Dex Enhanced Edition Review
By Omar (@siegarettes)
- Dex Enhanced Edition
- Developer- Dreadlocks Ltd.
- Publisher- Dreadlocks Ltd., Techland
- Xbox One, PS4, PC (Steam, GOG)
Cyberpunk is a volatile thing. Conceived in a time of growing corporate power, technological advancement, and social turmoil, cyberpunk was largely concerned with a dystopic vision of the future where “progress” had overwhelmed our ability to contain it. So what does it look like in a world where those concerns have arguably come to fruition?
This is what Dex comes into. Following in the template of the genre, Dex presents a messy world of hacking, conspiracy, and urban decay. It has an obvious reverence for cyberpunk, to the point where it makes a point to straight up call residents of its world “cyberpunks”. In a way, that is indicative of the tone throughout, a straightforward, obvious allusion to its predecessors.
Less straightfoward are the ways it allows you to navigate the world. A 2D action-RPG hybrid, there’s an ambition to allow multiple ways to navigate its situations and unravel the conspiracy within. You can sneak by, talk your way through, or just load up on ammo and shoot everyone. In theory, at least. Even in the early game there are multiple approaches you can take, and I spent a bit of time loading up saves just to see what outcomes were available. While there aren’t going to be a lot of major dramatic shifts, there’s enough flexibility in small moments to hold up the illusion. Augmentations eventually complement this, giving you new ways to traverse the space and opening up the city’s layout.
At some point, however, you’re going to have to hack something or shoot someone, and this is where it gets messy. The titular character, Dex, is positioned as a sort of messiah, a woman who can perform hacks without jacking into a computer and see the world in augmented reality. In practical terms this means you can pause the game and play a rudimentary twin stick shooter minigame to turn off cameras or stun enemies. This minigame also plays out whenever you enter a computer, requiring you to shoot through enemies with an underpowered shot and managing Focus, a second health bar that will kick you out of the system and damage your physical health when depleted.
For all the natural hacking prowess your character ostensibly has, you’ll often end up brute forcing these hacks. You’ll take down whatever obstacles you can, get kicked out then either spend resources refilling your health or Focus. You always feel underpowered for the situation, but rather than communicating a feeling of being an underdog taking down a secure system, it’s a grind that burns through the few resources available.
This problem extends to the combat as well. Even with a character built towards conversation or hacking, it’s frequently easier to just shoot a person, alarm or automated turret to get through an area. I ended up in absurd loops where I’d hack into a person to stun them (a process that takes probably a good 30 seconds), throw a few punches or knock them to the floor and shoot them, then repeat the process again until they were dead. There are opportunities for stealth, but the level design and aggression of enemies often subverts them, leaving you in a messy brawl that will having you wasting resources again.
Despite that, there’s enough approaches, and enough weight to the actions themselves that I’d be willing to overlook these flaws if there was a narrative behind it that could support what the developers were attempting to do. Unfortunately, this is probably where Dex let me down the most. In an attempt to capture the dark aesthetics of cyberpunk, Dreadlocks Ltd. have mistaken grime and cynicism for atmosphere. The entire game is voiced, and while the performances are noteworthy, the writing and dialogue itself is deeply immature. All the cyberpunk tropes are present: conspiracies, urban decay, digital messiahs and mega-corporations, but none of the philosophy that drove it. The characters and city are devoid of a worldview, and motivations stem from unexamined assumptions of the role certain groups play within society, and the inherent morality of them. This shorthand leads to some ugly territory, veering into racial caricature early in the game. One of the first groups you fight is a gang of Black people, led by a woman speaking in what can only be described as verbal blackface. Soon after you enter a slum dressed up like Chinatown, where characters affect stereotypical accents and dogs hang up on meathooks.
There’s also a bewildering immaturity to its depiction of sex. Sexual content is spread frequently as to make it mundane. You frequently come across porn discs and magazines littering the streets (the item descriptions themselves say “so much porn it’s boring”). Interactive condom vending machines are weirdly ubiquitous, given how few other machines are interactive, and the fact that the condoms really serve no purpose. You can have sex, but as far as I can tell only with a single female sex worker, after which she implies that wasn’t your first time. Then you can hack her computer and get info on her clients. There’s also an upsetting email later on, which implies that one of the male employees at a company was framed for sexual assault in order to get him out of the picture. That alone illustrates Dex’s attitude towards sex. It’s not a part of the human experience, but a sleazy paint used to coat a place with a sense of danger and depravity. And in doing so, it makes careless statements and moral judgments.
All of this is to say Dex falls into a trap of a deep lack of self-awareness. Cyberpunk, as a movement, cannot be divorced from the context that created it, and so many of Dex’s failures stem from a desire to imitate the aesthetics of the genre without understanding that. The best of cyberpunk uses the grit, the grime of it to reflect something fundamental to humanity. It takes our fears and personal desires and exaggerates them until they cast shadows over us in glistening commercial towers. Dex is void of that. Void of awareness of the changing place of the genre. Void of awareness of the modern context it exists. It’s functional, and arguably achieves what it sets out to do, but you have to ask yourself, is that enough?