the final level is significant enough to not feel like a total ass-pull.  It helps that there is some level of foreshadowing.  Minus the slow-as-molasses feel a lot of the time, the big issue is The Missing Link and the ending.

    The Missing Link explains what happens close to the end of the game, when Jensen goes off-grid for a few days.  It used to be a standalone DLC, but was put into the main game for the Director's Cut.  My big issue with it is that they didn't really change it enough to make it fit like it needed to.  It definitely feels, in gameplay and story, like its own thing that was never meant to be included in the main game.  Really the only thing that it does that makes it feel like it belongs is a bit that basically ruins the shock of the final boss.

    The ending is just... It feels like the devs don't trust you to understand the repercussions of your choices, so they explain it to you just in case you aren't capable of engaging with the story at its level, despite its overall simplicity.  You get 4 buttons: One for each of three Illuminati members whose message you may choose to spread, plus a self-destruct button to kill them and yourself to let the world figure it out for themselves.  The explanation of each option's results, before you even get to choose AND after you make a choice but before you confirm it, just took the ability for me to care away, since it felt patronizing to an extent.

Gameplay

    Overall, not bad, not great.  The biggest annoyance is that the game doesn't trust you.  Melee?  It locks you into a cutscene and is a one-hit-win.  Falling down?  If you have the no-fall-damage augment, it locks you into a cutscene and only gives you the control to stun people near where you'll land.  Seriously, I've had more than a few jumps screwed up by that cutscene thing when all I wanted was to have some control mid-air to land on a platform below where I started.

    It does definitely suffer from having too many toys and not enough batteries for all of them.  By not letting you recharge more than your last battery from empty, it discourages using your augments, despite them being the main selling point of the gameplay.  Melee taking a full battery is a major contributing factor, since it means that you can be left with literally no defensive options if you play wrong enough, or you can just be left waiting 20-30 seconds (depending on recharge time upgrade tier) just to be able to punch a dude.  Want to go invisible for 3-7 seconds?  Wait 20-30 if you're empty.  It makes long stretches of the endgame a slog if you're not dedicating a massive amount of your inventory to energy regen consumables, since you'll use your energy, run out, and have to wait so long just to get it back.

    The Missing Link is a massive difficulty spike close to endgame.  It strips you of your weapons and augments.  While it returns your weapons to you very early on, it's without the consumables and ammo you've been saving, so it leads to the rest of the DLC being pretty difficult relative to the rest of the game.  If you're like me (someone who likes to try stealth but is very, very bad at it, and sticks to nonlethal), you'll be burning through the ammo you get like there's no tomorrow.  Oddly enough, that the game gives you your weapons back so early can be a disadvantage, since it can leave you with large amounts of inventory space taken up by something like a laser gun that you've been saving to use on robots that you'll have no ammo for.  It also encourages budgeting your Praxis, since you won't have enough to do everything by the end.  IMO, were it not for it giving your guns back at the start, I may feel better about it, but as-is, it feels like it's taunting me by giving me my toys but no batteries.

    The final levels, thanks to The Missing Link's difficulty spike, feel like a victory lap instead of a climactic end.  Not only does it return all your Praxis to you (so you go from maybe feeling vulnerable to feeling like a god), but it also returns all your weapons and ammo.  As it turns out, I had been saving literally multiple dozens of each nonlethal weapon ammo, so the second to last level was a silent sneakfest while the final level was a shooting gallery.  YOU GET A TRANQ DART!  YOU GET A TASER SHOT!  YOU GET A PEPS ROUND!  EVERYONE GETS KNOCKED OUT!  The final level also feels like a difficult downgrade because of the enemies: They're all effectively zombies.  Their simplicity makes them easy to avoid or manipulate, their limitation to melee makes them easy to handle from a distance, and their large numbers mean the satisfying feeling of knocking 6 guys out at a time with a single gas grenade.

Performance

    It's good.  Nothing really to complain about.  I got a constant above 60 FPS with WINE and DXVK.  Granted, I played on the lowest settings, but considering the performance penalty for both WINE and DXVK, I'd say it's still pretty good.

Misc

    The inventory kind of feels claustrophobic at times, with some things taking up FAR more space than necessary (the jars of energy being the biggest culprit.  They take 4 spots to fill 3 batteries while the other two energy things take one spot per cell recharge and they don't stack).

