Deus Ex: Human Revolution

Lets' start with the simple stuff. Deus Ex: Human Revolution a.k.a. DE3 is a good game. It's in many respects a superb sequel (prequel?) to Deus Ex, a game I love and still play to this day. It is in no way the dire shoot-em-up that was Deus Ex 2: IW. It's rather awkward in places, but still, a very good game. As others have put it, almost a masterpiece, and one that definitely acknowledges its roots.

The core tenets that Deus Ex established (that of character progression and solving encounters your way) are mostly present & correct, albeit disappointingly dumbed down a bit. The game world is gritty, dark, presents the original flavour of the Deus Ex world astonishingly & immersively well, and there's actually less sepia & brown than trailers might suggest. There is this wonderful sense of melancholy & dystopia conveyed in the game world. This game has captured the Deus Ex world to a tee. The music & art teams deserve serious accolades for this.

Character progression is boiled down to XP for actions, from quest completion to eliminating an NPC, bonuses for a headshot, or tranquilising enemies mercifully; extra XP is awarded for mission areas where you are never seen, never set off the alarms etc.. All this XP tops up a level counter, and each level you gain a Praxis point towards more augmentation upgrades. These form a classic tech tree set, and you unlock most trees with 2 points, then 1 for upgrades - and you start with a few basic augs to get you going. All absurdly simple. After that, it's about your own playstyle and what meshes best with that.

Music & sound are handled extremely well from an audible point of view - technically speaking, the sound handling is currently atrocious in that the game is extremely quiet, but if you turn your speakers up and accept you might blast your eardrums with the occasional close up loud noise, it's workable. On a related note, it's fun that equivalent effects occur to your character from over-loud noises, complete with ears ringing. Graphically speaking, the game is still a little ropey, with occasional loss of fps or juddering for no adequately explained reason, and character animations can get quite... well just plain weird. No smooth & seamless Halflife 2 animations here - slightly moving lips and Thunderbirds-esque flailing of arms is quite common, mostly visible in close-up conversations. Those two gripes aside, the graphics themselves are nicely done and the place does look gorgeous.

The gameplay is extremely good in most places. Missions are well handled, with good level design & lots of nice helpful dialogue between NPCs to give hints, as well as some very fun little sidequests in areas to complete. Your choices definitely have impact, and yield branching within a given area's story, although a few aspects are very badly handled, such as sidequests that mysteriously cancel instead of just taking a different story branch with less dialogue. Overall I'd recommend completing all side quests before main quests simply to avoid cases the designers didn't consider how to handle. Not quite as well done as DE in this regard.

Running around and shooting stuff is feasible, but you need to be a good shot, because bullets are most unforgiving in DE3 and you will typically die after only a few hits. Guards will generally spot you in line of sight given a second or so, but stealth gameplay is as good as ever. The cover system works well, once you get used to the slightly jarring nature of its invocation. There's a fair learning curve (no pun intended) in the arcing of tranquilizer darts and other slower projectile weapons, which the complex & utterly unhelpful sight tries to help with, but you will mostly end up guessing until you get an upgrade which does it for you. Falling damage is utterly unforgiving - you can take damage jumping over a railing - but augs will help ameliorate this. Health is boosted via stims & painkillers allowing you to 'shrug off' damage, and slowly regenerates out of combat - it may be controversial, but I didn't even notice the health regen, and it certainly does nothing for your ability to survive, especially early on.

Where the gameplay does fall flat on its face is boss encounters. After hours of wonderful freeform gameplay where you can approach enemies your way, including just not being there, the game plunks you down in a small locked room with an enemy with a machine gun & grenades and expects you to kill him. Memories of evading combat with Anna Navarre in DE (and the storyline branching appropriately) kicked in at this point; I could quite easily have found myself facing an armoured opponent with nothing more than a tranquilizer gun and a waffle iron, and all my ability to be stealthy & quiet wasn't really much use. Most disappointing. Let this be a lesson to budding Jensens - always carry some form of heavy firepower.

There are a few technical gripes that marr the experience as well. The menu system flies about so much I managed to get motion sickness just from saving the game once too often, and on the subject of saving games, the saved game system is just plain asinine. Firstly, you are limited to 99 saves (the original limit was 20, and believe me, even at 99 you will run out of them quite quickly - this is not a short game), but even more staggering, you can neither back up nor move off & restore these games (e.g. if you wanted to throw 98 away into some storage to save some space). No, Steam rules your saved games now, peon, and they will be timestamped, hashed, and lofted into the cloud. Touching any of these files yourself is a great way to lose all your saved games; how odd, in a game about corporations taking over individual liberties... Some aspect of achievements crashes the game every so often, but in hours of play that's perhaps four times total. Walking around actually feels slightly odd, but I can't put my finger on why - perhaps just too much camera shake for my tastes - and lack of control over key features like film grain effects makes tweaking the experience to match one's personal tastes awkward. Guards have a tendency to not understand up or down, and if you're a level above or below them, but nevertheless in line of sight, they will tend to aim their gun at you, but never actually get around to firing.

