Deus Ex

[Passionario]

After getting to the first boss fight, I'ma go ahead and echo what all the reviews are saying - they're kinda dumb.

After going around and doing all this stealth-takedown headshot-kill stuff, you're suddenly thrown into a room with a dude with no head armor who apparently has a face made of titanium, because I shot it repeatedly with a shotgun and he didn't even flinch. It's the old "circle straft while shooting the boss and chucking explosives, waiting for his invisible health bar to go down" crap that I'd expect from something the in the Doom-Doom II era. (In fact, it felt remarkably like a Doom boss).

Very, very archaic feeling to watch this guy act completely oblivious to explosion after explosion and headshot after headshot. Bit of a downer, and completely removed the immersion.

Maybe it was because I got to him without a shotgun (or a combat rifle, or Typhoon, or rocket launcher, or grenades, or dermal armor... and yes, it was "Give me DEx" difficulty), but I had the completely opposite impression, to be honest. Rather than a Doom boss, it felt like the Werewolf chase sequence from VtM: Bloodlines.

Armed with nothing but a silenced pistol and my wits, and trapped in a room with a badass cyborg who stepped right out of Humanity Front's worst nightmares, I had to engage this killing machine in a lethal cat-and-mouse chase, dashing from pillar to pillar, distracting him with thrown boxes, luring him towards barrels, sniping fire extinguishers and hastily assembling mines from nearby supplies. When he finally hit the ground (twenty-something quick reloads later), I felt as though I truly earned this victory.

[Invisusira]

Ha ha, nice. But uh.. you do know you can THROW barrels, right?

[KysenMurrin]

EMP grenades are pretty good on that fight, btw - they stun him for a good few seconds.

[Passionario]

- Malik...
- Jensen, if you even think of using that CASIE mod on me, I'll hit you.

[Ardrhyst]

I finished the game today.

I think the gameplay is pretty good. I did a mostly nonlethal run, but I found out after the fact that killing people in the intro disqualified you for pacifist. I kept being basically non-lethal, but there's a certain time-sensitive event that called for more direct means of takedown. If you've gotten there, you know what I mean.

Throughout the game, though, I tried to stick to not killing, and I was like, "Man, I'm going to have a lot of fun going through the second time and just killing everyone." Sadly, though, I'm not. I thought it was fairly difficult to be stealthy and non-lethal, but stealthy and lethal is even worse because everything you do makes so much noise. When the game tells you that lethal takedowns make more noise than non-lethal ones, they're making a drastic understatement. In addition, the divide between the XP rewards is atrocious. Why do you get 20 more experience by being non-lethal? The same actions are required in both cases. If anything, the kills should give more XP in my opinion, given how much more complicated it is to use them without being shot to death when every dork in a six mile radius comes to investigate the scene.

So yeah. That's annoying. I definitely agree with everything that's been said about the game nudging you to stealthy non-lethal.

On a random note, I think that what we can all get out of Deus Ex is that humanities majors are all hellbent on world domination. Anytime someone quotes literature or classical mythology to you, do the world a favor and shoot them on the spot.

--SPOILERS FROM HERE ON OUT-HIGHLIGHT IF YOU WANT TO READ--

The endings suck. I know that people have commented that the four buttons, one for each ending, is kind of lazy, and it is, but the original Deus Ex pulled basically the same shit, just with a little more leg work between each button. It would be fine if the endings were worth it, but they suck. We get no real closure, no view of the consequences of our actions, and pathetic lip service to the original game in the ending voiceover, which is even more annoying due to the inclusion of Bob Page as nothing more than lip service to the original despite him playing no role in the story at all (And that goes for the opening cinematic, too, because that's pathetic. All that flashiness, but if you watch the original Deus Ex opening cinematic they enough malice and backstory in that dialogue to make the new writers weep with jealousy.). Weak. I've only watched two of the four endings and have absolutely no desire to see the other two. I don't care about Adam's philosophical musings. They should have just stuck with the canonical ending and made a real ending out of it.

-----

[Levantine]

The second boss is harrrrrd on hard. I so bad at shooters. D:

[Shyrtandros]

I've completed the "Good Soul" achievement on "Give Me Deus Ex" while working towards my "Pacifist" & "Foxiest of the Hounds" achievements..

It was pretty damn rough not killing everyone, blowing up the robot & I didn't have a STUN GUN which makes that area SOOO much easier.

