Deus Ex - Why doesn't everyone love cyborgs?

Signal Interrupted

 "Deus Ex: Mankind Divided" has been on my radar for a few years now. Square Enix's incredible first foray into the Deus Ex universe with "Human Revolution" scratched the itch that I didn't even know I had until I played it. Ion Storm's "Deus Ex" was a showcase in environmental storytelling, letting the player figure out what had happened or where to go by observing the room they were in, and Human Revolution was an up-rezzed, golden glowing homage to the stealth mechanics and lateral thinking that made the franchise so good to begin with. Despite being marred with some iffy combat mechanics (that didn't bother me because I play Deus Ex all stealthy-like) and some questionable boss-battle design (that did bother me, because I was spec'd for stealth and not combat), the story and setting ensured that I was going to play any sequel to Human Revolution. Oddly enough, one of the minds behind Deus Ex's incredible design; Harvey Smith is presently finishing off Dishonored 2, which is the only other game I can see dethroning DEMD as my game of the year. I guess time will tell.

The aesthetic design of the different environments is incredible.

So with a legacy as strong as Deus Ex's, it became my most anticipated game of this year. Of course between losing my job and desperately scrambling to find something to keep me afloat, my mind was nowhere near playing games for fun. I completely forgot about DEMD until my brother mentioned it in passing, saying he was happy it looked like the game would be living up to expectations. Waiting on money coming through and working a job and a half to keep myself busy, I felt horrendous that I wouldn't be able to justify the purchase of a new game to myself. When the 9+/10 reviews started to roll in, I knew I was likely to crack, and I justified it to myself (and my long-suffering wife) that I really needed to just escape for a while, and while Fallout 4 has new DLC, I needed a more engaging story; the kind of story that DEMD delivers.

The Details Make The Design

 When it comes to world-building, Deus Ex has taken a look at the ways humanity is developing (or regressing, some might say), and is able to craft a cyberpunk dystopia that feels uncomfortably close to an imaginable future. The whole planet has developed from the end of Human Revolution, with humanity divided along the lines of "natural" and "augmented" people, with the naturals persecuting the augmented for a number of reasons, all of which are outlined in a 12 minute intro video that goes over the events of Human Revolution. This backdrop is used expertly to allow players to guide their stoic (some might say "robotic") character through a maze of corporate intrigue, political corruption, brutal law enforcement and as somewhat ill-advised writing labels it; "mechanical apartheid". 

The augmented ghetto known as "Golem" feels like classic Cyberpunk.

The story is great, although it's hard to go into any detail without risk of spoiling it for those who haven't played it yet, or for those who are planning on picking up Human Revolution; a recourse that I whole-heartedly endorse! Instead, I want to cover the commitment to detail and storytelling that the designers decided to showcase through their environments.

I don't think I am the only one who appreciates the incredible design of Deus Ex's spaces. From the cozy corners of your engineer's underground lab & bedroom to the cramped high-rise alleyways of Golem, the level designers have crafted an incredible space to play in. Every space feels useful, and often tells a story. The disparity between the rich and poor is put on show in a way that doesn't feel tired or preachy, despite being a central plot-point. While dialogue also conveys the differences between the poor and the rich, it's the living environments where the player can rake around and get a real feel for who's living in 2029 Prague.

Beautiful interior design with high ceilings, minimalist design and little reading cubby-holes make me think that Deus Ex's level designers must be contract architects.

For example, almost every palacial upmarket penthouse has a PC in it that players can hack into and snoop around in the affairs of major characters, NPC's and sometimes even dead bodies who are lying next to the PC you're reading from. The content you're likely to read can involve child custody battles, apologetic emails from parents to now-dead drug addicts and letters from the corrupt corporate body, extorting people for money and making you feel so bad about stealing someone's credits that you drop all your pilfered beer and spirits so that they can at least get pissed when they find out that the trenchcoated weirdo with the naff-looking sunglasses has robbed them blind and read their emails for a laugh. Of course, while the player might appreciate these little snippets of seemingly useless flavour text, the aesthetic design of the city as a whole serves the classic gaming adage of "show, don't tell" and what a show the city puts on. The "Golem" environment feels like classic Cyberpunk, with dark alleyways, barely lit by flashing neon signs, beggars that hack and cough, rowdy locals and aggressive police officers. Naturally the Cyberpunk setting demands that the locals all have robotic limbs. It's a bleak place, but it's damn cool to visit.