These technical negatives & frustrations aside, there is significant & wonderful immersive depth to DE3. Reading material in ebooks & emails abounds, and conversations between NPCs add to the flavour of a living breathing world. The plot itself is somewhat formulaic if you've already played the original DE, but still works very well. Augmentations are a blast, sometimes literally, and punching through walls is certainly a nice fairly original addition. Ignoring the individual frustrations as rare anomalous spikes on a graph, the game itself flows together pretty well.

I should add that your choices are not limited to how you approach combat - you can engage in conversation with a few individuals and attempt to win their trust, rather akin to Mass Effect's dialogue wheel but with an overlay of what you pick to say has a real consequence of how much they grow to like you, and whether they'll perhaps assist you in some way. This adds an extra social dimension, further adding to your character not feeling like just a silent heavily armed protagonist. Considering how very personal the story is in DE3 compared to preceding games, this is a nice touch.

In summary, as a prequel to what some consider to be one of the best RPGs ever, DE3 has filled out the shoes pretty well. It's still in need of some patching polish, and has some questionable design decisions in places, but it's nevertheless a pretty good game. 3 stars for the moment due to enough glitches & awkwardness to break that immersive world just too much, but I seriously toyed with 4 even as it stands. If Square Enix patch out some of the issues, it'd easily be a 4-5.

Having sunk a fair few hours into this game, I feel it's time to write an early review for any of you people wondering whether Deus Ex:Human Revolution is a game worth purchasing. I can safely say that the answer is a resounding yes!

For those unfamiliar with Deus Ex games, they typically take place in a dark, sprawling future world dominated by shady technological corporations. The Deus Ex series is renowned for its unique blend between the FPS and RPG genres, and Human Revolution certainly doesn't disappoint in this regard. DE:HR slickly shifts from fierce, and surprisingly merciless (on just normal difficulty) combat to RPG-style exploration. There are a LOT of things to read, collect, do and see, and it's fantastically easy to really immerse yourself in the world. Some have criticised the pace of the game, saying it can be too slow early on, but I really appreciated the scence-setting. Only very rarely does the game feel like it's dragging on a little in some of the early missions, so be aware that patience is required. DE:HR rewards a sensible, considered approach; you may be an augmented cyborg, but if you charge in recklessly you will die.

Saying that, one of the main appeals of the game is the way in which you can upgrade various aspects of your character, providing boosts to things ranging from hacking ability to your radar display. In this respect, DE:HR feels like it has a lot of depth, and hence the definite potential for replayability. On the first main mission the choice is forced upon you, asking you whether you wish to approach it with stealth or lethal force, and giving you weapons accordingly. Despite being slightly artificial, it is designed to tell you just how differently every situation can be approached - the first mission can easily be played twice with the different approaches and is just as satisfying in different ways.

The graphics aren't stunning, but the aesthetics of the game is so assured and consistently immersive that it really isn't an issue at all. What DE:HR does benefit from hugely is a very slick soundtrack, which reminded me a lot of Half-Life 2 in its quality and context-dependency.

I'm really struggling to think of any major criticisms of DE:HR. The AI is sometimes a little suspect, although if it weren't the stealth approach would be practically impossible! Nevertheless it is slightly disappointing that sometimes the enemies seem oblivious to their colleague getting killed just a metre behind their backs, whilst other times they seem to have a sixth sense for detecting your presence. The character animation is very good from a distance, watching the way the guards patrol and interact with each other, but is a little wooden up close. Motion-capture technology would have been amazing here, but it's a minor gripe.

Overall, I can't recommend this game enough if you're looking for a dark, moody first-person experience, with a more considered approach than traditional FPSs. The RPG element gives you so much to do in the world, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who wants to explore everything DE:HR has to offer! 9/10

DX HR kicks ass. Those wanting a bit more from their investment of time & hard earned will love this slick game. It allows the player to pretty much choose the what, when and how you progress through the Bladrunner-esque levels. There's more than one obvious way to skin the DXHR cat and this adds a large helping of re-playability.

Hat's off for aiming high on this title, sure the guys at Square Enix could do with some lessons in scripting dialog but what the heck that's nitpicking. This game reeks of attention to detail and quality, even the music is totally awesome cleverly adding a layer of atmosphere to the situations Jensen find himself in. I played it twice and each effort was rewarded in surprisingly different ways.