Reviews - DXN - Deus Ex: Nihilum mod for Deus Ex

A really good mod coming from such a small team.

The Deus Ex-like story was quite nice, with all of them conspiracies and Wesley learning about the truth.
The story was easy to follow, there weren't too many hard points that could've been hard to understand.

The music was mostly very atmospheric, with most of the tracks being very suitable and atmospheric and a few being somewhat forgettable. I specifically loved the track placed in the map with Mad's first mission in Hong Kong, that one had some really nice spots.

The voice acting - well, there's mostly nothing critical to say about them, but Mad Ingram's voice does sound somewhat non-fitting for an agent grown in a pod - too gentle and soft, maybe. In some way I LOVED Mad's voice, though.
The other VAing was very good and sounded quite professional. Nice fem. VA's! The minor roles weren't bad either.
The only flaw about the voices was that some of them were too quiet - it was hard to hear them, especially in cutscenes where there's dramatic music in the background too.

While I'm not that much of a weapons freak in games, there could've been a few more weapons anyways, or more situations where you could've used them. The railgun didn't really go into such a big use, I mainly carried it around and shot few bots and cameras with it. Also, you get the light machine gun so late in the game that you mainly use it for the really tough mercenaries that XVA has.

And also about the amount of lockpicks in the game - way too much, especially if you have your lockpick skill leveled up to trained in the beginning of the game. Just after a couple of hours, you tend to have quite enough of them to get through any doors, and you get a lot more of them as you go.

The amount of original Deus Ex lines in the game was strangely high - it didn't really matter much, but I wonder why there couldn't have been more new voices.

But mostly, the mod's very enjoyable with an epic atmosphere. It's just too bad that it felt so short.

Quick and dirty pros/cons list;

+A pretty well told Deus Ex story, with your classic web of conspiracies and betrayals. There's a few odd discrepancies with established canon. Overall, though, it's very well executed and well written.
+Characters are interesting, if not particularly memorable.
+I'm not going all affirmative action on you here, but I really appreciate the main character being black. More games need that kind of diversity.
+Maps are beautifully well made and filled with plenty of secrets - enough to delight any explorer.
+Locations are classic Deus Ex stuff, with seedy nightclubs and illegal laboratories.
+New guns are interesting and well implemented.
+Difficulty isn't too challenging nor easy.
+Lot of interesting new elements and mission ideas.
+Music is absolutely amazing and perhaps my favorite aspect of this mod. If there's a soundtrack around somewhere, I'd love to download it.

-Mad Ingram's voice acting... is not that great. And that's being charitable. He sounds stilted and addicted to Valium - if you intend to make another release, or patch or whatever, consider getting someone else to voice act Ingram. Most of the VA work is pretty good, though.
-The maps, while beautiful and well constructed, are almost too large and too empty at times. Berlin and Hong Kong are the worst offenders here. It felt like you could have decreased the map size, or at least filled these locations out more adequately.
-Some of the story beats are muddied or not well fleshed out.
-I wasn't a huge fan at the attempts at humor in this mod - both the fourth wall breaking references to Deus Ex itself and the obnoxious ham sandwich jokes. It's not funny just because you keep referencing it.
-There is a frustrating amount of backtracking in this mod.
-There were a few bugs, but I'm not sure if this is the mod's fault or Deus Ex's.

Anyway, overall I really enjoyed it. Had a few obvious problems with some of the writing and voice acting, but yeah. Good work.

Long awaited, high-quality, excellent.

One more excellent mod for the allmighty Deus Ex. The scenario keeps on going better and better while playing, the maps are very enjoyable (the Queens one is my fav), the endings are great, and so is the replayability. This mod perfectly fits in the Deus Ex style.

This is a simply superb mod that takes what Deus Ex got right and then augments the hell out of it with an exoskeleton of dazzling, modernized visuals, innovative and unique game design, sing-in-the-car good music, and a tight gem of speculative-fiction story that does justice to the original (and that is some hard justice to do!)

Personally, aside from a full-blown Project Eternity-style, kickstarter initiative afforded the laser-guidance of Warren Spector, heuristically retooled by Harvey Smith himself, and infused with Sheldon Pacotti's sci--fi writing gems, I think Deus Ex: Nihilum is tough to beat for a Deus Ex 1 sequel.

Fantastic sequel-prequal to Deus Ex. Every Deus Ex fan must play this!

