Recent reviews by Ocean Man

♥♥♥♥ this lol

maybe it's just my zoomer brain but as much as i enjoyed the story and the dungeon-crawler aspects of the vaults and such it didn't hit the same chord other titles in the series did. Yes, it laid the groundwork for all the games to come after it, but the mechanics took way too long for me to get into. Play if you've already gone through all the other first-person fallout games; otherwise, it's too archaic to enjoy without its attachment to the wider fallout series.

May likely change review upon a revisit to the game.

Downloaded after remembering hbomber talk ab Deus Ex in a video I'd put on while I was doing dishes. Figured it would be a fun $7 RPG with stealth and FPS elements.

Some positives:

-Cool story about choice, control, and the relationship between technology and mankind

-Innovative horizontal power-up system

-Engaging stealth gameplay (especially with hacking) that had me always nervous as I was vulnerable to potential enemies surrounding me

-Re-using old levels remixed with new enemies / challenges was an unexpected way to give the world an "open" appearance, and made the game feel much more immersive.


Criticisms:

-Why the spoiler-y intro? As soon as I saw Walter Simons in game I knew the twist that was coming. I would've liked to have been left in the dark about UNATCO's true intentions for longer, or even given a chance to work with them for longer.

-Tying into my last point, I went into this game thinking I would have a much greater range of choice than I did. The augment system works as a cool form of horizontal progression. However, they only becomes viable once you've gotten a decent amount of Biocells. It's cool how they limited overusing the augments with the energy bar, but I feel certain ones could've been permanent buffs, like the subdermal implants. I ended up wasting a lot of my energy on lighting - more on this later.

When I flew back into Hell's Kitchen to check in on Paul, I thought I was being given the choice to either betray UNATCO or go back to them after killing Paul. Similarly, I thought there would be alternate routes / skipped levels depending on if you were able to dodge the cops in the Kitchen / evade or kill Anna Navarre in Battery Park, and even made separate save files in order to do so. No such luck. You WILL betray UNATCO, you WILL get captured, and you WILL "Flatland Woman" Anna. I probably sound like an ass complaining about parallel story arcs in a game from 2000, but for all the hype I got from this game reading reviews of it before buying it, I thought it was going to be more divergent than this.

-Gameplay is slow. Compare Deus Ex to Half-life; even though they were made in different engines, they control pretty much the same, where DX has a more complicated control scheme to allow for the augment system (pressing '[' to aim a rifle as a default????). My main gameplay loop was get to an area, try something, move forward, backtrack, die, forget to save, and then save scum every interaction for the rest of the level after dying to one bastard part like 5 separate times. Maybe I'm remembering Half-life too fondly (I never bothered beating the final boss, just playing up to xan like 3-4 times and then quitting), but I didn't nearly have this much frustration with it.

-Maps are confusing / hard to get around. Again, maybe I just have zoomer brain from always having a HUD and a quest marker, but getting around a lot of the cities was made difficult by how dark and similar the buildings looked, not to mention the confusing layouts of the non-mission parts of the levels.

-This ♥♥♥♥ did NOT run right on my computer. Looking at gameplay footage online, everything was so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ dark. I spent most of my time running around, clicking F12 on and off again to save on energy, because I could NOT tell where I was most of the time. Getting the cat eye augment near the end barely helped. Also, it would constantly crash or buffer, especially in Paris / HK (My computer crashed in Hong Kong a few times). I'm running on a laptop from 2021, and I'm fairly certain my hardware specs are up to par with the game's needs. I think this is the main reason I had such a bad time with the game, and I'd be willing to try it again on a better system / when I have the patience to try the at-home fixes.

Got to the sub level and it was too dark to find where I was supposed to go. Watched the endings online. Helios makes the most sense, thematically. Was committed to seeing this game out, but crossing the 20 hour mark when I was only having fun for an hour at a time has made me decide to set this one down for a while.