Deus Ex: The Fall

My honest first reaction after finishing The Fall was one specific flavor of sadness: the kind you feel when a universe you love gets treated as a revenue experiment. This is a PC port of a 2013 iOS tablet game, and that origin story haunts every single minute of play. The core loop asks you to slip into the augmented boots of Ben Saxon, an ex-Tyrant mercenary running low on Neuropozyne in the backstreets of Panama City. The premise is actually solid canon: the events unfold during the six-month window when Adam Jensen is recovering from surgery at the start of Human Revolution, and Saxon's ties to the Icarus Effect novel give lore-hungry players a thin but genuine thread to pull. If you have read that novel, you will recognize names, faces, and enough connective tissue to feel mildly rewarded. The augmentation system is present but stripped. You earn Praxis points to unlock skills including Cloak, Stealth Dash, Armor, and a suite of passive hacking abilities. The familiar amber-drenched visual aesthetic carries over, and Panama City does function as a small hub with side quests, hackable terminals, air ducts, and locked doors begging to be bypassed. On that narrow checklist, The Fall is technically a Deus Ex game. The problem is that the mobile-first design philosophy gutted every system that makes the series worth replaying. There is no jump button, so vertical exploration is almost nonexistent. Bodies dissolve seconds after a takedown, removing any need for actual stealth discipline. Worst of all, a persistent in-game shop lets you purchase weapons and healing items at any moment, which collapses the resource tension that normally forces interesting decisions. The AI patrols in slow, predictable loops and barely reacts to failed stealth attempts in any consistent way. On PC, the port itself compounds every design flaw with technical embarrassment. Keyboard controls cannot be rebound, mouse sensitivity feels sluggish even at maximum settings, and menu interactions regularly require multiple clicks to register. Character models are low-poly by 2014 standards, let alone today. Sound effects drop out at random, including during cutscenes where you need dialogue to understand your objectives. The writing that remains audible is flat: NPCs exist as props rather than people, and Saxon himself, despite a decent enough voice performance, is given too little runtime to become genuinely compelling. The story ends on a cliffhanger that was never resolved. The sequel content simply did not happen on PC. Here is the narrow honest case for playing it anyway: if you are a Deus Ex completionist who has already read Icarus Effect and wants every canonical beat accounted for, The Fall delivers a short, imperfect but contextually interesting slice of that world. The augmentation freedom, even in its stripped form, means you can ghost through most encounters with a stealth-and-hacking build or go loud with combat augs, and there is mild satisfaction in finding alternate routes through the cramped zones. But build variety holds up for roughly one playthrough of about four hours, and there is zero reason to return. For everyone else, Human Revolution and Mankind Divided are right there, fully realized, and they make this feel like a rehearsal that never made it to opening night.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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