Jensen's base of operations has several departments, most of which have cool high-tech looking goodies like this forensic scanner.

More Time in The Vents Than Newt

As well as the obvious visual appeal of Deus Ex's environmental design, the player agency that has always been at the core of the series is served so well by the diversity and depth that the game provides. Every time I needed to get into somewhere I wasn't meant to be, I found that there were normally three options:

1. Hack your way in.

2. Find a vent and creep in like a robotic John Mclean.

3. SHOOT EVERYTHING

Of course, there are sometimes opportunities to talk around problems, or maybe a case for combining some of all the different techniques, but I found myself crawling around in the vents for what felt like a third of the game. The augmentation skill-tree will often dictate what route you can take, with the hacking, traversal and combat skills all requiring sacrifices to be made in other departments to develop. I made myself a half-decent hacker with springy legs that let me jump up high and that sorted most of the puzzles I'd been dealing with. Of course, choice is the real take-away here and while the combat in DEMD is an improvement from HR, it should be mentioned that you are easily killed if you don't have the super-soldier augmentations installed. For all his spiked arm-blades and guns, Adam Jensen collapses under a hail of gunfire if you've stuck all your points into making him some kind of cross between the Blue Gene supercomputer and a pogo stick.

Every good counter-terrorism unit has a command room with lots of monitors, right?

DEMD isn't without its faults mind you, and the open nature of many of the environments are poorly served by some badly signposted environments, but sometimes a hunt to find the next area can lead you to discovering more of the incredible environments that Eidos Montreal have put in the game. The lip-syncing for voice-over is poor, but I am a culprit of sticking on subtitles and skipping through the very well voice acted lines as soon as I've read them. When compared to games like Mass Effect or Fallout, Deus Ex's writing is so brilliantly done that I never found myself stuck between a rock and a hard place, but the out-of-sync faces and the lego hair that clips through character's clothes is unfortunate and detracts from the performance.

In the end, it's a great game for people who like their story-driven RPGs, and the choice to play through the game as a stealth shooter or just a massive cyberpunk gunfight is an example in branching gameplay that rewards players with unique outcomes depending on how they complete a given task. If you like "doing it your way" then Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is worth your time.

Brashcast Episode 64: SDCC Trailer Bonanza, plus Star Trek & Beyond!

So this is mostly a tester for my blog to see how easy it is to host a podcast on my new website. Let's have a look-see and make sure it works, yeah? We can do it together, come on now...

Respawn

sunset od

Well it's been a while. I set up a blog a couple of years ago, with the intention of logging my thoughts regarding videogames; from opinion pieces on gaming culture to the discussing the nuances of specific games. That hasn't gone so well, I guess. For a nerd's blog, so far it's all about me and my now wife wandering around northern Italy, searching for gluten-free pizza and hoping to avoid being sunburnt as we are eaten alive by insects.

While these issues are still very relevant to me (the pizza especially), I figured it was time to give my blog a real chance, and even if nobody but me and a random guy who searched for the words "gluten-free pizza" reads it, I like the thought of being able to log my thoughts on an industry that I have followed for a long time as an outsider, and in the last few years have been lucky enough to enjoy from the perspective of a game developer. So I'm sorry my coeliac pizza loving friend, but I hope you like games, 'cos for now I'm all about dem vidjagames. (Stick around though, I'm off to Barcelona and Girona in October).

So as I said, this blog is primarily a journal where I can write down my thoughts on the modern gaming industry. I am an aspiring writer, as well as an aspiring games designer, and I like to think that even if it's not narrative, writing a blog will hopefully help me to keep my writing skills sharp, or at least inspire me to write more for my narrative projects. It will also serve as an outlet for my nerdiness. I am acutely aware that while I have a lot of nerdy friends on social media, there are also a lot of my family and friends who have no interest in videogames, and I worry that my annual E3 outbursts that normally end in me appearing to talk to myself will inevitably alienate people who have no idea who Palmer Luckey is.

ross blog

With all the preamble out of the way, I want to get started by mentioning how good it's been to get a week off. It was my birthday last Tuesday and I also had family visiting from the USA at the end of June / start of July, so I decided to take some time off. While my focus was definitely on seeing my family, some of whom I haven't seen for over half a decade, I was also looking forward to getting some time to focus on my back catalogue, which is ever-growing now that I have converted to PC gaming.

