Well I can't think of any game which lives up to the original in its ambition of level design but when you call the level design in this game archaic it does raise eyebrows. What exactly did you find archaic and what stealth tropes are you talking about?
I think the level design in this game is some of the best since the original. Palisade bank and the multitude of secrets and pathways to encounter them is proof of that. If there's anything MD is superior in over HR its level design. HR was very much a game about moving from point A to point B along a passageway with slightly different means of getting there. Not to mention most levels in terms of enemy and object placement made encounters dead obvious and boring. In MD not only is there more nuance on the latter (though still not enough) but the hub structure of levels allows you approach your objectives (and discover hidden ones) in a fashion which few games allow. Though admittedly not all levels follow this structure.
I found traversal to be completely competent. I don't ever recall having a problem with it. As for Icarus Dash, I don't think it was meant to serve as a blink substitute. For one, you can only dash laterally and never really across very far distances. It was meant as a little boost while in the middle of a jump to get to difficult to reach locations and as a means to dash quickly to cover and it fulfils that role fine.
Thanks for the well-argued reply.
I get your point on it being improved from HR, but that's a 5-year-old game that didn't exactly turn heads for its revolutionary level design at the time. Even then, a lot of progress has been made in that time by other franchises and even before HR came out.
I think traversal is a big part of that, and Deus Ex has made little effort to catch up in that regard. Games like Dishonored, Assassin's Creed (yes, even that franchise), MGS V, Hitman, Splinter Cell (eg. Blacklist), Far Cry, Arkham..All of them feature creative and fluid ways to traverse the environment and expand your stealth options. Deus Ex, meanwhile, is mainly stuck using air vents as the go-to stealth option. Sometimes, sure, you can put a thing in a window-washing platform and it takes you up, or you can punch through a wall. These are recurring elements, never just a one-off burst of creativity or part of a sandbox for the player to stealth around in. Oh, there's the platform again. I guess there's a secret window up there or whatever. It always feels limited and it rarely feels organic playing it.
Palisade bank was okay, because it was more complex in its layout and felt more like an actual place than other locations. The standard gamut of stealth options you had (vents, walls, the lot) felt like they actually belonged in this place and their layout made sense.
The hub structure is where the game's limitations stand out to me. Again, the traversal options are so limited that it's telegraphed miles away what your options for approach are. The game would have benefited from more dead space and dead ends; the hub feels cramped and almost every street leads to an objective. Instead of the hub feeling open and giving the player a sense of freedom in its approach, every section is just a little level leading to an objective, and every one of those levels has a predictable, limited range of options. Instead of one big open stealth sandbox, it's a couple dozen smaller levels, each with two or three very obvious means of approach.
Apart from all this, the game is also very obviously lacking in its dialogue mechanics, the story, console performance, inventory/trading, the writing and terrible filler bits like the section I described earlier (going into the conference call machine matrix world or some shit), but that's all irrelevant if it plays great. It never really does. It comes close at times, but then it's disappointing again 2 minutes later.
Wrapping up, re: Icarus Dash, I get the feeling it was absolutely meant to be a Blink substitute, just half-heartedly implemented and as a result failed to be an interesting mechanic. I didn't really understand what its point was, other than to remind me of how well Dishonored implemented something similar. Maybe it can do awesome stuff; the game just didn't bother telling me about it.
Side griefs: pretty much everything is completely underpowered compared to the Stun Gun, even Takedowns. Also, if anything feels archaic, it's the damn Takedown cutscenes
