Deus Ex Go
You would be forgiven for thinking that Deus Ex go is the odd one out, that there’s no way that a game as reliant on freedom, exploration, and variable options as the Deus Ex games can be replicated in turn-based puzzle format…but you would be surprised.
As ever, the game’s color palette and soundtrack offer an experience packed with character, and conveying the same tech-induced clinical paranoia of the console series. Watching the smoothly defined (and appropriately block-colored) Adam Jensen as he sleuths through corridors and takes down enemies with his nanoblades is utterly charming, and the game utilizes the interconnected-triangles motif first stylized in Human Revolution.
The one elusive element that Deus Ex champions is choice, while the Go series has single set solutions to each level. It’s hardly a happy marriage. However, it is within the framework of each level that freedom reveals itself. Freedom born of experimentation makes you feel as free as in any Deus Ex game.
Jensen’s tools are reproduced wholesale, giving you a plethora of different approaches to experiment with: computer hacking, invisibility, and brutal take downs all give you options with which to sleuth your way past guards, sentry bots, and track down your mission objectives. It’s the most complex of the three, and it’s with the experimentation that Deus Ex Go truly captures the freedom of the series. Hacking floor panels to trap opposing guards, or looping back around on yourself to knock them down; stamping out turrets, or cloaking to move past them; trapping an alerted enemy behind a passive one, effectively freezing him. Deus Ex Go will make you feel as though you have truly exploited the system it’s presented you with, and it’s this emergent feel that hearkens so effectively back to the halcyon days of the PC original.
