Mechanical App-artheid
Square Enix’s Montréal studio has a knack for taking the publisher’s most important franchises and creating mobile adaptations of them. Thus far, it’s the GO series that has proven to be the most successful, as both the Hitman and Lara Croft iterations were outstanding efforts. The Montréal team hopes to add another impressive game to its portfolio this summer.
Mere days ahead of E3, Square Enix Montréal announced today that its next mobile title is Deus Ex GO. It’ll release on iOS and Android later in the summer. No price has been mentioned yet, but the two other GO games originally launched at $4.99.
Both the subject and the timing seem appropriate. On August 23, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided releases, and it’s absolutely one of the biggest games Square Enix has for 2016. It makes sense that the publisher would want a mobile title out there first to warm-up audiences. Square Enix Montréal and Mankind Divided developer Eidos stand to mutually benefit from one another under that schedule.
We had a chance to get a first-hand look at Deus Ex GO at a pre-E3 event in May. Sporting that slick trademark Deus Ex neo-digitalized style, each level tasks protagonist Adam Jensen with surviving its many hazards. Armed soldiers and turrets litter the path, all of them ruthlessly lethal.
The few levels we saw were early and simple affairs, but they still captured what Deus Ex GO will be made up of. Speaking with lead designer Etienne Giroux, we were told that the game would be about half hacking and half combat. What that ostensibly means is it’s just as important to hack turrets to against their owners as it is to sneak up behind the bad guys. There may be more than one solution, but any solution that keeps you alive is the correct one.
While the base game will ship with a certain number of levels, the hardcore community shouldn’t be left wanting for content to play. That’s because sometime soon after Deus Ex GO‘s launch, Giroux says that the team plans to release a level editor so players can make their own stages. The studio plans to promote the best community-created stuff, and maybe even lump similarly-themed levels together as some sort of overarching challenge.
However, when you give players the tools, a lot of subpar content surfaces. And the developer has a plan for that. We were told that an algorithm is being worked on that can tell if a level is garbage just by analyzing its DNA. If it’s no good, it’ll be pushed to the bottom where most curious eyes won’t be bothered by it.
This seems like a good addition, and that’s mostly because the framework looks to be very solid. In Square Enix Montréal’s short lifespan, it has proven itself proficient at putting out high-quality mobile titles. From what we’ve seen of Deus Ex GO, it seems poised to carry on that tradition of taking Square Enix franchises and augmenting them for a different platform.