    I'll never understand why I can't use vending machines for stuff like energy bars or food to heal with.

    I finished this after Mankind Divided for this retrospective project.  I stand by my opinion of Jensen's character.  Almost no time is ever spent to show that he actually likes anything.  Even the most cynical, depressed character has to have SOME likes to feel like a satisfying character, but Jensen never does or it's too insignificant for me to remember.  The only things I can really even assume he likes is being sarcastic and Meghan Reed, and Meghan barely counts because she's literally the focal point of the story.

Mankind Divided

Graphics

    I dislike the style.  Having everything be hexes or triangles of UTTER SCI-FI is just annoying, and makes no sense.  They also changed the stun gun from a kind of cool design to "A pistol, but a little weird".

Sound

    Don't care either way.

Story

    Not good.  The point where it ends feels more like the midway point of a "finished" story.  Basically no real resolution, IIRC, but that's why I'm replaying it: I need to have it fresh to think about.

    Replay done.  I don't like it any more than I already did.  The story ends at the halfway point of a real story, leaving several loose threads with an obvious "Here's where the next game goes" kind of cliffhanger.  Some things are explained, some things aren't, but I just don't care.  The game lost me within the first hour, and it consistently pushed me away further, rather than pulling me back in.

    I hate, absolutely hate, without any limit, undeniably, with the fury of a thousand supernovae, unskippable cutscenes, especially when they're the four minute long train bombing sequence or the police stopping you to check your papers.  Screw that, screw them, and screw anyone who thinks "It's not that bad."  It is that bad.  If I already want to play something else, all those cutscenes accomplish is making me act on that desire.

Performance

    Not great.  At 1080p, regular dips to single-digit FPS, along with almost never getting above 30 FPS.  At 720p, I tend to stay above 30, but often dip to 20s, and still occasionally dip into the single digits, especially when looking at the augmentations screen.  RAM requirements are high, basically making me keep my browser closed while I play.

Gameplay

WHOO, BOY, WHERE DO I BEGIN!?

    All the new augs, minus the ranged hacking and maybe the Icarus Dash, are just not very good.  Whoo, I get yet another aug that takes rare ammo to do things I can use my guns to do.  How wonderful. /s

    Scratch that.  New augs are OP AF.  I wrote them off because of high costs or an ammo requirement, but one aug completely negates that: The crafting aug: It allows you to disassemble things like guns to get crafting parts, which in turn allow you to craft things like biocells or multitools, completely bypassing energy and hacking as mechanics.  TESLA, thanks to the ability to craft ammo for it, completely overshadows the stun gun, which doesn't have lock-on and can't be upgraded to have better range or multiple targets per shot.  I didn't use PEPS, the nanoblade launcher, TITAN, or focus augs, as they weren't aimed towards my stealth-nonlethal playthrough.  Ranged hacking lets you disable security devices, so of course it's powerful.  Icarus Dash is... Yeah, it's not very good, except as a guaranteed "This is where you can go" button, or as a way to run away fast.

    Melee sucks in every way.  It's a one-button "push to win" against most enemies, the only exceptions being enemies in exosuits and robots, but you can still win against exosuits by using EMP rounds on them first to stun them.  It also takes too much energy, and all of it is permanently lost, meaning that you can go down to basically no energy, leaving you no combat options if you for some reason run out of ammo or lose your guns.  They also initiate a stupid cutscene every time, as if I didn't actually want to PLAY the game, instead wanting to WATCH it.

    Now that I think about it, EMP rounds are a bit overpowered.  They shut down robots and exosuit enemies, can be used in silenced weapons, and aren't too rare.  Put a full magazine of these things in a silenced pistol and you've got both a powerful stealth tool in that you can disable cameras and turrets, and also a strong combat tool that allows you to completely disable the most threatening enemies you'll encounter for most of the game.

    Energy is generally not very well-done.  Some of the most powerful augments (invisibility, for instance) have almost no permanent energy cost, while melee has a very high permanent cost.  IMO, I'd rather permanent cost be completely removed, instead opting for a system where you can regenerate some energy quickly (the current minimum, 25 energy, would be a decent start) and have the rest of the energy slowly regenerate up to your maximum.  This serves two purposes.

