I’ve been waiting eagerly to play this game for a long time, now. Many people were upset with Deus Ex: Invisible War, despite it getting very generous review scores (for the most part). They felt the sequel resulted in an experience watered down like a sleazy bartender trying to make more money off of you.
So that leaves us with one question: is Deus Ex: Human Revolution a worthy sequel? Read on and you might just find out.
Writing: Robocop RPG
In Deus Ex: Human Revolution, you play the role of equally empathetic and cold-hearted Adam Jensen, a man with the most comically shaped chin I’ve seen since Jay Leno. His chin and beard are sharpened in such a way that it looks like a political cartoon was doing motion-capture for this game. This leads to some amazing irony that we’ll get to later.
Adam Jensen got it rough in a place tactlessly named Mexicantown, presumably the one in Detroit since that’s where this game takes place. To give a little insight, he basically didn’t feel particularly gruesome that day and lost his job as a SWAT commander because he wouldn’t indulge in a massacre. Now, I feel nothing but sympathy for Jensen, but this is offset by the fact that you could play a character in this game that mows down any punk who even so much as have the nerve to appear on Jensen’s radar.
Jensen now works as a private security officer for a company called Sarif Industries. High-brow joke. One day, Jensen shows up to work and the building’s laboratories are attacked. See, I wouldn’t hire Jensen as security because having him around would keep the accidents-free counter low. Jensen is left mortally wounded in this attack and his love interest – as most do – dies quickly in the game; at the start, that is. However, David Sarif – the industry’s CEO – wants to keep Jensen in his pocket, so he has him rebuilt with state-of-the-art surgical equipment, and thus augmenting him. Not the first commander to be brought back from the dead after an attack.
A simple six months later, Jensen goes back to work as Robocop. I’d argue that the medical leave for this company is terrible, but they did bring him back to life. Now it’s his job to investigate cases concerning those meddling Purists who caused people not to like Uncle Sarif anymore.
This isn’t addressed in dialog or even the writing, but I get this feeling that people think Jensen became mentally handicapped after the augmentation, whether it be coercing a police officer into spilling information while a lady stands directly behind you, or NPCs speaking unnecessarily loudly. The interesting this is that the AI seems to be far more thick than Jensen is, however.
Now, a lot of people are praising this game for the relevance of its conversations, and for the most part, the dialog does concern gameplay. Most games don’t try to make a habit of this, but for this game, reading e-mails that seemed otherwise pointless had saved me from a difficult third boss battle, before the second one even took place.
Moving on, the characters who will support you include Malik, a pilot who should quit her job in favor of attending raves all night and sleeping all day, and Pritchard, a cyber-security officer who looks like an old man trying his absolute hardest to look twenty years younger. The personalities come across as quite believable, and some of the dialog between Jensen and Pritchard tends to be humorous. The work that Eidos put into character development certainly shows.
Gameplay: The path less traveled.
Before I start praising what this game did right, there’s something I really have to get out of the way that might serve as an unfortunate overshadow for this game. I mentioned that the AI is stupid, and it is. Whether it be shooting officers with tranquilizers and having them drop in plain sight, or sometimes disregarding the fact that I’m standing right next to them in a restricted area, I get this nagging feeling that people from Detroit (in the future) are stupid. Let me put this into perspective. The police are so stupid that there is a rundown gas station turned into a makeshift firearms dealer who sells firearms illegally, while police stand right outside of the gas station, never for a moment thinking they should check it out.
The AI usually isn’t bad. Other times, the AI is actually very courteous. I fought a boss in the game whom I stunned with a P.E.P.S. gun and it seems that she figured I wanted her dead. She was kind enough to stand perfectly still for me while I fired about fifteen shotgun shells into her back. There are a few technical issues, but I haven’t encountered as many bugs as Jesse did with his review of the PC version.
If you’re trying for the achievement where you’re never allowed to alert enemies, I suggest you do two things: play on the easiest difficulty and install the game. The loading times for this game are simply unacceptable. What happened to the days when we put in a cartridge in our console and loading rarely occurred? It seems loading times these days get longer and longer, as if we’ve taken a step backwards with technological innovation, which is frustrating as hell when we can play games on a damn touch-screen phone. If you install the game, however, the load times are effectively halved and, trust me, that will definitely keep you from going insane.
As I said earlier, I was trying for the achievement for never alarming enemies. I also was trying for the one where I never kill a single enemy. Unfortunately, killing enemies in the prologue count, so I decided to retry the game on an easier setting because I wanted to finish the game for this review as fast as I could. I ended up giving up the first achievement, but the second I would still try.
For my run, I was playing a social and stealthy Adam Jensen who used non-lethal means to disable enemy ranks. The first time I played, however, it seemed I reloaded saves more often than I played the game. This is mostly because if you’re going to pick a style of gameplay – as much as the game tries not to force you to – you’re going to have to stick to it. It isn’t like other RPGs like Fallout 3 where you level up certain abilities but others are still easily accessible. I won’t say this breaks the game, but it certainly is like a frustrated parent that makes you stick to one or two things.