Unfortunately, I'm updating my review of DXN again to report even more issues with AE. It axed the UMP SMG for the XVA rifle, which is 4x2 instead of 3x1, but still deals 2 damage per shot (vs 3 of assault gun), and is otherwise a completely inferior assault gun except with a scope and it fires 20mm emp. Due to FGR's unfamiliarity with the scope, though, he isn't aware that it negates the laser sight you can install when playing with vanilla, and makes the weapon nearly useless without being zoomed in, ruining its use as an assault rifle... And it recoils super heavily when scoped, making it useless when zoomed in. All this for 2x the size of the base game AR. Why?

New forced icons are crammed into your deus ex directories whether you ask for them or not, changing all sorts of small details without any information as to what and why. Random posters, inventory icons, and hell, even the DX icon in the upper left of the menu are now DXN versions. Due to how DDS is processed this will affect ALL versions of DX you play with D3D10/11, so I highly recommend against it.

Maps still exhibit nauseating nonlinearity, excessively used prefabs, and a wasteland devoid of proper image resources, making you get lost for 30-40 minutes in most maps, which is not fun at all.

Rockets are halved in the quantity given, ammo packets are still insanely rare, and the mod has a boner for throwing assloads of robots (which can now HEAR, contradicting their weakness installed for stealth players, but DXN simply isn't built with stealth as a possibility), which, with the gauss removed, are nearly impossible to handle in any way. God forbid you don't take the XVA, you will suffer for not using the forced grenade mule gun and all 8 of its slots consumed.

The list goes on. This mod is problematic in quality control, very, very poorly balanced, and a pain in the *** to trek through, with lackluster plot and dialogue to top it off. Don't play this unless you're intent on playing every DX mod ever made at least once.

Really good mod... on my opnion,that one is on the same lavel that TNM is...
The atmosphere is really good(Music=Good),make me fell on really Cyber-Punk cities, and i used much time to explore them!And the Caracters are have good Mental and fisics!
Really good mod,and it is better when you use New Vision and the HDTP

It's been *checks notes* 10 years since I last reviewed this under the name of "metroid13," so I decided to give it another go.

A lot of my old critique and praise still stands, although I think I'm a little less positive on the plot now. There's a few ancillary details (mostly in readables or some minor dialog) that make DXN's contributions to the Deus Ex universe rather fascinating, but it mostly takes a backseat to the conspiracy tennis match between the three factions, which is often confusing or, as the main character so helpfully points out time and time again, overly contrived and coincidental. As a rule of thumb, if the characters themselves have to mention this, it doesn't actually absolve the writer. It just means that everyone is on the same page that the plot isn't great, both writer and characters. I think this is intended to be funny, but it's just alienating instead.

I also still don't like the humor overall - less the ham sandwiches now and more the explicit and continuous callbacks to lines or plot beats from Deus Ex itself. None of them feel particularly clever, they're just... references. It's like playing the DX equivalent of Family Guy.

As far as gameplay goes, I'm genuinely not sure whether any modifications were made to the levels (I'll get to the DLC in a moment) but I liked Hong Kong way more this time around. Everything afterward takes a nosedive in quality - the player is mostly herded in a single direction from set piece to set piece, whereas Hong Kong felt full of possibilities for experimentation. The MPS commander even gives you a nice rundown of your choices at the end of the mission - the mod should have honed in on this concept, as it was by far DXN's strongest component.

Something ubiquitous to the entire mod are locked doors and key hunts. Everything felt mazelike. You do mention this in the mod description, so fair play, but the excessive backtracking and testing out keys on random doors didn't feel any better for me this time than it did a decade ago, unfortunately.

The new weapons feel kinda superfluous. The chunky and ugly XVA rifle's only saving grace is the EMP grenades, which are a great idea. I would have just changed the base assault gun for it, though. I briefly experimented with the paratrooper rifle but it A) looks and sounds really bad and B) is a heavy weapon, and shows up way too late in the game to feel worth taking.

I also don't like the new Glock - it feels weirdly off-center on the screen, and the hand texture doesn't match Ingram's skin tone. You recommend playing with HDTP, and the 10mm pistol from that not only looks and sounds much better, but it can actually display weapon mods. Kind of a miss for me, overall.

The voice acting for Mad Ingram in the base mod remains jaw-droppingly bad, but everyone else is fine. Ingram himself is greatly improved in the DLC. I would have had that guy re-voice his original lines for the base mod, but that's just me.

Speaking of the DLCs, they represent a leap forward in quality, honing in much better on the classic DX gameplay loop. The only fly in the ointment remains the attempts at humor, but I digress. Great job with these.

The base mod stands at a 5/10 for me, with the DLCs more of an 8/10. They're great missions, and left me with good feelings in the final analysis, so that brings the whole proceeding up to 7. It was interesting to come back to.

Man I wish I had amnesia so I could play this again!