It’s an exciting time in iOS gaming. The hardware is powerful enough to run some truly impressive games and the App Store’s sales are strong enough that big-name studios are taking notice. Companies like EA, Sega, and Square Enix have been pumping stuff onto the App Store for years, but it’s been more recently that we’re seeing triple-A titles hit the platform. Last month saw an awesome port of XCOM and this week we got an original triple-A title from Square Enix, Deus Ex: The Fall.
The original Deus Ex (2000) was a major success both critically and commercially. It was widely praised for giving players a lot of dialogue and playstyle options that let players choose how to get through a level and caused their actions to directly affect the narrative path. These open gameplay options and narrative paths are present in Deus Ex: The Fall as well. I’m happy to report this isn’t just a janky mobile cash-in. The Fall is a high-quality triple-A title debuting on iOS.
For those of you who are familiar with the series, The Fall takes place in the same year as Deus Ex: Human Revolution and serves as a direct sequel to the Deus Ex novel, The Icarus Effect.
If you aren’t familiar with the series, your playstyle options range from total stealth to running in with guns blazing and killing everything on sight. Your gameplay choices and dialogue choices have a direct effect on the story. The Fall takes place in a dystopian 2027 where technology is booming and humans can be mechanically augmented to perform a wide variety of superhuman feats. You play Ben Saxon, an augmented British ex-mercenary. Augmented humans need a certain prescription drug to survive the effects of augmentation, but powerful corporations are limiting the drug’s supply. Ben has teamed up with Anna Kelso (ex-Secret Service) and Janus, a faceless group of hackers, to take on this global conspiracy and fight for the survival of all augmented humans.
Everything in this game is designed around letting you play your way. As you progress through the game, you will be able to upgrade your equipment and augments. Your equipment possibilities range from very lethal (rocket launchers and plasma rifles) to not lethal at all (tranquilizer crossbow and stun gun). While various augments serve all kinds of purposes, including improved hacking skills, improved social skills, the ability to punch holes through walls, the ability to run silently, turn invisible, and remove recoil. The augments are all cool and come at a good pace that makes them feel precious without the game stagnating. Beyond character upgrades, you can completely rearrange the HUD to fit your playstyle.
Every bit of the game has multiple solutions, so you are almost never locked out of an area for not having the right setup. If you don’t have good enough hacking skills to enter a room, there’s probably an entrance in the back that you can access by moving a very heavy object. Most of the gameplay is set in the slums of Panama City and there’s a lot of exploring to do. The rewards for exploring are multifaceted so gamers should get something out of it regardless of their motivations. The hidden contents of one corridor might be some ammunition and a grenade, an email that gives a passcode to a nearby door, and an eBook that provides story-based details about why augmented humans need Neuropozyne.
I loved all the lore and exploring. Various emails, voice recordings, and eBooks reveal lots of details about the world of Deus Ex and it’s really rewarding to piece the bits together to get some insight on the game’s mysteries. The world is extremely detailed too. The graphics are excellent for mobile and every corner of the environments feels carefully crafted. There’s a lot of voice acting in the game, even non-repetitive lines from NPCs walking around Panama City. The voice acting is generally good, with a few instances that I’d call “decent” instead.
The Fall uses the same gold and black palette that was Human Revolution’s signature. It’s not something we see very often in gaming, but I kind of love that the entire experience is unified by a chromatic theme. The gold and black are symbolic of the Golden Age and dystopia, respectively. Symbolism aside, the palette looks sharp and gives the game some identity. First-person shooters tend to look very much the same and fall into the muddy realm of liberally applied browns and grays. Not so with The Fall. Like Human Revolution, you would be able to pick screenshots of this game out from a lineup of 20 other first-person shooters, a feat that’s both refreshing and impressive.
If you’re experienced with any of the first-person shooters on iOS, you should adapt to the controls easily. I’d consider them among the best touchscreen controls I’ve used for first-person games. You have the traditional dual virtual sticks for moving and looking around. They are very responsive and the game would be perfectly playable with these alone. You also have several other control schemes mixed in, and you can use them all simultaneously. Double-tapping on any location will have you automatically move to it. The aim assist can be set to Off, Tap, or Auto. With tap aiming, you can tap an enemy to set it as your target. A press of the fire button will automatically aim at your target’s torso. If you hold down the fire button instead, you will look down your gun’s sights and be able adjust your aim a bit, allowing for headshots and firing when you release the button. Auto aiming targets the nearest enemy for you, but I appreciated the increased control of tap aiming.
There are other buttons for using consumable items and special abilities, reloading your gun, and throwing a grenade. These buttons all expand into quick-equip menus if you hold them down, which is very convenient and doesn’t take up any extra HUD space. Context-sensitive buttons appear to let you move between covers or perform melee takedowns.
The Deus Ex series has been praised for letting players progress through levels in their own way. The stealth and all-out offensive strategies both have their advantages and disadvantages, but have generally been well-balanced, with both options feeling fun and neither option feeling like it’s inherently the best. Unfortunately, that has not carried over to The Fall. The stealthy, hacking, non-lethal path is a clear winner because of some problems with the gunfights. The AI is kind of stupid when it’s on the offensive, sometimes an enemy will just stand still until you take him down. Also, despite having good virtual controls, they’re still inferior to a mouse or physical joystick and they just don’t hold up in hectic firefights. The game is absolutely beatable with the guns blazing approach, it’s just not as fun.
A single playthrough will give you about 5 hours of gameplay. Not bad at all for a triple-A game at the $6.99 tier. If you wanted to go back to try a different playstyle, search for the 24 hidden collectibles, or knock out the achievements, you could easily squeeze several more hours out of the game. A fan favorite achievement from Human Revolution makes a return, asking you to complete the game without killing anybody. There are IAPs to buy extra credits or to buy a permanent 50% boost on the credits or experience you earn. The prices are shockingly reasonable for Square Enix, with the boosts costing $1.99 apiece and the biggest bundle of credits costing $12.99. That said, the game’s balance is incredibly fair. I feel like the IAP moves the game from balanced to too easy rather than a game whose difficulty all but demands you purchase IAP if you want to complete the game.
It should be mentioned that this game is definitely demanding on your hardware. If you’ve got a device on the low-end of the supported spectrum (iPhone 4S, 5th-gen iPod Touch, iPad Mini, and also iPad 2 which Square Enix is planning on supporting in a couple of weeks), expect the game to crash once or twice an hour. Even if The Fall is the only app running, you’ll still have the game give up at random points. It was annoying, but never problematic thanks to a good autosave system. You can also save manually whenever you want, once you’re done with the tutorial. The same intermittent crashing happened with XCOM. While I’m sure Square Enix will continue to improve the stability, I can only imagine we’ll be seeing plenty more triple-A titles that are graphically demanding. The iPhone 4 is already becoming obsolete for top-tier gaming, it’s only a matter of time until this affects the 4S as well.
ViewDeus Ex: The Fall on iTunes ($6.99): https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/deus-ex-the-fall/id633443676?mt=8
A light version: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/deus-ex-the-fall-lite/id720123843
