Port Report: Deus Ex The Fall

[Guest Shadowstealer7]

Released halfway through 2013 on iOS, and later on Android, Deus Ex: The Fall is the fourth game in the franchise and is set during the events of Human Revolution. A few weeks ago, Square Enix released the PC port, promising a superior experience to the tablet versions. This report is going to involve diving into it and seeing how it holds up to Square Enix's promises.

System Requirements

Minimum

• OS: Windows XP SP2
• Processor: 2GHz dual core
• Memory: 2 GB RAM
• Graphics: DirectX 9.0c compatible graphics card
• DirectX: Version 9.0c
• Hard Drive: 4 GB available space
• Sound Card: Integrated audio interface

Recommended

• OS: Windows 7 SP 1
• Processor: Quad Core 2.66GHz CPU Intel or AMD
• Memory: 4 GB RAM
• Graphics: GeForce 500 Series or Radeon 7000 Series, 1 GB Graphics memory
• DirectX: Version 9.0c
• Hard Drive: 4 GB available space
• Sound Card: Integrated audio interface

Specs used for testing: Intel Core i7-3630QM @ 2.4GHz, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660M 2GB, 16GB DDR3 RAM, Windows 8.1

Nothing groundbreaking in the specs department, which is a given because this game was made for iOS 6 devices. But it does show that not much effort was put into improving the technical aspects upon the iOS version.


Graphics

As the image below shows, the only options you get for graphics is your choice of resolution, what form of MSAA you want to use, whether it is windowed or not and if you want VSync on (which is highly recommended to prevent stuttering). No texture quality settings or fancier features like ambient occlusion or anisotropic filtering.

It is also to be noted that this game runs on Unity instead of the modified Crystal Engine found in Human Revolution, of course due to the cross-platform nature of the Unity engine.

Below is an in-game image taken in the level 'Drug Den' with maxed out settings

 

Antialiasing

As stated before, The Fall only supports MSAA to a value of 8. Because of the lack of proper graphics settings, performance can only be gauged via this setting, this will be further discussed in the Performance section.

The antialiasing does improve image quality a bit, as the comparison image shows, but during gameplay at a 1920x1080 resolution, I did not really notice a difference. Better forms could be forced with your graphics driver's control panel, but I have not tested whether this will work.


Performance

Obviously the framerate should be low on a laptop on a maxed out game from 2014? Wrong.

 

Yes, this is correct. A laptop (one made for gaming though) can run this game at a minimum of approximately 160 FPS. Although, you wouldn't really expect anything different from a bare-minimum port like this.

This data was gathered by running a 60 second benchmark in Fraps and walking a roughly planned route in the level 'Drug Den' until the benchmarking process had competed.

Gameplay and Controls

The graphics may not be up to par, but at least it plays like Human Revolution, right?

Wrong again. This game has very clunky controls that try to imitate Human Revolution, but fall flat. Yes, your hotbar is still there and augmentations are still mapped to the function keys, but the game does not teach you this.

Instead, the terribly boring tutorial introduces you to the way tablets play it. To choose a grenade, hold down G and use the scroll wheel to choose what you want. That's right, not on your hotbar (which is only for weapons), but you have to open a sub-menu to choose your grenade.

The cover system is probably the most accurate control (besides hacking) to Human Revolution. It works, let's just leave it at that.

Combat, on the other hand, is utterly broken. Enemies (which have very dumb AI) can soak up shotgun blasts at point blank range, the takedown animations are clunky, and the game has a recoil system that zooms your FOV in and then out, which just messes with your head.

Also, controls cannot be rebound. The game does support Xinput based controllers as an alternate control scheme if you happen to have one handy.


Interface

The interface in game looks very similar to Human Revolution, only scaled bigger than HR had at a 1080p resolution. The menus, however, are a clunky mess and buttons can take multiple clicks to register. This is big tablet size buttons we are talking about, not some tiny little hyperlink.

Issues and Other Information

This game does have its fair share of bugs. The cover system does not work properly all the time and the sound frequently drops, leaving you to miss out on vital story dialogue or even NPC dialogue, which cannot even be seen with subtitles enabled as it is shown for a split second.

Deus Ex: Invisible War was criticised for having small levels with loading in between. It should be noted that it is the same with this game, only the levels are much smaller scale than Invisible War's. Another technical criticism that stands out it the lip sync and animations. I do not know what quality this is for an iOS game, but for a PC game in 2014, it is unacceptable. The quality of animations look comparable to Invisible War, only with slight improvement.

Another note is that you can buy items whenever you like in the pause menu, provided you have the credits. Square Enix should be commended for removing the microtransactions from this menu, however.

And on a final note, I would recommend that if you do play this game, read the novel Icarus Effect by James Swallow beforehand, as this game is a direct sequel. The game is also meant to be episodic, but only the first episode has been released with no information on a second episode.


Conclusion

As an overall experience, due to the nature of this port, it would be wise to avoid this game until it goes on sale, and even then only if you are a massive fan of the Deus Ex franchise. Yes, it is a tablet port, yes, Square Enix did deliver what they promised, but good enough is just simply not good enough for this game. A poor effort was put into this port, and for an extra $10, I would recommend you get the Director's Cut of Human Revolution instead of this until it goes on sale and is fixed up.

This is a shame, especially since Assassin's Creed Liberation HD lived up to its potential and the recently released port of Batman: Arkham Origins Blackgate seems to be slightly above average, and this game does come from a well praised franchise of games. We have seen some decent ports from handheld and mobile devices before, but this would have to be in the lazily and/or poorly ported pile, and it shows that adding a name to something does not make it any good.