Those abilities take the form of “augmentations” in this game. See, you’re kind of like a reverse Samus Aran: you have all your abilities already, but you need to unlock them with Praxis Points. These are obtained by leveling up, or finding or buying Praxis Kits (if you buy them, they cost 5000 credits). I found that buying the Praxis Kits wasn’t much hard work. I just sold all the lethal weapons that I never used because I was doing a non-lethal playthrough. This is made a little more difficult by the Resident Evil 4-style inventory system. However, I’m willing to let that slide, since Resident Evil 4‘s inventory system was good.
Another good part about Deus Ex: Human Revolution is its upgrades. All of the upgrades are useful somehow, though they depend on your play-style, naturally. I didn’t find any of them not to be helpful except for the upgrades that silence your movements, because they drain energy. Eidos did a good job balancing the upgrades, if you ask me. Naturally, there will be staples among the upgrades. In this game, there are two: cloaking and the social enhancer.
Now to point out what peeves me. The controls. I’m not talking about using X to talk when usually games use A. I’m talking about the cover system and the hacking system. Let’s cover the… cover: the camera tends to dislike you in this game. Instinctively, if you want to look at something a little too far to your left or right, you’ll move the camera in that direction. However, if you go too far, Jensen will obligingly poke his head out from cover so that the guards can make nice target practice and give the room some feng shui with his brains. I’ve been caught a few times by guards because of this, but it really only becomes problematic if you’re trying for that super hard achievement. As for hacking, when you try to hack, you’ll find the controls are very sticky. Like, almost super glue sticky. When you try to move from node to node, you’ll find that the cursor has a serious addiction to whichever node you happen to be hovering over, which could cost you precious seconds that you could use to hack before the firewall locks you out and possibly sets off an alarm.
Every crust I’ve trimmed so far boils down to some poo covering an otherwise great game. I could have done with some more side missions, and more guns, and perhaps less bugs, while Eidos is at it. The amount of content is almost perfectly satisfactory, if you ask me, with just enough to do to keep you interested without being shorter than a plot synopsis of Super Mario Bros. I imagine Eidos is already at work on DLC for this game.
Presentation: Hexagons are the future.
Here’s the big turd that smothers Deus Ex: Human Revolution, not that it’s much of a problem for me. First of all, the graphics are… well, they’re good, for the most part. Textures look realistic for the setting trying to be portrayed. However, some objects and sprites appear so polygonal that they could function as saw-blades, and some textures are very blurry. Some small writing on signs like sticky notes, however, is quite sharp and easy to ready, ironically.
However, what really farts on the presentation is the lip-syncing. I think the lip-syncing pretty much made it clear for me that Eidos didn’t care too much about making the game look as pretty as can be (they didn’t really have to). There seems to be some bugs with the otherwise beautiful audio, though; sometimes I don’t hear certain words. At one point, an entire sentence being said by Malik was silenced, as if she thought that Adam’s augmentations could read lips. Considering there were subtitles, he probably could.
The gold color scheme that the developers picked for Deus Ex: Human Revolution is actually nice. Some might call it pretentious, but I actually think it is a nice way of giving the game an identity of sorts. It’s not an artistic expression that should be put on a pedestal, but it’s at least not an obvious attempt to shirk duties on graphics design.
In closing, the music is wonderful and very ambient. If it were a cake, I would scarf it down. Then I’d feel bad because I don’t have any more cake left (people who make Portal references, please line up to have your comments deleted). This might be a little silly to note, but I especially enjoyed the title theme. It’s not as epic and “rocking” as the original Deus Ex‘s theme, but it still felt very fitting and wonderful to listen to.
Gamers Leak Recommendation: Buy It
So we come to our closing (or at least I do). Deus Ex: Human Revolution has an open world, but it’s not as exciting and expansive as something like Fallout or Grand Theft Auto. What it lacks in style, however, it makes up for in substance with its solid gameplay that – although with issues – puts it in a position that safely challenges Portal 2 for my personal best game of the year. This game definitely feels like it’s deserving of my sixty dollars. Not that games should cost that much.
Played the entire game on Easy difficulty (it was so I could review this faster, honest!). The game is single-player only. Available worldwide (except Japan; will be released September 8). Retails for $59.99.
If you want, read the editorial follow-up to this review!
I found that the hacking controls were usable in the PC version but I would’ve liked to see some hotkeys, to make fortifying points faster and whatnot. Also, load times have been fixed via a very fast patch from Eidos, though I don’t know if this is just PC or consoles too.
Oh, and raise your hand if the PEP gun was the most useless non-lethal gun in the game. *raises hand* Seriously. For a gun that literally has people in the world talking about it because it’s so awesome, you’d think it would be useful in more than one scenario (the melee enemies in the final area). Even then, Reflex Booster + High Recharge rate equaled tons of unconcious enemies anyway.
I have yet to be prompted with a patch download, but as I said in the review, installing the game makes the load times breeze by. I recommend doing so before playing the game.
I found that the loading times on the 360 version were significantly cut down by installing the game on the console.