Deus Ex: The Fall. And how far they have fallen.

Deus Ex The Fall has fallen, and it's 12 hours I will never get back.

Invisible War and Human Revolution were both an improvement on their respective predecessors in many ways, but The Fall fell well short of all of them.

Yes it was part 1 of an planned episodic series aimed mainly at mobile devices but wow, it's not hard to see why there was only 1 episode. The main problems were not any technical limitations imposed on the target devices.

From the offset the voice acting is terrible, the animation during dialogue was atrocious, and it would not be so much of a problem (previous entires have been a bit meh, but not this bad), but you also have to spend most of the first 30 minutes listening to so much it cannot be ignored.

I mean, why does Ben have to spell out the entire back story in dialogue, then we play the related memory sequence, with even more terribly delivered exposition.

The only saving grace of The Fall is the inventory system has gone.

Now the worse part. In order to get all achievements, I needed to play through the game 4 times to earn enough credits to buy the 2 most expensive weapons, quit and reload and play through again for 10 praxis kits.

It would have not been so much of a pain if there were more episodes to gain the required credits, but you cannot let it lie. At least after playthrough 1, it can be knocked out in less than 90 minutes.

On a side note, if you are using a controller to play this game, it appears the joysticks are directly linked to FPS, so if you play on a decent machine, even for 10 years ago, hacking and camera control are impossible as the cursor/crosshair is uncontrollable. Use V-sync, it fixes most of it, and also turn down Controller sensitivity in the game options.

Time for the final installment in the Deus Ex series in my list... Mankind Divided. This cannot be worse.