Game Reviews: Deus Ex: Human Revolution

Note: All images and videos are not mine

Finally! I got this through. Once again guys, really sorry that this is late, but college comes first and I also have a few good internship opportunities at the moment that I’m dealing with. Anyway, now it’s time to get back to what I do best and that is writing about crap I like or hate.

This time however it’s something that is good, Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Now I’m a big fan of the original Deus Ex, if you haven’t already guessed, and I consider it to be one of the biggest impacts of the gaming industry for its interactive story and narrative design. It takes place in the future where technology has developed into a way of life that makes it easier for some, but also makes it harder on others. Wars, terrorism, diversion between classes, and more are all centered around one theme: Is technology good or bad? That one theme elevated the game into a ground breaking level that to this day I still call the Game Designer’s Bible.

Eleven years later, Eidos Montreal has given us the prequel to the original known as Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Now I actually got a chance to visit Eidos Montreal a while ago while meeting the Head Producer, David Anfossi. Now I can’t really talk what happened there as I signed a non-discloser agreement, but I can say that it was really interesting to meet him and see the overall work place where Eidos Montreal makes their magic happen. I can tell they put a lot of effort into this game and it was something everyone enjoyed working on.

Now about Human Revolution, this is a prequel to the original game so if you’ve played the original you’ll see a lot of familiar things with Human Revolution, but also a few new ones. If you haven’t played the original, don’t worry you don’t need to. This game is a great way to start on the Deus Ex universe and I’ll tell you why.

1.       Graphics

The graphics in this game are just jaw dropping, especially the backgrounds. Each level is unique in its own way and style. Detroit feels like a city bursting with poverty, crime, and decay while Shanghai, my favorite area, is well divided into a popular bursting commercial area while its slums feel dirty and disgusting. Lighting and shadows play a really important part in telling the atmosphere and the overall story construct of the game.

Character graphics are nice too, with each character being uniquely made to look human and their facial expressions are top notice. The movements are a bit rusty looking and rigid, but it all pays out with the ragdoll physics. The one thing that I love most about this game’s graphics however is, like I said before, the backgrounds. Shanghai in particular is the best out of the entire game in terms of scenery. It’s got an entire upper level city that looks like it’s streaming with life and its so technology advance that you see the difference between the higher level class structures compared to the lower class structure you play through.

        But while this is a positive notion on one end it has a flaw to it. See, the more I looked at the backgrounds the more I wanted to explore them, but I can’t. The game doesn’t allow much free roaming and I’ll get on that when it comes to gameplay. It feels like you’re being called out to explore the world when you see these backgrounds of locations that you can’t go to and it sucks. It’s like an unintentional suckered move and it’s kind of disappointing.

Still, the graphics in this game are really top notice and the cinematic scenes almost feel like a real move at times. It’s really awesome.

2.       Controls

The original Deux Ex controls took some getting use too, even if you’re a keyboard expert.  For Human Revolution, it’s much easier and simpler. It follows like your typical average first person shooter controls with crouching, shooting, jumping and reloading. But what I like about the controls in this game is that they feel really human. Unlike in Duke Nukem where the controls system was off and the steps felt like giant leaps, this one is very well tightened and stabilized.

        You also can activate your augmentations thanks with the D-pad control allowing you to activate your cloak or typhoon abilities in the nick of time should an emergency situation come up and that’s useful in crossfire or stealth situations. Along with the D-pad controls you have your very own Power Wheel much like Mass Effect. Here you can quickly change weapons and grenades while stalling gameplay to help you choose how to plan your attack better. You can also access health items and Neuropozyne to refill your heath bar and battery meter.

       

        The only deal I have with the controls is the aiming. Now it’s not the worst aiming, but unless your aiming and shooting at the same time you’re going to be wasting a lot of ammo because it’s not that very accurate unless your close to an enemy. There is an augmentation that supposed to help you with aiming, but it’s not that effective making it useless. Still, I had no problem getting use to the controls and I doubt you will too.

3.       Gameplay

The gameplay on Deus Ex Human Revolutions is unique. On one hand it’s kind of your basic average first person shooter or stealth game. You got all the basic functions you normally see plus the interaction with the world you can do, but it all changes thanks to the augmentations.

Let’s first talk about non-combat gameplay aka the exploration. Now you don’t have as much exploration in this game as you do in Deus Ex which is disappointing, but it still keeps the same spirit of doing whatever you want in the game. Want to jump off a building? Go ahead. Hack a co-worker’s door and grab all his stuff? Sure. Beat up innocent civilians or druggies? You’re going to get shot at, but that’s fine as well. During your time in Detroit and Shanghai, as well as in the combat area levels, you'll want to explore as much as possible. Not only will it give you xp, but you can find some nice bonuses such as credits and ammo.

