Deus Ex Go

Square Enix’s GO series has become one of the must-play franchises on mobile in the past few years. The first game, Hitman GO, was an inspired adaptation of Hitman’s sandbox puzzle gameplay into a turn-based affair presented in a charming board game aesthetic. The follow-up, Lara Croft GO, kept the deliberate turn-based skeleton but then added action-adventure trappings that fit well with Tomb Raiders of old. The latest game, Deus Ex GO, attempts to fit a GO game onto the well-worn cyberpunk series, and for the most part succeeds. Still, the GO formula is starting to get a little stale, and it seems that Adam Jensen might need a few more augments to step outside of Agent 47 and Lady Croft’s shadow.

In Deus Ex Go, players must guide series protagonist Adam Jensen through a gauntlet of puzzles in order to get him closer to his objective. By swiping in the desired direction, Jensen moves from node to node in the level. Scattered throughout the levels are enemies and obstacles that must be dealt with in order to progress. Players are able to attack enemies, stealthily move past foes, and hack machinery. Figuring out the correct application of these abilities makes up the core of the game’s experience. Like previous GO games, the first third of the game gets you used to the basics, the middle has you thinking outside the box with regards to the game’s mechanics, and the final third lets you sink or swim based on what you’ve learned. It remains a satisfying ramp up, although at this point GO veterans will likely blaze through the first half with ease.

Enemies for the most part are re-skinned versions of previous GO adversaries. There’s the Metal Gear looking robot that patrols back and forth in a straight line, there’s the guard that remains stationary but will pursue Jensen should he appear in their line-of-site, and there’s the spider enemy that will kill our hero should he get too close. The only truly new enemy type in the game is a drone that will fire missiles at the player’s last known location, although it doesn’t get introduced until the last chapter. The designs of these enemies are perfectly fine and fit well with the near-future trappings of Deus Ex’s world, but none have the personality of Lara Croft GO’s rogues gallery. Indeed, the bland enemies quickly become overshadowed by Adam Jensen’s toolbox of abilities.

The key differentiator of Deus Ex GO from its predecessors is directly tied to the protagonist’s cybernetic enhancements, known as augments. Like the main Deus Ex games, Jensen’s augments allow him to do cool cyberpunk things like hack computers, become invisible, and stun enemies from afar. The bulk of the puzzles will involve hacking of sentry guns, drones, and rotating platforms. To do so the player must move Jensen to a node with a computer terminal and then draw a line from the terminal to the device that needs to be hacked. The catch here is that certain enemies will be equipped with an EMP device that will break the hack should they cross the line the player has drawn. Players can avoid this by taking out EMP enemies or by drawing their lines in creative ways, but advanced puzzles will require you to time enemy movements just right so that they break the hack at opportune moments. The result is not all that different from Lara Croft GO’s tendency to get enemies to trigger switches, but it feels a bit more open simply because you are the one setting the location of the “switch”.

The remainder of Jensen’s abilities are activated once he picks up a battery located in certain levels. These batteries allow Jensen’s cooler augments to be used, and with them he’s able to cloak to get past guards, remotely hack terminals, and use a stun gun on enemies. While they do add an interesting strategic layer to the gameplay, they can get frustrating later in the game. When batteries are first introduced, players are only able to cloak, and this gives them a straightforward use. Furthermore, batteries in early maps reappear once consumed which gives some amount of leeway if you use them incorrectly. However, in the late game each battery pickup gives you many possible uses and they don’t reappear once consumed. This results in players running into unwinnable conditions for simply experimenting with the mechanics, necessitating a restart. Normally this wouldn’t be that bad, but the game inexplicably considers the battery “consumed” when I remotely select a terminal to bring up the hacking overlay only to discover that I have no options to hack. It’s a weird “gotcha” moment that feels incongruous with the ethos of previous GO games, where all the information needed to solve a puzzle is always presented clearly to the player. Add to that the triangular arrangement of nodes not always registering my swipes correctly (an issue not present in the square arrangements of previous GO games), and I found myself in situations where I had mentally solved the puzzle but kept failing to execute on it.

Visually the game looks fine on my iPhone 5c, although it feels like a step back from previous GO games. I can’t necessarily blame the developers here, as Deus Ex’s world revolves around corporate intrigue in cramped offices, and including lush jungles or ancient temples may have been a stretch for the brand. The game looks how you would expect a top-down, minimalist Deus Ex game to look like and nothing more. Adam Jensen himself animates quite nicely, and his enemy takedowns look just like his melee attacks in the main games. Overall, don’t expect to be blown away with scale and color like in Lara Croft GO, or be charmed by a complementary take on the series like in Hitman GO.

There’s a pretty substantive story in Deus Ex GO involving the usual corporate shenanigans inherent to the franchise. The game is set up as a prequel to Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, and characters from that game appear here to advise Jensen as he completes his mission. After completing each set of levels, Jensen and his companions discuss the story’s events as talking heads. There doesn’t seem to be much (if any) voice acting in the game, so you’ll simply be reading what is being said. I honestly could not tell you what the story was about, and I can’t help but feel that a less-is-more approach to the storytelling would have helped it make more of an impression. One of the most charming things about previous GO games was the presentation of the story in only the broadest of strokes. Agent 47 is tasked with eliminating a series of targets in a variety of environments, and Lara Croft seeks a treasure in a temple guarded by a scary snake monster. It would have been nice to see Adam Jensen wordlessly discover a conspiracy that is left to the player’s imagination to fill in, but alas that is not to be.

I can’t help but think that Deus Ex GO was created from a different set of principles than its predecessors. Whereas Hitman GO and Lara Croft GO felt like the developers were exploring non-traditional takes on established franchises, Deus Ex GO feels like an exercise in brand extension. This is best exemplified by the game giving you items to use in Mankind Divided, the “real” Deus Ex game coming out almost simultaneously with this mobile release. That’s not to say that Deus Ex GO isn’t worth playing, however. There’s plenty of well designed puzzles to solve and the developers will be offering a steady drip of new levels for players to tackle in the coming weeks and months. If you’ve been a fan of the GO series, it’s still worth a pick up, but for newcomers I recommend checking out the older games first.