Playing A Game Deus Ex: The Fall PC

Deus Ex: The Fall is exactly what I would expect from asking a mobile game studio to re-make Deus Ex: Human Revolution in the Unity engine with a minimal budget.

Everything about this game is "cheap." The animations and models are low-effort. The camera often clips into the environment. The UI art is flat and under-detailed. The writing is poorly-edited schlock, the voice acting is rote and dull. The inventory controls are a wreck, due to having crammed too many options into a touch-screen interface, and then haphazardly translating them back onto a keyboard. (Movement controls, at least, mostly work by simply duplicating the control scheme from Human Revolution and Mankind Divided.)

I didn't even get far enough in the game to see its Detroit- or Prague-equivalent hub area, but the internet tells me that I'm not missing much.

The game really set itself up for failure by attempting to imitate the full scope and complexity of a big-budget, high-resolution Deus Ex title. Not only because some of those mechanics map poorly to a mobile device - the aim-then-shoot control is ... yikes - but more because it was an obviously over-ambitious plan for such an under-funded project. This Unity-praising press piece, despite its promotional spin, shows off how many corners the team had to cut to crank this game out quickly and cheaply.

Some of Human Revolution's features should map perfectly to a mobile device, and even those - like the hacking minigame, or reading pocket secretaries - feel like low-rent knock-offs here.

This small-screen spin-off is clunky for a mobile game, and just plain bad for a PC game. Its resemblance to Human Revolution and Mankind Divided invites some intensely unfortunate comparisons to triple-A productions; The Fall is just like them, but, worse.

Better than: Batman: Arkham Origins Blackgate
Not as good as: Cat Quest, Deus Ex: Human Revolution - The Missing Link (or even Alpha Protocol)
As with Just Cause 3: I didn't expect much, but at least it was for a good cause.

Progress: Gave up after I fell through the map in the first mission.

Rating: Bad