Dex

After the disappoinment that Eidos gave us with Deus Ex: MD, this came as a nice surprise. It's Deus Ex 2D with a nice story, meaningful auguments and pleasant music. I love it!

The idea and setting are creativ and "new". The storytopics are adult (Patented Food, Drugabuse, Sex sells, etc.) Now to the Problems i expirienced with this game: You talk to people with multiple choice answers like in an adventure. Sadly the field where you can click on dont work sometimes, so your forced to talk about topic and opinions which you dont support as a person. The translation of text is good, voices are only english and ok too. Then there is the "find the location" Problem. The map is minimalistic and i searched for ages for a clinic to get augmentation but didnt find it. That said i give 3 stars. With a few bugsfixes and a better mapsystem this game could get 4 maybe 5

The good: + very good story, writing and excellent cyberpunk atmosphere + good 2D graphics and ok soundtrack The bad: - the combat and the general lack of challenge - animations are rather basic Think of this game of something that tries to be a 2D/Platformer Deus Ex. It's basically and adventure game, around which an action game has been wrapped up, but where the adventure part is at times brilliant, the action part is generally weak. The story would have worked probably better in a point-and-click adventure. It's still there, though, so if you ignore the action sequences and play the game for the story and the setting, you can still enjoy it. Some mechanics (concealment) seem borrowed from Mark of the Ninja, but Dex is very far from that perfection. While graphics are good in general, animations are much less inspiring. The RPG aspects are rather generic, weapons are totally forgettable since hand-to-hand is about as good. Fights remind Double Dragon but they aren't as challenging. If I were to rate the game as an action game I'd give it one star, so it's clear it hasn't been the action that made me keep playing. The story and the writing, instead, iare almost on the level of Shadowrun:Dragonfall, that is very good. The ending is disappointing: there are different decisions you can make, just as in SR:DF, but differently from that game, the game doesn't care to explain what changes thereafter. It's just as if the endings haven't been properly finished by the development team. Bottom line, this game stays definitely below Deus Ex and SR:DF in the list of my favorite cyberpunk games, but for those who like the genre and play for the story and good writing, it's still a very good title, just don't expect much as an action game.

So much pleasure playing Dex! With a story that could have been written by David Icke himself. At first, I hated the "hacking" parts as much as I loved the "real life" game part. After all, those hacking cessions are just some arcade action game feeling like a pub gaming machine from the 80s. But I have come to enjoy this to, after forcing myself to put experience points into hacking talents. The art, the writing, the gameplay... All a real work of love and talent from intelligent devs. Bravo!

The elements we have seen before - except now we care about them. The voice acting in particular, makes you want to really listen to every character - it is not just filler - it is what we came here for, right? To have a story? Just like at the core of cyberpunk there's a transcendence of humanity over technological omnipotence - here I think also, the creators take existing themes but give them a flow and authenticity that reaches the player and makes them care. You can tell the writer is using his own thoughts and ideas - not just repeating tropes. I can't come up with anything more accurate than to say this game really has a pulse