1. it allows you to restore energy as you go around outside of "dungeon" areas without needing to use consumables, allowing you to be completely ready to go into a new area after some downtime.
2. It allows the relatively risky melee attack (you have to run right up to an enemy, which can be dangerous thanks to the amount of damage surrounding enemies might hit you with) to be used more than once after you run out of energy without using a consumable biocell.

DLC

    A Criminal Past starts off good, removing your ability to use your augmentations, forcing you to rely on stealth and your wits.  Sadly, it undoes that quickly, starting the riot just as the hostility of the prison even had a chance of sinking in, and you're offered your augmentations back before you can really have a use for them.  I'd rather it have lasted longer before you had a chance to reactivate your augs and before the riot began, since that was the interesting part.  After that, it's basically just the main game in a red or yellow jumpsuit, plus an effect of either pain or fuzzy vision when you use your augs.

    System Rift feels like it belongs in the main game, thanks to it not really being different from what the main game offers.  The later third or so is interesting, featuring heat sensors instead of normal cameras and introducing the Breach, but it's neither good enough nor long enough to be of much note.

    The microtransaction DLCs are all just bad.  You pay real-world money for an in-game benefit you can only ever use once?  Yeah, you get the skinned weapons multiple times, but those also apparently don't work like normal unskinned ones as far as picking up ammo, so you need to keep an unskinned one anyway just to pick ammo up from enemies' weapons.

    I guess I'll throw Desperate Measures in here as well, even though it's free.  It's just another main game mission, really.  Hell, it specifically fits in with the main quest.  If it's not part of the normal game if/when a "Director's Cut" rolls around, I'll be surprised.

Misc Notes

    I hate Jensen's character.  He's basically just "slightly sarcastic man who didn't ask for this".
    I will never stop hating the stun gun redesign.
    The mobile app would have sucked anyways, but now the game pushes you to download something that doesn't exist anymore to experience content that you can now experience for free on YouTube.

The Fall

Graphics

    Not great.  The textures are okay, but the model and animation quality is very bad.  I swear, I've played PS2 games that have better models and animations than this.  The Jak games come to mind as good examples.

Sound

    The only real major complaint is the voice acting.  It wasn't phoned in, but rather telegrammed in.

Performance

    Roughly on par with my experience for Invisible War, but they're both through WINE, so I can't really say much on it, really.  It was consistently buggy, though.  A notable bug that was there the entire time was that my mouse had a noticeable list to the right whenever I tried to move it any direction.  Try to aim up?  How about aiming right, with a little bit of up?  Left?  You're fighting the bug.

Gameplay

    It's watered down Jensen-era Deus Ex.  I like the inclusion of a crossbow as a silent ranged weapon that could either be non-lethal or lethal, but there really wasn't much to the game.  It did, however, prove that your protagonist is better than Jensen in one way: You can actually increase the amount of energy you passively regen from empty.

Story

    It's unfinished, and I don't mean in the Mankind Divided "Oh, it leaves off on a cliffhanger and doesn't feel like it ended" way.  I mean that it literally ends on a "To Be Continued" screen.  This game ends at what feels like the end of Act 1.  The Prologue is the tutorial, while Act 1 is you finding a source for your drug addiction need for Neuropozyne and getting a short-term hook (Belltower selling a competitor to Nupoz that kills people) and a long-term hook (Your old terrorist buddies appear to kill an inspector as you're dealing with the short-term hook).  If the story were finished and told in a good game, I think it has the potential to be fairly good, partly because you're not playing as a guy who doesn't need Neuropozyne.

Misc

    I thought I'd hate this more than any other game on this list, but so far (after Mankind Divided and Invisible War), it's actually not too horrible.  Overpriced, buggy, unfinished, and with excessive mobile design?  Certainly.  But, for some reason, there's a quality about it that makes me more forgiving of it than Mankind Divided.  Maybe it's the knowledge that this was a mobile game, maybe it's that I paid the equivalent of $1 for it, or maybe it's that it actually gets on with the gameplay.

    I'd like to reiterate that this guy can upgrade his passive power regen in a way Jensen can't.  Come on, Mister "I Never Asked for This", step up your game!