Speaking of xp, nearly everything you do will give you xp that will allow you to exchange your augmentations. Read journals, sneak around, perform head shots, take downs, explore, use hidden passages and more. Each action has a positive reaction for you and I that a lot. Xp is used to upgrade your augmentations which you’re going to have to use to survive this game; I doubt many of you will last without at least four upgrades. The augmentations are really cool, allowing you to be cloaked in stealth, increase your armor, increase battery power, and hacking skills. Unfortunately these augmentations require power which is symbolized on the GUI right below the health bar. Its measured as battery power and you start off with two bars, but you’ll quickly see that two bars won’t last long and you’ll have to upgrade the bar count and the drainage of your augmentations early on. To that point, I want to point something out: Not every augmentation is needed in the game. In fact, some are really useless. Sure some are helpful for a few levels, but they rarely appear. Such abilities are walking softly, the armor upgrade, and aiming upgrade. They really don’t help you that much in the game. Others like the cloaking, the Icarus system (Which makes you jump from any height and not get any damage), the heavy lifting augment (Which is always fun to use because you can throw vending machines at people), hacking, and a few others are better to be spending points on.

Now about hacking, this is one of the easiest hacking mechanics I’ve ever seen. It’s a lot like the Bioshock hacking system except with nodes. You start off as one node and you have to get to the main node to hack successful. There are nodes with numbers on them that tell you which ones are going to be more difficult to hack as well as nodes that will give you extra cash or files if you take over them. However, if you hack a node you run the risk of setting off the security system which will not only try to kick you out in a reasonable time limit, but also will be making the nodes harder to hack. You do have two programs that can help you though. One will stop the security for a short time while the other allows you take over a node immediately. This is helpful in extreme emergencies.  There is one flaw in the hacking system and this is more of a bug really. If you press B (I played on Xbox) then Y, you can leave the hacking mini-game without wasting a try. Kind of need to fix that Edios.

Now about combat gameplay which is both good and bad. What’s good is that the difficulty in this game is pure Deus Ex. The original game was hard and challenging and this one follows well. It requires you to think on your feet while also planning out your next move ahead of time. You can hack turrets to kill enemies; you can sneak past guards, go all guns blazing, or just take them out one by one silently. It allows you to choose the path you want to take in these levels to get to your objectives and I promote it a lot. However, there are a few problems. First off, I can handle hard difficult moments in games, but the difficulty is a little bit harder than it should be. Even on the easier setting it will take you only a few second till half your health is gone from getting shot and later on the enemies get so buffed that it takes TWO HEADSHOTS from a sniper rifle to kill them. You will be wasting tons of ammo taking out these punks in head to head combat so really the game is pretty much telling you to go for stealth since it’s the safest and easiest option. This is a bad thing because I like it when you can do both. It limits the players mobility and interaction in the game when the best change to survive is just stealth. The weapons don’t make much of a difference as you don’t get as many weapons as there should be and some are not really all that useful.  Ammo is going to be gone from your inventory like shrimp at a cocktail party and with an aiming system that could have used a few more tweaks you’re going to have to match your shots perfectly.

Finally, the last thing I want to address and this is the thing that bothers me most, is the boss fights. The thing that bothers me most is that A. They are too easy for boss fights, B. No build up to them at all, and C. You don’t have the ability to sneak past them like you did the original Deus EX. You have to kill all the bosses and it kind of bothers me a bit it’s like that. Maybe it’s just the original fan in my saying this, but I really was disappointed by the boss fights.

Still, the game is fun to play and I did overall enjoy it, but I kinda think people will only play it at most a few times.

4.       Story

Okay, now I’ve praised the Deus Ex’s story a lot and I’m working on separate blog posts discussing it so I’m not going to go too much into the original. What I can say about its prequel is that it follows the feeling really well. The game takes place during the starting stages of augmentation technology, when it was mechanical. During this time, corporations have taken more of their fair share of domination in the world with world governments having lesser power.  The most powerful ones are the augmentations companies like the one your main character, Adam Jensen, works for.

                Augmentation’s is pretty much cybernetics that can replace your body with upgrades that give you increase speed, super strength, stealth, seeing things from far away, hacking skills, and more. Unlike the original Deus Ex’s Nanotechnology which only few individuals can use, machine augmentation is a possibility for everyone. The problem is its very expensive to get and very painful. Plus, you're forced to take a drug called Neuropozyne which is to help prevent pain between your augmentations and the rejection of it. Thing is its expensive and addicting which is forcing many people to lose their income to it and end up in the streets. So while this technology is good for those who have lost limbs or for military purposes, there are back draws.

                But the main theme of the game is what does it mean to be human? There are two major movements in this game: Those who want augmentation and those who don’t. The people against it claim that augmentation is running our humanity and is a corporation conspiracy to gain control of the masses as well as give the military more dangerous weapons. The UN is trying to decide which fate humanity should follow and you play a key role in all of this as the game progresses.

