Deus Ex: Human Revolution

Deus Ex Human Revolution Review

The first Deus Ex was magnificent, the original ‘free choice’ game. The less said about the second, the better. So how will this third title fare? It turns out to be a curious mixture of great moments and loathsome mechanics that combine to form an ultimately unsatisfactory whole.

The game revolves around the idea of augmentations, a series of upgrades to your fragile human frame that can change the way you play. You can’t get all of them (at least, you’re not supposed to – the game is so full of glitches that it’s possible to snare all the upgrades before you gain your first side mission) so you are forced to choose how your game unfolds. Do you put the emphasis into stealth, hacking, firepower or physical abilities? Seeing as how the game only congratulates you for playing stealthily and avoiding merciless slaughter, you have free will on the basis that you don’t care about gaining rewards.

The main problem with the game is that it wants to trick the player into believing that they are free to play however they see fit. This is a lie. You have exactly two choices – kill or not kill. Occasionally you’ll have the chance to talk your way through a situation, but this can be waltzed through with the right augmentation. The game also pretends that actions have consequences. This too is a lie. For the most part, interacting with people or completing side missions simply rewards you with an abundance of credits at a later date. Considering how much money you can gain everywhere else in the game, it’s irritating that you aren’t given any other type of reward.

The game’s lack of genuine free will in play continues throughout the entire game. It doesn’t matter how you play through because, if you’ve been a dick to everyone or become worshipped as Mr Nice Guy, there are only four endings. And all four can be unlocked during the final mission. To put it bluntly, there is nothing to gain from being a nice guy in this game. In fact, many of the game’s achievements ask you to play opposite to how you would choose to do things. One rewards you for not completing a sidequest fully, while another will pop up once you’ve allowed a vicious gunrunner to go free. It makes no sense.

Another irritating point is the size of the text in the game – it’s tiny. If you are playing on anything smaller than a wall-sized TV, kiss your chance of reading any ebooks or emails goodbye. There is also the problem of the hacking minigame – a tedious flag-capturing affair that you’ll be playing every five minutes – because it’s just plain naff. Because it’s the only minigame you’ll come across for the entire duration of the campaign, it means that absolutely everything needs to be hacked – people’s homes, storage units, safes, even military installations. You’ll be playing this tiresome game a lot more than you’d like.

The game does do stealth brilliantly, making you any successful infiltration feel like a work of genius on your part. Every enemy can be sneaked past without engaging, every camera can be turned off, every sentry robot can be disabled, and gaining access to a secure facility without raising a single alarm is a very satisfying experience indeed. Although, to be fair, it is one that will see you constantly reloading your last save.

Speaking of which, the load times are horrendous. Even after installing the game on your hard drive, the wait is roughly twenty to thirty seconds for every load screen. And when you consider that most, if not all, of the game’s sidequests ask you to go from one end of the map to the other and back again, you’re looking at a minimum of four load screens for each mission. Bring a book for the wait.

The game also comes riddled with bugs. These range from the exploitable (the ability to upgrade completely at the very beginning of the game with just a few hours’ effort) to the ludicrous (enemy AI seeing through walls). None of them are game-breaking, it’s just disappointing that a triple-A title has come packed with so many glitches.

On the whole, Deus Ex: Human Revolution is a strangely unsatisfying game. The feeling on complete a stealth section perfectly is undeniably great, but the game’s appalling story, hateful load screens, loathsome characters and myriad of bugs and glitches render the experience somehow incomplete. For a ‘free choice’ game, that’s just not good enough.

65%

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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.