{"id":83,"date":"2012-04-30T18:47:42","date_gmt":"2012-04-30T18:47:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.subtleallusion.com\/blog\/?p=83"},"modified":"2012-05-02T12:41:00","modified_gmt":"2012-05-02T12:41:00","slug":"deus-ex","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.subtleallusion.com\/blog\/?p=83","title":{"rendered":"Deus Ex"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-large wp-image-85\" title=\"Deus Ex\" src=\"http:\/\/www.subtleallusion.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/04\/deus-ex.jpg\" alt=\"Deus Ex\" width=\"546\" height=\"126\" srcset=\"http:\/\/www.subtleallusion.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/04\/deus-ex.jpg 546w, http:\/\/www.subtleallusion.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/04\/deus-ex-150x34.jpg 150w, http:\/\/www.subtleallusion.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/04\/deus-ex-300x69.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 546px) 100vw, 546px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Disclaimer: the first part of this was written months and months ago in a fit of rage:<\/p>\n<p>Disclaimer 2: Spoilers follow:<\/p>\n<p>So due to Eidos&#8217; frankly terrible game design, I have a choice between continuing (and failing) to attempt to kill this third boss and eventually gouging out my eyes and recreating a scene from Event Horizon, or restarting the game and playing the last 15+ hours from the start because my save pair only extends back an hour (a length of time that in most games, is enough to save from any fatal mistake)<\/p>\n<p>Little did I know there&#8217;d be a choice four hours before the consequences that screw you over. Four hours&#8230; Really Eidos? You really want to separate a choice with it&#8217;s consequences by four hours of gameplay so that any chance of reloading a save to make the other choice is gone?<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Penny Arcade have summed it up nicely (<a href=\"http:\/\/penny-arcade.com\/comic\/2011\/9\/2\">Link to that<\/a>)<br \/>\nThe bosses in Deus Ex can all tank well over fifty direct shots to the chest, on top of that, the only way to tackle them is pretty much a head on fire fight with minimal cover and absolutely zero stealthing options. Which makes them like a completely separate game.<\/p>\n<p>Through out the entire game I&#8217;ve been outfitting myself for stealth, playing how I enjoy it, and the game has actually been rewarding me for it, a lot. I get bonus points for making headshots, I get bonus points for non-lethal kils, the enemies don&#8217;t know where I made my shot from because I use a silencer on my pistol (other than the revolver, the only weapon I&#8217;d choose to use, but ammo is sparse) allowing me to get another few kills in before the guards have any clue where I am.<\/p>\n<p>Playing stealthily is an amazingly rewarding and effective way to play the game. I never ever have to engage the enemy in a head on firefight, so I don&#8217;t have any of the damage reduction augs, or the typhoon (human-grenade) aug, or have any grenades stockpiled, so when it comes to the boss fights I find myself criminally underpowered.<\/p>\n<p>Fortunately for me the first boss glitched out and stood still allowing me to pump shotgun shells into him whenever he was reloading.<\/p>\n<p>Then the second boss was wiping the floor with me time after time until I realised I could just run in a circle around the room and as long as I kept up with her, she&#8217;d also run in a circle and never actually attack me. So I just shot her in the back (close range with a shotgun) but the 40 shots I had at the start of the fight weren&#8217;t enough: I had to break the cycle and grab some ammo from the side. If I&#8217;d dedicated more of my inventory to shotgun ammo, I could easily have killed her without taking any damage because of the poor design, Still though, 50 shots in the back when the rest of the game I&#8217;m taking out over a third of enemies with headshots is more than just a bit stupid.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m now at the third of these terrible boss fights and I&#8217;ve not found any glitches or exploitable patterns. Even if I had the typhoon aug or damage reduction augs they&#8217;d be no good here because of a choice I mistakenly made over four hours of play earlier. I have no augs to use. My vision is VERY blurred, I have no indication of how much ammo I have in my gun causing me to have a great opportunity to shoot but having to reload as soon as I start firing. I have no indication of what my health is. And on top of all this, the guy is a grenade-happy invisible man with some kind of plasma gun which deals one hit kills.<\/p>\n<p>Currently I&#8217;ve spent the most frustrating 3+ hours trying to kill this guy, usually dying before I&#8217;ve got 20 clean shots in and he can probably tank 80 or more.<\/p>\n<p>So I have two choices:<\/p>\n<p>Replay the game from the very beginning and make sure to take the other choice, buy the typhoon aug and stock up on frag grenades.<\/p>\n<p>Or continue to destroy my soul in this hopeless battle.<\/p>\n<p>The fact that I haven&#8217;t included giving up on the game all together tells you how good the rest of the game is. If it was anything other than -excellent- I&#8217;d have given up on it. I&#8217;ve done that with several games in the past. The final (I assume) boss in GoW was after a long cut scene and with uninspiring game play and a poor story: what&#8217;s the point? Indiana Jones and the something or other on Wii. For some reason Indi is in a warehouse with Nazis climbing up ladders to get to him and the only way you can stop them is by bashing them off the ladders with a grand piano held by a crane. Cool huh? Well no. As soon as any Nazi gets to the top of a ladder (there are four) he shoots you and it&#8217;s game over. This would be fine if it weren&#8217;t for one simple fact: Indi has a gun. The inability to shoot back. The stupid and pointless limitation of not being able to shoot back (or pre-emptively) combined with the frustratingly fiddly piano controls got me very frustrated and I gave up (in fits of cursing).<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;d really like to get past this boss and finish the story, but having to start all over again remove so much motivation that I&#8217;ll probably have to wait well over a month before I can play again. Which makes me sad.<\/p>\n<p>If the boss fights could be removed from Deus Ex: Human Revolution, I would easily go down as Game of the Year for me, however, they can&#8217;t. That relegates it to the worst experience in gaming I&#8217;ve had all year. (That&#8217;s saying something because I played the piss-poor Dead Space PC port this year. I imagine everyone at Visceral Games does their development actually using an Xbox, because there is no way they&#8217;ve ever used or probably even seen a mouse.)<\/p>\n<p>&#8212; Everything that follows was written today after completing the game &#8212;<\/p>\n<p>Now I&#8217;ve finished replaying all of Deus Ex on a harder difficulty setting, I made proper use of quicksaves, allowing my (now three) cyclic save method to extend back hours and hours. But with the hindsight I&#8217;d made the &#8216;correct&#8217; choices anyway.<\/p>\n<p>I can honestly say it&#8217;s been a <em>lot<\/em>\u00c2\u00a0more fun to play this time, especially as I decided to omit the boss fights by changing the difficulty down from hard to easy when they started and using the typhoon blast. It&#8217;s lovely this way.<\/p>\n<p>Great game, great story, terrible ending, terrible boss fights. I highly recommend it, just make sure you&#8217;re aware of the totally out of place boss fights.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Disclaimer: the first part of this was written months and months ago in a fit of rage: Disclaimer 2: Spoilers follow: So due to Eidos&#8217; frankly terrible game design, I have a choice between continuing (and failing) to attempt to kill this third boss and eventually gouging out my eyes and recreating a scene from [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,46],"tags":[76,71,73,72,77,74,35,75],"class_list":["post-83","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-game-review","category-rants","tag-boss","tag-deus-ex","tag-deus-ex-human-revolution","tag-dxhr","tag-eidos","tag-rant","tag-review","tag-stealth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.subtleallusion.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.subtleallusion.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.subtleallusion.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.subtleallusion.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.subtleallusion.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=83"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.subtleallusion.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.subtleallusion.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=83"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.subtleallusion.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=83"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.subtleallusion.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=83"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}