                We talked about the world, now let’s talk about the actually story. You start off with your girlfriend, Megan, who’s about to give her presentation on a new discovery that would change the world and augmentation forever. However, the company they work for, Sarif Industries, is attacked by terrorists who happen to be augmented. You pretty much get  beaten to death while you’re girlfriend is apparently killed. Your boss, David, gets you augmented to become pretty much a mix between Neo and the Terminator. Six months later you're back on the job to deal with hostage situations and from there the game’s main story starts.

It all webs around this conspiracy and Megan’s research.  You first think it’s an anti-augmentation group, but then the game leads you on several leads such as Sarif himself, another rival company, The illuminati, and a politician named Bill Taggart who is against augmentation until you find out he’s working for the illuminati. But it’s actually Huge Darrell, the main who first invented augmentation that is behind the scenes. Reason being is that he sees his creation is diving mankind and he wants to end augmentation once and for all so that the Illuminati don’t use it to take over the world.

Yeah I like that joke.

So he makes a virus that makes all augmented people go insane resulting in mass chaos. You then have to shut down the virus, but afterwards you then have four choices otherwise known as “Press button to end game room”. Here you choose one of four buttons that will either A. Make Augmentation humanities best friend. B. Have it controlled by the government. C. Get rid of it all together. Or D. You and everyone else dies so nobody can single handily decided the fate of mankind because it must be chosen by all of them.

Yeah kind of weak endings, but I’ll get on those later.

Now for the good things about the story. It’s well paced and it feels like you’re in the Deus Ex universe. The mystery and build up is just like the original and feeling of war between technology and non-technology philosophes continues to fuel the story like it did in the first. Maybe not as much, but a pretty solid level. Now one thing about Deus Ex that stood apart was the fact that every action you took had a major consequence to the game. You could do anything, explore locations on your own free well, steal and break into other people’s homes, and even attack civilians and cops even though you were heavily punished for it.  In this game, it’s the same thing. Only the consequences story wise are not as heavy infected as they were in the original game. It kind of seems a lot weaker in that it doesn’t have major consequences, but they do come up.

But by far the most disappointing thing in this games story are the endings. It’s basically just four buttons that decided the fate of mankind and you don’t even get a satisfying epilogue. You just some shots of various moments in human history and a long monologue from Jensen. I wanted to see more impact on how my ending choice had instead of just guessing on the top of my head. It kind of bothers me when a story that starts out strong with great buildup then ends in such a lame way for an ending. Totally turns me out.

Still the story is good and I liked it over all.

5.       Characters

The thing with this game is that the characters really aren’t all special except for the main player character. Granted their history and the goals do play a major part in this game, but when I played this at least three times I didn’t get any sort of real connection with any of the characters.

Let’s talk about Jensen first, the only character who I really liked. Jensen is a bad ass in all the terms and ways. He’s got kick ass moves, kick ass voice, kick ass gear, kick as clothes, and most importantly kick ass shades. Best shades in a game ever. Now Jensen as an overall character is both good and bad. The good part is that you have to actually complete sidequests and dig up your own history to find out more about Jensen, who doesn’t know that he himself is a major role in the game for his ability to be more adapted to Augmentations than any other person out there. You learn that it’s his gene that is the key to making augmentations none painful for humans and a closer bond so that rejections don’t happen anymore which means no more Neuropozyne. Another great thing about Jensen is the conflict he has with being augmented as it wasn’t his choice. When you look around his apartment, the death of his girlfriend and the fact he’s not completely human anymore shows how much anger is in him. The smashed window and the large amounts of booze are just some of the hints of his personality.

Unfortunately, there is a flaw with him and that’s his voice. Like Cole from LA Noire, he runs on two voices: a Keanu Reeves voice and anger. I kind of feel bothered by this, but it’s not a big flaw.

Other than that, most of the other characters don’t really rub me as memorable. Sarif is a corporate boss, but he honestly has the desire to help humanity and believes augmentation is the way. Taggart is an anti-augmentation politician who you’ll hate the moment you meet cause…he’s a politician. Megan turns out to be alive and is a bitch that lied about being dead, causing Jensen grief, and used you for science. Other than that the only two other cool character are Malik, a pilot, and Prichard who has the best chemistry with Jensen. Their dialog is always a laugh.

So while these characters aren’t bad, they just don’t stand out except for Jensen.

6.       The sound is awesome. The music fits the mood and the voice acting, for the most part, is pretty well done. 

OVERALL: 4/5

I know I’m late with this, but I really wanted to get my opinion on it out.  Human Revolution is a great game and everyone should play it a few times at least. I hear it’s better on PC so try getting that instead of the consoles. Either way, you’ll have fun.

We are Gamers and We are Legion

Later