Deus Ex: Human Revolution

The world has changed since the year 2000. Even ignoring the strong grip consoles have on the world's gaming market, there have been significant advances in many areas of the video game arena.

So it shouldn't come as a surprise that Deus Ex: Human Revolution isn't a 100% conversion of the Deus Ex we know and love (and may have inadvertently placed on an impossibly high pedestal). It has stuff like "regenerating health" and "snap-to cover" which may shock, and even confuse those holding onto their unassailable memory of the first game.

Still, for me Deus Ex: Human Revolution is basically as good as it gets on almost every single count. The graphics - while not as good as say, Crysis or Battlefield 3 - are still great, but I felt like the cut-scenes could occasionally have had more attention and care paid to them.

Otherwise the game is fantastic - nearly flawless. You play Adam Jensen, a security officer who gets heavily augmented after an... incident. It's a story heavy game, so I won't spoil what the incident is - hell, I won't spoil much else beyond what I've said already - but I will say that fans of the first game are in for an excellent time as they play DEHR.

The game is built upon four pillars - Stealth, Combat, Hacking and Social. You'll definitely wind up using all four of these pillars - the game's only other misstep is in not allowing the player to choose definitively between either the Combat or Stealth pillar.

You could probably avoid using Stealth, but to my mind it would make the game brutally difficult. You can't not use Combat during boss fights - and even if you use non-lethal options in the rest of the game, you'll still wind up having to kill those bosses. This sucks for those interested in how a non-lethal playthrough might have affected the rest of the game - still as soon as I slipped up and was spotted once, I went weapons loud and stayed that way.

Hacking is particularly fun - a very simple puzzle game where you capture nodes as quickly as you can, hoping to beat a rival computer in capturing your node. It's largely based off luck - there's a heavy dice roll element to it, as the rival computer will not begin capturing nodes until you alert the system to your presence.

You can get augmentations which lower the odds of you alerting the AI as well as others to make hacking things easier in other ways - the truth is, more than anything else I upgraded my hacking, as hidden on computers or behind locked doors was more backstory in an extremely rich world.

The world is shown off further in the Social pillar - getting augmented to help you with that aspect is definitely something you should do early on, but even before you equip the required augment the game puts it on display as you resolve what you know against what the other person is saying.



It's similar to what LA Noire did, though you're reading into only their words and the evidence you have at hand - not facial tells. You might have gleaned some information from their computer, or from a conversation with someone else - the game fluidly melds this knowledge into your response choices and the game goes on whether you use it properly or not.

There's the real sense of consequence to your actions, and it's something we've not seen in games for a long time. The augmentations are diverse and interesting enough to also force you into making some legitimately tough decisions. Augs that allow for faster sprinting would be nice - but because you'll never unlock every augment in the game the choice to run a bit faster will mean you can't ever have something else.

Not everything is deadly serious in the game - the team at Eidos Montreal definitely made room for some humour. At one point while digging through someone's hacked computer you find an email referring to how they limited the Mailbox size to 4 'for security purposes' - a joke about how small the email lists are. It's great to see that they took the time to inject this personality into the game solely to lighten the mood - it's not that Deus Ex HR is a dark or heavy game, it exists solely as a palate cleanser.

The gunplay is very good, though the enemy AI isn't going to have you staring in wonder. They take cover and try to flank you, but they definitely have some no-go areas that you can exploit if you have the skill.

The guns are good, and being an RPG you can kit them out with upgrades to make them better. Curiously the modifications you make to a gun stay with it even if you pick up a new one - this robs the importance of specific weapons to some extent, though it does allow you to experiment with new guns. I spent most of the game using the same two weapons (and swapping in others when they would fit in my inventory) because I'd invested too much in the guns to let them go - I relish the idea of being able to go back into the game and try out some of the late game guns now.

Some way along the path to perfection, you begin making compromises - decisions which pull you from that path just a little bit, but enough to change your end goal irrevocably. Deus Ex: Human Revolution has these compromises - in its AI, in its curious elimination of combat specific options (non-lethal vs lethal) and in its occasionally low res cut-scenes - but it arrives at its goal relatively unscathed. It's what Deus Ex would have been if it had come out in the year 2011 - and while that's not ambitious in its originality, it's definitely ambitious.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution appears to have been made with me as a player in mind. There's so much to explore, so much to do that you're guaranteed to get value for you money out of it. There's elements from other games present - Metal Gear influences are every where - and there's definitely a driving force behind getting the player to replay the title. Deus Ex: Human Revolution heralds the return of the first person action game - the only question is whether it has already set the bar too high.