Deus Ex: The Fall Review

The environments are visually impressive for the game's tablet origins, but are cut to pieces by constant load zones.

The controls are another culprit here; they are clunky and unresponsive in ways that a keyboard and mouse never should be. Menu buttons routinely fail to respond to repeated mouse clicks. The HUD has not been sufficiently converted from its original tablet-friendly design into an interface that works with keyboard hotkeys. Scrolling through text and inventory screens is far from smooth. You do these things so regularly that such minor niggles result in great aggravation over The Fall's eight-hour play time--eight hours in which the game's single hub location artificially inflates play time by forcing you to travel back and forth through tiny areas sectioned off by frequent load zones.

In a rather unsatisfying move, unarmoured enemies consistently require more than one headshot to take down.

This lack of polish extends from the interface to basic gameplay functions. Moving in and out of cover is clunky. Cover angles are inconsistent, with enemy bullets reaching around corners to hit you when they should impact cover instead. At one point, I entered cover and simply fell through the world geometry and died. The inability to jump at will makes removes the joy of vertical exploration, and reduces the scope of cover-based shootouts to what feels like a series of corridors rather than varied features of an environment.

But the most disappointing thing about The Fall is the complete lack of the extra layer of systemic possibilities that have appeared in every prior Deus Ex game. You can't pick up and stack boxes to create your own routes through areas. Bodies actually dissolve into nothingness after a few seconds, completely removing the need to hide them to maintain a stealth approach. This discourages sneaking by removing an extra layer of cautious play, and making a guns-blazing play style the path of least resistance. Heavy objects can't be picked up and thrown at enemies or used to block incoming fire--interacting with them simply makes them slide out of the way in a canned animation. The lack of these systems results in a disappointingly restrictive and stripped-down approximation of a Deus Ex game.

This is your inventory--a store through which weapon and item purchases can be made instantaneously.

The store uncomfortably removes much of the planning and forethought required for a Deus Ex game.

The store in The Fall is not a vendor character, but a menu screen that can be accessed at any time, where purchases are instantly transferred to your inventory, without logical explanation. It's a functional holdover from the iPad version's design for real-money microtransactions. Though you can't spend real money in the PC port--in-game credits are used for store purchases instead--the store uncomfortably removes some of the planning and forethought required for a Deus Ex game. A climactic final encounter pitted me against an enemy armoured robot; because I had no weapons to take it down, I browsed the store, purchased a rocket launcher with three rockets, and blew the robot up a few seconds later. It felt cheap, lazy, and thoroughly unsatisfying. Because exploration has been simplified, finding credits lying around the world is simple enough that money is plentiful. The store is optional, but, since there are no traditional vendors to act as an alternative, you will feel significantly underequipped if you avoid it.

This store is the perfect example of the many problems that plague The Fall. This PC port fails to take advantage of the PC's increased technical power and greater control fidelity to adequately smooth over the game's prior tablet limitations. The story feels like it's attempting to fill in some blanks regarding Human Revolution's underdeveloped boss characters, but the game ends well before it has the chance to do so. At least nFusion had the mercy to not include any boss fights.

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