Can I just say that the major advantage to PC gaming isn't "the sensitivity of mouse and keyboard" or "the increased power"; it's the price of games. I will sometimes find myself buying games that I have already completed because they're so damn cheap. I guess this is the pitfall that Steam sales are good at capitalizing on, but I'm honestly shocked at the disparity between digital sales prices for games on Xbox Live Marketplace and Steam or CDkeys.com. Of course, PCs are significantly more expensive as an investment, and they require a certain level of technical know-how...but I digress, that's not an interesting topic.

So approaching this little holiday that I've made for myself, I am looking forward to playing two things most of all.

1. Witcher 3's "Blood and Wine" expansion.
2. Fallout 4's "Far Harbour" expansion.

It turns out that I hardly played any of the Witcher 3, and to be fair, Fallout 4 is easier to leave and come back to, as every month seems to bring new patches that fix significant bugs, and the missions are modular enough that the story thread can be lost and re-found later on. The reason I didn't play any of these games is largely because I have awesome friends who buy games at birthdays, but also because I wanted to give Insomniac Games' "Sunset Overdrive" a shot and it really sucked me in! I ended up spending quite a long time in Sunset city; grinding, bouncing and shooting my way over the rooftops in a game that I never thought I'd play until it came up for Xbox's "Games With Gold" campaign recently, and I decided to try it out. On top of Sunset Overdrive, I also played and finished Campo Santo's beautifully rendered and performed "Firewatch" and a hefty chunk of ID Software's "DOOM". I'm not sure if it's meant to have all block-capitals, but from the time I've spent with it, I think it's earned the right to be presented as a game that is shouting for attention. It's a brash game, with all the heavy-metal angst and album cover artwork that one would expect from the reboot/next iteration of ID's 1993 first-person shooter.

These three games offer a very different range of experiences, although reflecting on some of the similarities between DOOM and Sunset Overdrive have left me wondering if they've both been approached with much the same design tenets that have loaned themselves so well to creating action-packed and knowingly over-the-top gameplay that is capable of leaving players so satisfied with their experience that they can't help but smile as they tear around the environment, guns blazing, as bad guys explode into needlessly, but satisfyingly visceral (and I mean visceral in the literal sense) gibbets.

I didn't expect to like Sunset Overdrive that much, to be honest. I am a big fan of Insomniac's "Ratchet and Clank" series, especially the range of weapons that they tend to offer, but I knew that this was an open-world traversal game, similar to the Crackdown series or perhaps even Spiderman (which turns out to be the next franchise that Insomniac is set to tackle). I have played open world third person superhero games for years, with vivid memories of enjoying swinging around New York's Central Park in Spiderman 2 (but where are the webs connected to?) but I always get turned off by the learning curve and the relatively weak character that you have to start with to make the evolution of your character interesting and engaging. It happened with Crackdown and it worried me about Sunset.

I needn't have worried; Sunset may have a bit of a learning curve when it comes to traversing the environment, but it seems like right from the start, there's something new to shoot, climb on or detonate. As someone who likes to feel challenged, but not overwhelmed, I was a bit nervous at first, with the myriad of ridiculous weapons (that I'm worried Insomniac are developing for real in-house) being a lot of fun to use. There's an automatic slingshot that fires vinyl records like a machine gun, or a weird-lookin' plunger device that allows you to fire exploding teddy bears into the faces of oncoming monsters, who just happen to be humans that have been transformed by drinking too much experimental energy drink. On the topic of the "evil corporation" that makes the energy drink, I can't tell if there's some kind of political commentary going on, mostly due to the game being so ridiculously OTT that it's hard to take it seriously.

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While the weapons and monsters are fun, the game is really set apart by its setting. Sunset City is technically a post-apocalyptic city, controlled by Fizzco, the aforementioned "evil corporation". I've played Fallout, The Last of Us and Mad Max in the last few years, but none of them had a city as vibrant and exciting to traverse as Sunset City. As you learn the techniques that form the backbone of the game, namely grinding on top of the conveniently located cables and figuring out which objects can be bounced on to gain height, you'll find that you can cover great distances at massive speeds without ever touching the ground, making this a city that while enormous, doesn't ever require you to drive a vehicle.

