Stealth, at least, is reasonably well implemented, with vents and sneaking and swooping between cover – but reducing Deus Ex down to one component isn't really Deus Ex, is it? Everything needs to blend together to allow you to try things out. Sneaking is only satisfying if there's a consistent way of resorting to violence if things go wrong. Not here, where a headshot is guess work and a short-range shotgun blast is either shrugged off or a killing blow.
It looks and sounds as clumsy as it plays. The animation in conversations lines up about as well as badly dubbed movie, with the characters gesticulating in ugly loops. The movement has no weight at all, and the awful flapping ruins any sense of dramatic impact. From cutscenes to action, there's little humanity or sense of gravity in how people look or move. And the voiceover is even worse. I very nearly quit a few moments in when I encountered a tutorial voiceover so painfully bad, so horrendously stilted and awkward and alien, that it made me and everyone I demanded experience it with me cringe. It's indicative of the quality of most of the actors – they sound like they're reading the script for the first time while riding in a bumpy cart.
Searching for an ear augmentation to block the voice acting led me into the inventory. The changes here strip a fair bit of role-playing for convenience: there's no inventory space to worry about, for instance. Upgrades are immediately available, with the only restriction being your ability to afford them. Health, weapons, ammo, and even Praxis kits – what you use to update your abilities – can be bought and installed without having to hunt down a vendor. I guess it fits into the pick-up-and-play nature of mobile games, but it feels cheaty when played on a desktop.
So it's not a good port, but it's technically troubled as well: on-screen buttons will only work about 50% of the time, I've had my mouse cursor vanish, my character would start to walk instead of running for no discernible reason, and at one point I put my crosshairs over an item and instead of grabbing it the action flushed the toilet next to it. It's a series of bugs that manages to emulate what it's like to be drunk. Perhaps that's why there's only one save game slot? Maybe it's emulating memory loss?
Hatefully, there's still a surprisingly good Deus Ex game hidden away. It's not a new story (drugs, fake drugs, conspiracies, yada yada) but it is compelling with lots of branches worth exploring, and there are a number of twists in the main story that keep things vital. You can pick up as many or few sidequests as you please, and even manipulate the main story: pretty early on I was asked by a doctor to do him a favour because I couldn't afford his help outright. I agreed, but before leaving his office I hacked into his email. From there I discovered his office safe's combination and grabbed the credits stored within. I went back to him and paid him his own credits to get out of the previously agreed-upon mission. For those moments, if you ignore the awful acting and terrible presentation as you talk, it almost feels like Deus Ex. But something always comes along to remind you that they didn't care about making The Fall an even reasonably decent PC game.
