this year was to say that it had taken Deus Ex: Mankind Divided down a
totally new art direction, replacing its now-trademark black and gold
sheen with a pink and white, low-poly look. It turns out no one got the
joke. It wasn’t that Eidos wouldn’t be doing this - it’s that it’s
actually way more than a change in simple art direction.
Welcome to Breach, a new mode that sits alongside Campaign
on the game’s new menu. It’s a self-contained storyline that takes Deus
Ex’s key components and tweaks them for a faster, more arcade-y
experience than you’d expect from the chilly, clever series. And a fair
bit of it wears that fetching cotton candy palette, just for kicks.
As you’ll no doubt have seen from Eidos Montreal’s many
announcements, it’s currently obsessed with the idea of a Deus Ex
Universe. You can tell because it keeps writing “Deus Ex Universe” on
things, its dystopian setting spilling over into spin-off games,
backstory advertising, even a fashion line. Breach comes with a similar
thrust, taking place in the same time period as Adam Jensen’s latest
mopey jaunt, but following its own story path.
Taking on the role of a “Ripper” - hackers who have made
Virtual Reality their means of attack on the world’s biggest, shadiest
corporations - you quickly find yourself sneaking through dangerous
servers, uncovering the indiscretions of the world’s most powerful
people, even investigating unsolved crimes and conspiracies for bereaved
loved ones as a sort of side-line business.
If you stop to think about it all for more than a few
seconds, it quickly tumbles into silliness. Where it aims for a
Matrix-meets-Tron vibe, it comes off more like the Comedy Bang! Bang! sketch where tweets in VR Land are just massive blue bricks.
I mean, I get that enemy AI represents anti-virus programmes of some
kind, but what’s that big white crate I moved to get into a vent? Just
loads of holiday Facebook photos some perv downloaded and hid on a
server?
Thankfully, it’s very easy to ignore the set-up when the
game itself is such fun. Breach is, above all other things, smart. It
takes the building blocks of Deus Ex’s action gameplay, that fluid mix
of combat and stealth, and gives them a new context based around
efficiency, style and, most of all, speed. Deus Ex now has an officially
sanctioned speedrunning mode. What a world.
The set up is this: your path through Breach’s story is set
across a map of servers (not unlike the main game’s hacking mini-game
in appearance) - each server is an individual level, usually filled with
data points that need to be syphoned and, once you’ve nabbed all your
allotted data, you’re forced to make a quick escape back to your entry
point as the system notices and throws all the defences it’s got at you.
For the player’s part they are, essentially, a shiny,
digitised Adam Jensen, equipped with firearms, activated augmentations
and a massive, varied upgrade tree. The difference here is that you’ll
be asked not to specialise your approach, but adapt to a variety of
situations. Some levels will prioritise stealth given the huge defences
laid against you, while others will abandon the data point structure
entirely and simply tell you clear out every enemy AI inside before you
can leave again. Most interestingly, you don’t simply get stronger over
time - a “Memory” limit puts a stopper on how many augmentations you can
slap on before entering a server, so researching what’s coming is key
in more difficult situations.
Even after a short time with the mode, it feels like a
brilliant recycling of the game’s existing strengths, using what’s
already available to make something new and truly distinct.
Leaderboards, achievement medals and difficulty modifiers (making
elements of the level harder for a points boost upon success, for
example) shake up how you play, putting you in direct competition with
friends and strangers and forcing you to analyse how you’re playing each
time you head into a level.
The only potential stumbling block here comes in the form
of the mode’s reward method. Booster packs of items - which can include
firearms, special ammo types, augmentation upgrade points and more -
signal a move into microtransaction territory (although they can be
bought with credits earned as you play). That leaves the potential for a
bottleneck, as you reach a server that’s simply too tough with the
equipment you have, forcing you to grind or pay until you pop something
useful enough.
Whether that turns out to become the case will only become
clear after some serious time with the game, but Eidos Montreal’s
commitment to making this a “live” game mode - updating it regularly
with new features and levels - inspires at least some hope that any
initial problems will be addressed.
As it is, Breach is a perfect quick-fix next to Campaign’s
expected long haul and, certainly for myself, going back to the main
game afterwards felt like having to adjust to far more sedate experience
- Breach has the outlook of a good mobile game, immediate and
satisfying, but the trappings of a console game in the sheer breadth of
toys you’re given to play with. Turning Deus Ex into a
speedrun-obsessed, bitesize, online-connected sounds like an April Fools
joke - I’m serious when I say it’s great.
No comments:
Post a Comment