On Deus Ex: Human Revolution

I wanted to have my review of Deus Ex: Human Revolution up by now. I really did. Reviews for the game were glowing with praise across the board and I was very excited when I finally borrowed it from my housemate.

Then I started playing it and everything went wrong.

It’s such a strange game. Half of it is good – almost superb, in fact – but the other 50% is pure, undiluted shit. To start with, the text is incredibly small. If you happen to play this on a TV screen that’s smaller than, say, an entire wall, you won’t be able to read half of what is going on. Emails, ebooks, plot-relevant reams of text, you name it – you can’t see any of it.

Another point is that the game is more buggy than an anthill covered in honey. Some side quests can become impossible to finish if an enemy glitches out of existence, guards can sometimes be killed by your non-lethal tranquilliser gun, you can even accidentally slaughter a guard if the glitch occurs while you move their unconscious body out of the way.

Something else that pissed me off was the fact that you have to spend your vaulable Praxis upgrades kits on expanding your inventory. Why? What’s wrong with spending credits purchasing larger pockets? Why must you be forced to choose between a useful upgrade and a ludicriously minor one that shouldn’t inconvience you at all?

While the game is a thoughtful one, rewarding you for sneaking through areas and not going in guns blazing, the achievements make little sense, as you seem to be rewarded for doing things that are completely at odds with how you should play the game. One achievement will unlock if you toss a man off a roof (going against the achievement for not killing anyone at all), another will reward you for letting a guilty man escape justice and another will unlock if you choose not to hand over a piece of evidence to a grieving mother. Um, what?

I’m almost at the end of Deus Ex, an experience that oscilates wildly between entertaining stealth and hateful mechanics (why do you have to stop and listen to every single guard’s conversation when you try and sneak through an area?) I’m now in a position where I can’t see any way to progress. I’m in a boss fight with the final mercenary and my augmentations have been turned off (I was probably warned about this in some document or other, but I couldn’t read the blasted things). Naturally, I have been playing the game without trying to kill anyone, so I have very little ammunition. I am also playing the game on Hard. And now I am stuck.

So that’s my experience of Deus Ex: Human Revolution – mostly excellent stealth pretty much destroyed by the game it’s in.

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