All of this bouncing around is set to a soundtrack that can only be described as "Rockin'" and includes tracks from punk band "The Bronx" who are an alter ego of a favourite band of mine called "Mariachi el Bronx." The mixture of punk and EDM make sure that your head is bopping as you throw your character around the city. This is so profoundly fun, that I found myself unwilling to use the fast-travel system, which is a feature that I use extensively in games such as Skyrim and The Witcher 3; two games where I often play just to immerse myself in the world. When you nail the mechanics of simply getting around, you have done something right!

So during my holiday, I spent a fair bit of time lounging around in my PJs, playing Sunset Overdrive, but when my birthday rolled around I was lucky enough to receive a few gifts from my friends. These gifts were all present on my Steam wishlist, but I still have to hand it to my friends for their good taste. Let's face it, if you're buying someone a game from their wishlist, the first thing you think of is "Ok, which of these looks like something I'd be excited to play?" These games were:

• DOOM
• Firewatch
• Hard West

The more eagle-eyed of you might notice that I haven't mentioned Hard West, but that's largely because I've seen it compared to X-Com:Enemy Unknown, which is a game that ate hours of my time, back in 2012 and has continued to be a fallback game across three separate platforms since then. I am saving it for when I know I can sink my teeth into it. I will undoubtedly be covering it here at some point.

I'll mention DOOM next, as I feel a natural drift from Sunset to DOOM. As I mentioned previously, I think that both games share quite a few similarities in their design philosophy. While I concede that most action games require such staples as "fast pacing", "explosions" and "kick-ass music", these games share a real fraternity on a few different fronts.

The Weapons Rock - I've already covered Sunset's crazy cartoon arsenal that would make Wile E. Coyote's eyes pop a foot out of his head, but DOOM is positioned as the grandson of the formative FPS, meaning they can use the "classic" weapons without having to feel bad about it. You think shotguns, assault rifles and rocket launchers are boring? Well DOOM is able to present them all as familiar companions on a gore-soaked adventure, but they introduce alternate fire modes that make every weapon seem unique and fun to use. This also stops the normal gaming trope of letting the early weapons sit idle in your inventory as you repeatedly wonder why you can't pick up any more ammo for them. I am a good 3 or 4 hours into the game and I still love my trusty shotgun!

AODOOM-INT-SAMPLE-PG-146-600x794

The Enemies Are Gross - Ok, so Sunset has mutated humans that pop when they're shot, often throwing sticky orange goo into the air, causing other mutants to appear. It's pretty gross, and the game's sense of humour is very good at knowingly nodding to it. This does mean that it's "funny-gross" like Tucker & Dale vs Evil, while DOOM goes down the route of "portal to hell, tortured souls and monsters that splinter into meaty chunks of dog food-gross" which I guess can be kinda funny too, although that just puts fuel on the fire of the "videogames desensitise people" argument, I guess.

tucker-vs-dale

No Time To Stop - Unlike many other action games, DOOM's environments are set up in such a way that you cannot stop moving. Enemies will spawn behind you, in areas you thought you just cleared. If you stand still to fight what's ahead of you, there's a real risk of being attacked from behind. Sunset is third-person, which means you're never really caught unawares, but you still need to keep moving to avoid being shot or mauled to death. While this "on or off" approach to gameplay seems somewhat simplistic nowadays, it's actually refreshing to play a pair of games that won't let you relax until you've fought your way clear of your enemies. There's no hunkering down for cover or hiding while your health refills. There is only carnage! DOOM actively encourages getting stuck in at close range with "glory kills" which will reward players with ammo and health drops. The last game I played that had the same approach to "forward, never back" combat was Warhammer 40K's "Space Marine". It was similarly gory and involved chain weapons.

I feel like this is a good place to leave my first blog-post about games, as I've covered two similar but distinct games. In my next post, I'll go on to discuss my experiences with Firewatch, and perhaps offer my opinions on what seems to be causing a lot of hubbub in both gaming and popular culture at the moment: Pokemon Go.

All that and more next time, thank you for reading!

-Roguester