Not knowing when advancing the plot means I won’t ever be back to Prague, I’m exploring the shit out of the starting town first. So I’m employing one of the most world’s most sophisticated suites of cybernetic enhancements in a series of petty burglaries and reading people’s e-mail. Sometimes my hacking gets me a Grey Hat bonus, and sometimes Black Hat. I can’t then tell based on rummaging through people’s shit why it was somehow worse to break into one apartment than another, though I do get some satisfaction out of robbing, say, the prick at the music store who refuses to sell to Augs. Yeah, I can see by his email that he’s an independent business man trying to resist selling out to a big corp. But he was a prick to me when I spoke to him in case he wanted help. Fuck 'em.
It does seem like the side missions are not exactly legion, but then again it may be that it’s absurd when games pack a single neighborhood with lost puppies and treasure troves. You can spend a lot of time screwing around in sewers and second story windows, though.
You always come back to Prague, but it changes so old sidequests usually won’t be available. Basically, you know this is going to happen because you’ll have a mission where you get on a helicopter to go somewhere else.
Does anything I loot get refreshed? Because I’ll run all over and burglarize everybody again if I have to.
I keep getting these codes for safe deposit boxes. I’m currently engaged in trying to figure out anything I can do with this info based on my cybernetically enhanced ability to notice vents. If I run into a cyborg guard who can detect when a vent is standing opened, I’ll be in hot water.
I’m talking about the ones in this bank. I have managed to get into all of them that are occupied, and even one of the three large walk-in corporate vaults though I have no idea where I picked up this Blackwater^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HXe Services^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HAcademi^H^H^H^H^H^H^HBelltower^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HTalos corporate key card.
I finally got on with the plot, and my secret partner asked “You’re in T29 already?” Yeah, sorry, lady. I ran out of unopened vents. Then she calls back later to ask me about planting the bug. Sorry, I was too busy hacking every other computer that I’ve suddenly discovered a treasure trove of. I’m not really even stealing anybody’s shit at this point because I get the impression I’ve already bought the only Praxis kits available for sale. I’m not sure I’m going to need money from now on, since I have a buttload of Tranq darts and I’m not planning on maintaining any other weapons. I retain EMP ammo, in case I later go up against robots, but since I don’t carry the associated weapons, I don’t know that I’ll ever even bring it with me on a mission.
I finished the game and without getting into open spoiler territory, was underwhelmed by the plot.
Graphically, it looks fantastic, but overall I didn’t really feel like anything I did mattered and I was disappointed most of it took place in Prague. The globe-hopping nature is one of the appealing things about Deus Ex and I was hoping to get to visit a more significant location.
And yes, I know there are two missions located elsewhere, but they’re mostly inside and didn’t really make me feel like I was travelling to an exotic location as part of my efforts to unravel a conspiracy.
Also, there was one glaring thing which I’m surprised wasn’t addressed - At one point, Adam has the opportunity to assist the underground newspaper Samizdat.
They ask him to “go and find some dirt on Picus News for us” and Adam ends up breaking into a bank to go through the CEO’s office for some reason.
However, Adam also knows that Picus News presenter Eliza Cassan is actually an AI - yet he chooses not to mention this for some reason. And that information would actually be more significant - and useful to Samizdat - than what he does find in the CEO’s office.
Overall I think it’s a fun game and worth playing, but I don’t think it’s quite as good as Human Revolution.
I am guessing that you didn’t pay too close attention to the background details. I thought it was pretty clear that the bank was a data vault for corporations, using physical storage media instead of safety deposit boxes.
Well, not only does this game not feature lethal boss fights, so far there are no boss fights at all. I’ve just left Prague for the last time, and it looks like there will finally be a boss fight in the end.
Previously, I would have assumed that someone might be temped to pay a buck or two for extra Praxis kits at critical junctures. But so far, playing on normal, I’ve got a dozen unspent. In fact, I’m so jammed with inventory that I carry around just in case, I don’t have room for all the resources I’ve been hoarding.
That’s the one point I’d make that isn’t pretty much covered by Zero Punctuation’s review. But I quite like the game. I’ll probably even buy the Season Pass so I don’t miss out on the part where I finally need so many goddamned BioCells.
I blew most of my load of tranq darts in GARM. Got noticed by one of those jumpy guys, and decided to knock the entire place out instead of trying to hide.
Why can’t Jensen just use his badass to knock people out, instead of energy-sapping augmentations?
The Micro assembler aug is great for these situations. Break down weapons and ammo you don’t need and turn them into Tesla rounds, Biocells or even Multi-tools. I don’t have anything in hacking (other than turret and robot control). I can make the multi tools to hack anything.
Well, I’ve finished the game. Got the Pacifist achievement. I’m still going to go non-leathal in general, but I’m gonna kill that one motherfucker next time.
I don’t know how people who didn’t pick up the invisibility power get through the later stuff without everything going to hell. And even with needing to go both invisible and silent sometimes, I actually didn’t burn through even one of the two piles of BioCells I brought with me.
[spoiler]I won’t say that they totally Dragon Age 2’d the thing, but it was a relatively shorter game which was more like a link between this game and the next than it was a full-borg sequel. But they did have the news report at the end which appeared to be a response to some of the specific decision points you were given, a gimmick that as far as I know was first used in Fallout, and which has been highly appreciated by its fans.
Miller: A straight-shooter, as it turns out. From the beginning I felt he was pushed so hard as a bad guy that he was probably going to turn out to be alright in the end. It then became surprising that you weren’t actually hosed by Juggernaut.
Dr. Shrinkenstein: A plant. (Revealed in the middle of the credits). I don’t think I was particularly clever to see this coming. All named NPCs are under suspicion in a story like this, and if they’d really wanted to surprise me, they’d have made Chang the plant.
Joseph Manderly, Bob Page: I don’t see how they’re going to make sense out of this business with this trilogy as a set of pre-quels to the first game. Surely we must think of this as the set up to an alternaverse take on the events of the original Deus Ex.
I was a little surprised that it turned out to be possible to save the people from bombs and save the muckity-mucks from champagne poisoning. I don’t feel like it was cheezy, though. I actually dislike the forced incompatible dilemmas you get in games these days. I was delighted that I could actually have it both ways. Well, that’s on top of the fact that I was relieved that the game wasn’t forcing me to fight my way to a cutscene about my failure. I do wonder under what conditions it was possible to fail. Perhaps if I hadn’t gotten the defusing device from what’s-her-name?[/spoiler]
Some of this game is very challenging and I like it. I had to abandon my first play through at the GARM facility because I had made shitty upgrade choices. I am now on my second playing and in London trying to figure out how to make this work.
Too many games have been nerfed so it is nice to get a bit of a challenge.
I found that the secret in London is to just go ahead and dump whatever prāxēs you have left into being able to turn invisible. When you’re invisible, apparently, nobody can see the guy you’re choking either. Otherwise, people freak out if you don’t manage to coax security guards into bathrooms before you rabbit-punch them. In the confrontation against the Big Bad, if you use Invisibility to get you to the upper catwalk, nobody can see you and you can take shit out at will. Does that help?
I was really, really disappointed with the final boss fight. I get that people sooked about the boss fights in Human Revolution, but for me, beating the bad guy in Mankind Divided was simply a matter of
Taking cover behind something, waiting until he got close, firing a few EMP rounds from my pistol into him, then executing a takedown on him.
Some of the random goons I fought on the way there were more trouble than that.