On 6/16/2012 14:51, Jim Henderson wrote:
> I was wondering how the new Deus Ex was - saw it's out on the PS3, and
> now that I've played through MW3, I'm looking for something else once we
> have some spare cash again.

It's fun. Very replayable. I went the whole game the first time thinking 
that augments were very limited because I didn't know some of your energy 
slowly grows back, so I used mostly weapons.

It has the same problem as 90% of the sneaky games out there, in that the 
difficulty level doesn't really go up. It's way, way easier to be sneaky 
than to fight through it.

Plus, of course, as usual in such games nowadays, there are (like) three 
ways to accomplish a goal, but each is really obvious. You can fight in thru 
the front door, or sneak around the back, or climb up on the roof and avoid 
the bad guys altogether. That sort of thing.  In Thief, for example, I never 
got the feeling "well, there must be a way to go in thru here, because it's 
a game." I.e., the level design seemed rather game-ish, unlike (say) the 
original Deus Ex. So far I've found an air vent with no purpose but to 
connect Meeting Room 2 with the men's room, a corridor full of stored boxes 
and paperwork with no doors at all (you have to break through the wall to 
get into it), and all the guards manage to patrol *right* to the edge where 
if they took another step, they could actually look around the corner and 
see you hiding there in wait.

Some of it is pretty funny. The music the in-game radios play is the music 
from the original Deus Ex, for example, and the names of bosses in Deus Ex 
show up as grunt-level workers in emails in this one, and you meet as kids 
some of the people JC Denton interacts with as adults, since it's set a 
couple decades earlier. Some of the dialog is amusing as well, especially 
between the cyber-security guy and the physical security guy.

There's attempts to make your decisions have consequences, but most people 
you interact with that come back to haunt you make relatively little 
difference. There is one or two characters where for most of the game you're 
going "Is this guy part of the conspiracy? Or is he just a really bad voice 
actor?"

I'm slowly working my way through it on pacificst mode, meaning you don't 
kill anyone and indeed try not to get seen at all. 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTOxcWR1y6E (Maybe a teeny spoiler in there, 
in the sense that you see where one of the boss fights takes place, but you 
know that well in advance story-wise.)

Maybe some time I'll go thru and see how many people I can kill on the way 
too. :-)

I good, solid, enjoyable game with lots of different ways to play it. But 
maybe my standards are too high, because it seems pretty average, with 
average level design, average visuals, average gameplay, etc. Bioshock was 
much prettier, Batman was much cooler, etc.

Having been through it and seen what all the weapons are, the upgrades, how 
the augs get used, it's somewhat easier the second time. I can say "No, I 
don't need to horde that ammo, as I will never use that gun anyway." Stuff 
like that.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Oh no! We're out of code juice!"
   "Don't panic. There's beans and filters
    in the cabinet."

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