I will add my frustration that they really should have a "Statistics" page of some kind that will show you how many people you've killed, knocked out, alarms you've set off.. the ability to track achievement goals..

I will not be happy if I finish and not get my achieves

[kenshin648]

I've completed the "Good Soul" achievement on "Give Me Deus Ex" while working towards my "Pacifist" & "Foxiest of the Hounds" achievements..

It was pretty damn rough not killing everyone, blowing up the robot & I didn't have a STUN GUN which makes that area SOOO much easier.

I will add my frustration that they really should have a "Statistics" page of some kind that will show you how many people you've killed, knocked out, alarms you've set off.. the ability to track achievement goals..

I will not be happy if I finish and not get my achieves

I passed the same part and im having a bit of a scare. One of the bodies was classified as dead. I hope its just the bug where it "kills" them when you shoot them in the head with a tranq and not having died from the robot exploding. If it is from the robot exploding, hopefully it wont count against me (the body was behind crates so it shouldnt have killed him)

[KysenMurrin]

I'm moving very slowly on this game. Actually did some combat in one bit for the Good Soul achievement, but I only had an upgraded pistol, a tranq rifle, and one EMP grenade, so it was damn hard. Had to reload the game over and over for about 45 minutes.

[Kelaan]

I kept being basically non-lethal, but there's a certain time-sensitive event that called for more direct means of takedown. If you've gotten there, you know what I mean.

Oh hell yes.

I liked that nonlethal takedowns were no harder to do than lethal ones, and that doing takedowns was more (slightly) rewarding than headshots. It's between 50% and 100% more XP per 'kill' that way, which isn't gamebreaking. Considering I ended the game with 6 unspent Praxis Points, I didn't need the XP from them.

That said, I liked it from a roleplay perspective. Choking someone out (cop, ganger, etc) was MUCH more satisfying than beating them repeatedly with a club (Deus Ex). I effectively ended up not killing most of the low-level mooks I encountered. What'd they do to deserve death? Be a ganger? Be a cop, one of my ex-coworkers? I didn't really start killing people very much until I was in Hengsha, and didn't really go whole-hog until it was "No, really, they're very much shooting at me" (e.g., after Wenches Be Wenchy).

At that certain time-sensitive event, I took tremendous enjoyment in hunting down every one of those bad guys. Later in the game, I'd even occasionally knock someone out, drag them someplace else, and then shoot them in the face. Very satisfying.

[Talaii]

I'm moving very slowly on this game. Actually did some combat in one bit for the Good Soul achievement, but I only had an upgraded pistol, a tranq rifle, and one EMP grenade, so it was damn hard. Had to reload the game over and over for about 45 minutes.

I did Good Soul nonlethally, didn't really seem hard. Went through a bunch of the packs of energy bars, but I just ran around with a stungun and takedowns, plus a single EMP grenade for the bot. Think it was the first area I botched Ghost on - it seems doable, but I couldn't be bothered trying over and over to get a perfect route down.

Having said that: the Stun Gun is amazing. It's the new riot prod, but you don't need a headshot to send them straight to sleep.

[Invisusira]

Stun Gun is great, but oh my god the PEPS is sex in gun form. It reminds me of that wind-up gun from Minority Report. Every now and then I just save my game, crank up the subwoofer, and go on a PEPS rampage.

[kenshin648]

Did a 3rd playthrough to find all the xp books and get the one where you dont set off any alarms. I did not set any off but didnt get the damned achieve >.<

[KysenMurrin]

Finally finished this yesterday. I guess I was losing interest, because I got very sloppy in the final levels, not really caring so much about stealth and not killing people (I killed a hell of a lot of insane people in the final level, mostly because I couldn't seem to get past them and didn't have enough gas grenades).

The ending was a bit meh, the final boss fight was only a little better than the other three. The game didn't make it very clear what I was meant to do with Zhao - there was an objective marker on her long before the glass shield was down and I wasn't sure if I was supposed to kill her once it dropped, but the game didn't seem to present any other option.

[PsiVen]

Stun Gun is great, but oh my god the PEPS is sex in gun form. It reminds me of that wind-up gun from Minority Report. Every now and then I just save my game, crank up the subwoofer, and go on a PEPS rampage.

Despite carrying it around for the entire game, I only successfully used the PEPS on the last mission. Every other enemy takes multiple hits to knockout and the damn thing takes longer to reload than people do to stand up again (slightly shorter with a reload mod). I was really disappointed with the weapon.